Microchip MCU pricing

[JonW]

Saturday Morning debate....

I see ST has released the STM32C071 a few months back, holy crapola this is cheap for a QUALITY MCU 

1k pricing $0.66
Dev board $9
32-bit, 128k onboard Flash, 24k Ram
Full speed USB
DMA, TImers, I2C, SPI, 12-bit ADC  blah blah

Microchip equivalent..  $3+

Surely Microchip will have to do something soon. It's not the architecture, as the processing and packaging costs are the same, plus ST pays a license fee to ARM!
The lower-end parts are $0.24 for 16k/6k. We are not talking about Chinese copy/RISCV low-end processors here, either. 

 

[david]

It doesn't seem right but perhaps ST has a much finer geometry (smaller die) and gets a much higher yield for a given wafer size.

David

[kcsl]

Now if Les would modify Positron to support them

[top204]

Now if Les would modify Positron to support them

I would love to add differrent devices to the Positron family, but R&D does not pay the bills without any financial backing.

And, as I found out with the company I previously worked for, for 15 years! Without written proof, it does not pay the bills with "promised" backing either, if they screw up the deal with the customer just before contracts are signed for the final item, but I have still done all the months of work 'in my own time at home' for a new script to hardware tool, and do not get a single penny for it because I did not have proof of the payment deal, because I had trust in a particular person. :-O . Or promised final shares in a company, and I worked my arse off to make the company what it is, then get "not a penny" because I trusted, and did not get anything in writing when I had to resign because of my head injury, but the company was in full swing and operating well by then!

So I am "extremely" untrusting of 'virtually' everything and everyone now, because those incidents were not the only times it happened there. And I would only take on the gruelling task of learning a new architecture from scratch, and then learning it even deeper, then writing an 'optimised' compiler for it, if it was "cash in the bank" first.

I'm not a wealthy person (far from it), so I cannot just drop everything and start working on something so detailed and logisticly difficult long term as a whim.

On the original subject of the thread, I have a sneaky feeling that microchip do not have to drop prices. They are now one of the largest companies for microcontrollers and other devices, so why drop prices? Just look at crapple and micro$oft and other large companies? They have products that cost a few dollars to make, and are nothing special anymore, yet still sell them for tens of hundreds of dollars because they do not have to drop prices because people will still buy them! And they are sure the other companies with cheaper devices will also increase their prices when they get more popular. Just look at samsung with their phones and other computer companies. They have done "exactly" the same, and this has always happened with companies online and in the high street when they get more popular.

Unfortunately, it all comes down to "money" now, and the, 'extremely', sheeplike nature of the modern human that is well known and studied by the trained psychological crooks of the companies.

[JonW]

Pricing always drives the commodity electronics market.  I agree if you don't need to drop pricing then don't, however it's a very dangerous game to play.  It's not like it's a few cents though, its a huge difference in cost.  They are getting more aggressive with the Q devices so maybe we will see some more powerful lower cost devices.