I read the article elsewhere this morning and though "I should head ever to anand and see how Ben is spinning the hell out of this one."
There is nothing to spin, I just pointed out the yields Charlie was talking about are way off. I haven't ever commented on concrete numbers of produced parts, not for ATi or nV, until after we get some actual numbers.
Well, when AMD shipped more than 2,000,000 Radeon 5xxx cards between 9/23 and 1/11 he said it was 'shocking how badly' AMD's PC GPU division is doing.
And why do you think that statement doesn't hold? This isn't about spinning it for one company or the other. nV launched a product with very low availability. Last reported quarter, without this new part available, they posted a $400Million gross profit. That is without a high end part to compete with ATi
at all. With no competition at any price point over ~$120 ATi was outsold by a 2:1 margin in the last reported quarter. That is shockingly bad. That isn't so much a bash on ATi as it is on the broader market, how can a company be outsold 2:1 in dollar volume when they have no competition at any of the moderate or higher price points?
When Nvidia is coming up on a month since their Fermi 'launch' and is knocking on the door of 10,000 units shipped, it's about Charlie.
It was about Charlie being off by roughly an order of magnitude on his reported yields. That isn't splitting hairs, he wasn't even close. According to this report nVidia is having a yield situation that isn't a staggering amount off from where ATi was with yields at a comparable point in their life cycle. nV is certainly lower, but within a reasonable amount given the differing die sizes. That isn't spin, ATi was ~40% with nV in the 20%-30% range. This isn't a catastrophic event by any means, and it isn't going to have a significant impact on nV's bottom line despite what Charlie may think(the lack of a part in the mid range to compete with the 5750/5770 is a
much larger concern to nV in terms of their bottom line then their halo parts). If ATi had incredibly bad luck for a bit and could produce close no 5850/5870/5970s it would have minimal effect on their overall operating budget(it would have an impact, but it wouldn't be huge).
There is the enthusiast end of the market and the bread and butter of the business end. From a business perspective, having low volume on their higher end parts isn't that big of an issue- if anyone doubts that simply look to the two quarters when ATi dominated that segment without question and still was underperforming nV by a very large amount on the financials. If nV can't ship the mid tier offerings to compete with ATi and ATi starts getting a large quantity of design wins from OEMs prior to nV having anything to compete with it will be a much larger issue for nV on a financial basis. As of right now, it is very surprising this hasn't already happened as ATi has had a clearly dominant part in the mid tier segments from an OEM perspective for quite some time.