> Both effects together will push costs at the top level to $100k a year. Spending that magnitude of money on software is not without precedent, chip design licenses from Cadence or Synopsys are already $250k a year.
For how many developers? Chip design companies aren't paying Synopsys $250k/year per developer. Even when using formal tools which are ludicrously expensive, developers can share licenses.
In any case, the reason chip design companies pay EDA vendors these enormous sums is because there isn't really an alternative. Verilator exists, but ... there's a reason commercial EDA vendors can basically ignore it.
That isn't true for AI. Why on earth would you pay more than a full time developer salary on AI tokens when you could just hire another person instead. I definitely think AI improves productivity but it's like 10-20% maybe, not 100%.
> For how many developers? Chip design companies aren't paying Synopsys $250k/year per developer. Even when using formal tools which are ludicrously expensive, developers can share licenses.
That actually probably is per developer. You might be able to reassign a seat to another developer, but that's still arguably one seat per user.
I don't think so. The company I worked for until recently had around 200 licenses for our main simulator - at that rate it would cost $50m/year, but our total run rate (including all salaries and EDA licenses) was only about $15m/year.
They're super opaque about pricing but I don't think it's that expensive. Apparently formal tools are way more expensive than simulation though (which makes sense), so we only had a handful of those licenses.
I managed to find a real price that someone posted:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/c8z1x9/modelsim_and_q...
> Questa Prime licenses for ~$30000 USD.
That sounds way more realistic, and I guess you get decent volume discounts if you want 200 licenses.