How much does it cost to make a processor? Although this report doesn't factor in the incredible amount of money put into research and development or the loss of product due to faults off the line, in more than 2 years the price has not changed. $40 for one, says the report, at least for Intel. That may seem strange, having the same production costs despite inflation, but with microprocessors it tends to balance out. Over time, a single core takes up less room, and thus you can produce more at once and as efficiency increases you waste less.

Some might be shocked to see markups as high as 2000% and higher. I don't think this is unfair, though. The R&D for CPUs from any developer is going to be in the billions of dollars, the fastest processors always have low yield rates, and technology is only becoming more affordable for the single user. It is interesting to see the figures behind the companies, though. There aren't numbers for AMD, VIA, IBM or others, but I can imagine the difference would not be much.