A huge cost is R&D. You worry how much the wafers and heatsinks cost, but the real point to consider is R&D. The Fermi architecture, just like the G80 architecture, was a long time in development and expensive to produce. But consider a few points:
  • The architecture is being made into three seperate high-end products, the cheapest of which is the GeForce part. Quadro parts are often priced twice (or more) the price of GeForce parts, and Tesla parts even more.
  • The architecture is extremely modular. Scaling up for the next generation after GTX 480 is almost as simple as CTRL+V. Scaling down is just as easy.
  • Longevity. Fermi has it. It's an extremely advanced architecture with a ton of features built around the best part of DX11, tessellation.

I haven't seen anything that's made me believe that NVIDIA will be selling GPUs at a loss. Consider that even with HD5800 out performing NVIDIA parts, NVIDIA is gaining more of the market, selling a ton of GPUs and making a lot of money. Even IF they were selling GF100 at a loss, they aren't in AMD's financial shoes.

Besides, why should we care if they make or lose money on a product so long as the price and performance are competitive?


Amorphous