Charlie's thoughts on the fermi derivative parts

[TemjinGold]

And since margins are percentage rather than absolute numbers
We are talking losing money versus not losing money, we are talking about absolute numbers.

I was referring to middlemen margins, not nVidia's. If the middlemen claim x%, that will be larger when the costs are higher.

 

[GaiaHunter]

Absolutely not, what I'm saying is that the highest reported costs for the GTX4xx GPUs we have seen is $250 and it is reported that they are taking a loss on these parts. The GTX480 sells for $500- if it is true that the GTX480 is selling for a loss then that means there is over $250 in cost to produce the PCB, buy the memory, package ship and distribute the boards. The 5850 is comparable on all of those costs except for the GPU. What I was saying is that if a magic fairy delivered 5850 GPUs to ATi for free, anyone that believes that nV is taking a loss on the GTX480 would believe that ATi was making at most ~$10 on the 5850 seeing that it launched at $260. That is a laughable assertion to be sure, I am positive ATi had far higher margins on the 5850 then that even though they actually made the GPU themselves and didn't have a magic fairy zapping them into existance for free. The idea that getting a PCB/mem/assemble/package/distribute on a sub 1 cube sub 5lb part is close to $250 is absurd.



Yields were a given for anyone who knows anything about building a processor. They have 3billion transistors on an inmature 40nm build process, there is no way yields were going to be good. ATi's chips were around 40% and they had parts that were built to be high yield, not pushing the upper limits of what was possible. I could start writing a bunch of posts now about how summer is going to be hotter then winter, what would you think of people who used that as evidence of insider information? It is the same thing.

Someone in here estimated the price paid per wafer at around $5000.

ATI gets around 160 candidates per wafer and NVIDIA around 104.

With yields of 100% ATI Cypress would cost $31.25 per chip while NVIDIA chips would cost $48.

Now - ATI doesn't have 100% yields and neither does NVIDIA. Simply due to die sizes difference NVIDIA has less viable candidates, so the difference will be bigger. If NVIDIA has 50% yields - highly unlikely according to the rumours is under 20% or worse, that mean those GF100 chips cost $100 a pop.

At a minimum of 20% yields you get that $250 fermi chip. At 40% yields those Cypress would cost ~$78. But those yields increased since then. Not sure how much but AMD was claiming doubling the units available, so lets say it is 70% so those cypress are ~$45.

That is over $200 difference.

Fermi cooler is also more expensive, the components used in the PCB are likely more expensive too and it has more memory of exactly the same type.

A GTX 480 isn't $200 more expensive than a 5870, nor is the GTX 470 $200 more than the 5850.

NVIDIA might not be selling these at loss but NVIDIA and/or its partners are making $100+ less in GTX470/480 than ATI and theirs partners with their 5850/5870.

Then there is total volume shipped to recoup R&D.