Re: Cost of military grade 80486 processors?

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Allen Thomson) writes:

>I gotta question or three.

>The latest Chinese illegal tech transfer story has the PRC
>acquiring eighty MG80486 DX2-5 processors for $540,000. MG seems
>to mean "military grade."

>See 
>http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/sns-ap-scholar-guilty-plea,0,623713.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines

>That's $6750 per chip which, in its civilian version, went for a
>couple
>of hundred bucks. 

>Is that a standard markup for such items? 

Approximately so, in my experience.


>What does the MG provide that the vanilla version doesn't? 

A quality control and test protocol that guarantees it will still work
in a sauna or a meat locker, after having been run through a paint
mixer, dragged through a swamp and a sand dune, and immersed in salt
water.  Or handled for half an hour by an E-1 grunt, whichever is
worse.

An ordinary COTS chip will *usually* do all of this, but the military
often has lives riding on it, so is willing to pay for the certainty.


>And what would the PRC need with eighty such things that it couldn't 
>use the commodity version for?

See above.  They want to build eighty copies of a field-deployable
system where it is really important to have that much processing
power in good working order at the end.  That covers a lot of ground.
And sea, and air, and space, for that matter.  


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