19 Dec
2006
19 Dec
'06
8:41 p.m.
To me it seems like a smart idea. Concentrate on a
few chips so that
you can get the manufacturing yields up, the cost per component down,
and fewer parts to stock and manage from manufacturing all the way
through repair servicing. There are lots of overhead factors that
increase with the number of kinds of parts you have.
Adding just ten more chip types will not significantly increase
manufacturing overhead. How many parts total were on the Cray-1 BOM?
10,000? 20,000? making it 10,010 or 20,010 is not going to strain the
inventory folks.
Also, by adding just ten more chip type, the total number of chips in
the system will have gone down - perhaps by ten percent. That will
greatly increase yield. Back in those hand-placed hand-soldered
surface mount days, board errors were far more likely to be bad solder
joints (using that old fashioned solder! horrors!) than misplaced
parts.
One of the Cray-1s faults was the somewhat miserable servicing
requirements, and the crummy downtime that forced it. Fewer parts
would have increased uptime (although many of the issues with the
machines were not chip related).
--
Will