Originally posted by: Creig
Sure they are. But they also have more room to lower prices to due a less expensive/higher yield GPU.
The GPU might be smaller, but that doesn't mean it costs less. Nvidia undoubtedly enjoys volume pricing and if you look up TSMC's revenue by partner, Nvidia is at the top, by far. There's also other factors to consider like RAM price along with high-end PWM modules used on the 4870s that weren't seen on any parts prior.
Sure they posted a profit. But you and I both know it's substantially less than it would have been if AMD had not released the 48X0 series. And the GT200 is not Nvidia's only product. They have chipset sales, G92 sales, mobile products, etc. So the GT200 could still be selling either at cost or actually below cost and Nvidia could still show a profit. Nobody (except you) is denying that the GT200 is a large, expensive chip to produce. Whether or not Nvidia is showing much (or any) profit from them is information that's unavailable to us. And I doubt Nvidia would want to share it, either.
Yep, they posted a profit, which is a far cry from the doom and gloom you and others were spouting about losses due to the high chip price per GT200. Yes they have other businesses but the discrete GPU market is still the overwhelming portion of their revenue, @75% I believe. You think that entire 800M in quarterly revenue is coming from $60AR 9600GSOs?
Like I said before, there's no way they're taking a loss on a GTX 260 at $300 and there's certainly no way they're going to price a C216 even more aggressively around $200 in hopes of selling EVEN MORE parts if they're taking such a huge loss. This isn't Sony or MS with consoles hoping they make their money back with game attach rates, they're simply not taking $100 loss per card and posting a profit. PERIOD.
I think you and others grossly overestimate how much one of these parts actually cost to make and fail to see the majority of the margin is just reinvested into R&D, which helps ensure the quality of future products. Its a concept AMD has never been able to grasp and a notion the consuming public has never been able to accept: paying a premium for high-end AMD parts.
I said no such thing. I said that by pricing their cards the way they did, they ended up taking away sales from Nvidia. That's a far cry from "had to undercut and steal in order to sell parts". I'm sure that ATI's 48X0 series would have sold on the strength of their benchmarks alone, just not in the same volume they did at the prices they were actually released at. Nice try, though.
- Originally posted by: Creig
Let's see, price it higher and try to compete directly with Nvidia for sales. Or... Price it lower, steal sales from Nvidia, garner enthusiastic public support for offering low cost/high performance cards while simultaneously forcing Nvidia to cut their own prices, drastically reducing (or eliminating) Nvidia's expected profit margin on an already expensive die.
Uh, ya. Sounds like you're a lot more confident than ATI was, or they wouldn't have undercut the market so drastically from the outset.
Nvidia's GT200 is simply more expensive to make than the RV770 due to its process size, number of transistors and yield. This means that ATI can undercut Nvidia while maintaining a higher profit margin. It's simple economics.
Already covered, simple economics leave you with the impression a graphics chip costs $200.
AMD is more than just their graphics division. Which, by the way, IS showing a profit.
Computing Solutions division is showing a profit too if you're going to use Operating Income as a metric, but then again that's not what's showing on their bottomline.
Riiiggghhhttt... Whatever. :roll:
When you and Wreckage are done derailing the thread, perhaps we can get back to discussing the article.
Rofl, this topic was derailed because I correctly pointed out RV770 still wasn't enough to turn a profit for AMD and a few like yourself took exception to it.