Nvidia CEO said they spent $10 Billon dollars on R&D for their new chip. What exactly does an R&D worker do all day? Where does this money go?

Question

How does a chip go from being an academic theory to a $10 billion R&D Project?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Among other things they design and test various prototypes, which cost **a lot** more than the finished product because they’re one-offs or made in small batches so you get none of the cost savings of large scale production. And that’s the cost of producing the chip,  there’s also verification first to make sure the chip will do what you think. When I was in school 10 years ago learning this stuff we couldn’t even do the verification, let alone actually produce the simple integrated circuits we designed as just the verification cost was on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per circuit. And our circuits were utterly trivial compared to what goes into a modern GPU. We’re talking maybe a few thousand transistors for our stuff vs tens or hundreds of billions for a GPU.