Quote Originally Posted by Sr7 View Post
No offense, but I find it funny that someone on a forum with an excel spreadsheet for approximating yields thinks they know about yields as though NVIDIA didn't know exactly what they would be dealing with before making their chips. Sorry, but when millions of dollars are at stake, you know these things ahead of time, and you calculate around that. Sure it can fluctuate a bit below what you might expect, but not much.

People making a thread like this seem to think that these guys make wafers and just pray they'll get good yields. When people say good or bad yields ,this isn't a major swing. It's a matter of a percent or two. So it's not the difference between 80 or 20 dies like some seem to believe.
You really think the difference between yields on a 260mm^2 chip and a 576mm^2 chip is 1-2%?

There is a reason why Intel, with the best fabs in the world, built Kentsfield & Yorkfield out of dual-die MCM. Yields on 2x 143mm^2 chips are significantly better than a single 286mm^2 chip even at Intel's fab, and I am sure they get much better yields than a foundry like TSMC. TSMC doesn't have a hope of getting good yields on a 576mm^2 chip; that is Itanium size, and even Intel only manufactures chips that large for CPUs that sell for $1,000s and do not need good yields to be profitable.

nVidia is not dumb, the problem is they thought they could sell GT200 for more than they are now able to. If nVidia sells the GTX 280 for $649 and the GTX 260 for $449, like they originally planned, they can still make a good profit off the cards. But the problem is AMD showed up with RV770, which is much more competitive with GT200 than nVidia thought. GT200 clocks are lower than expected as well; this is very clear when you see that the GTX 280 misses the 1 TFLOP mark. If nVidia was able to get good yields at a higher shader clock, there is no doubt they would want their flagship card to hit 1TFLOP.

Now nVidia is faced with selling the GTX 260 for $300 or so and the GTX 280 for $500 or less if they want to have good sales. nVidia expected to be able to sell GT200 for much more money than AMD would sell RV770; thus they could make up for the horrible yields and much higher manufacturing cost. Now they are unable to do that.