Сравнение custom и merchant silicon
Benefits of custom silicon
• Can be designed to integrate perfectly with a custom operating system
• Can be designed to support proprietary features
• Can be purpose built
• Can provide a significant competitive advantage due to the previous bullet
points
Drawbacks of custom silicon
• Requires expensive on-staff expertise
• Requires expensive fabrication facilities
• Often slow to market
• Return on investment can be slow
• Long ROI can lead to longer product lifecycles
Benefits of merchant silicon
• Easy to design around with well-supported APIs
• ASIC vendors are motivated to make stable, successful, and fast products
• Fast to market
• ASIC vendor does one thing: make ASICs
• No overhead involved (no expensive ASIC designers to staff, or expensive
manufacturing facilities to build and maintain, etc.)
• Easy to implement, newer ASICs
Drawbacks of merchant silicon
• No custom or proprietary hardware features are possible (the chips may support
proprietary features, but anyone that uses these chips has access to them)
• No inherent competitive advantage; any vendor can use same ASIC, although
the implementation may be better with one vendor over another