The Fermi Thread - Part 3

[saaya]

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.

jeez... why dont you post the nvidia pr slides here right away? you seem to be repeating what nvidia pr tells everybody... :P

and scaling down is easy? gf100 taped out when? and gf104 is coming when? if its that easy wouldnt you expect gf104 to come out just months if not weeks after gf100? look at ati, they released rv870 and rv840 at almost the same time, in fact the rv840 team managed to slightly pull ahead of the rv870 team in the rnd process! THATS what id call easy scaling...

I haven't seen anything that's made me believe that NVIDIA will be selling GPUs at a loss.

fair enough...

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.

uhmmm and you base this on what exactly?

Even IF they were selling GF100 at a loss, they aren't in AMD's financial shoes.

exactly, amd has financial backing from abu dhabi and they have all the ip they need for the next decade, x86, gpu, chipsets...

hey guys have you seen this?
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/31...is/index3.html

10.3 gives ati cards almost a 10% boost in unigine and hawx... impressive...
and a 20% boost on minfps for the 5870 in fc2 as well...
if you ask me, this is atis fermi welcome party hehe
im sure they had those tweaks before, but didnt integrate them into the past few driver releases to have something for the fermi launch...

and the timing is perfect, they released them just in time for fermi reviews...