Key quotes:<p>&quot;Super complex SOC platforms like Apple’s Ax family or the IBM Cell very likely exceeded $1B in total development costs and involved thousands of engineers in aggregate.&quot;<p>&quot;Meanwhile relatively simple SOCs like the Epiphany family of chips were designed for less than $3M over the span of 3 years.[1,2]&quot;<p>And Adapteva did such a good job being cheaper than average they wrote a [different] blog post about how they went about it. So, the low end was $3 million over 3 years while users wanting to ditch proprietary are asking for price&#x2F;performance&#x2F;watts closer to the above quote that cost $1 billion. Hence, my prediction it will take millions to tens of millions to make something acceptable. Also, me pushing Cavium&#x27;s model of RISC multicore + HW accelerators for common things. I think it will help by taking load (&amp; optimization) off the main CPU&#x27;s.<p>Now, people doing <i>analog</i> stuff have it a lot easier given even 350nm is often good for that. That stuff can get really cheap:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.planetanalog.com&#x2F;author.asp?section_id=526&amp;doc_id=559519" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.planetanalog.com&#x2F;author.asp?section_id=526&amp;doc_id...</a>