Quote Originally Posted by FischOderAal View Post
Yepp, it does. But don't forget yields. I think it's safe to assume that Fermi has worse yields than RV870.

Someone made a claim that NVIDIA would have to sell Fermi at a loss in the desktop market. If things go bad for NVIDIA (AMD cuts prices, very bad yields etc) I can see this being true easily.
given the same defect density per wafer of silicon a bigger die will automatically have lower yield (take a piece of paper, put 5 defect dots on it with a pen, cut it into 10 pieces, now cut another piece of paper with dots into 20 pieces, count how many pieces without dot you get)

if nvidia is smart (they probably are) they put some spares on their gpu which is basically extra pieces of hardware that can replace pieces where defects are in the silicon. for example you could imagine having a 5th GPC cluster that can replace one with defects. if you do the proper math you can compute spare designs that are statistically going to increase your per-die yield even though such measures increase the die area