disolitude said:
You've been saying that ever since I rememmber. It may have been true for the first few months of production, however no one will have problems buying a fermi card from different manufacturers at this point. So I think one could say that they are manufacturable enough to meet demand... |
Oh, they're manufacturing them anyway. Just that no company which cares about being profitable would do it. GF100 yields remain in the 20% region, so you can't make money on them. Hence the loss last quarter and huge inventory pileup which means greater losses are coming. Intel or AMD would not attempt to sell a chip yielding that badly.
Notice that they have yet to release a full-shader (512) version. What graphics chip in history has had yields poor enough so they've had to do that? Even the super-expensive halo Tesla and Quadro parts only have 448 SPs at most, whereas if they had thousands of 512-shader candidates they would certainly release them there.
GTX 4xx demand is very low as well (evidence: how much the prices have dropped while 5xxx hasn't really) so it masks the fact they're producing minimally. Look how fast the GTX 460 dropped from $200 to $170, and Digitimes is saying further cuts are coming. The GTS 450 was rebated from $130 to $100 even before its official release, even though the chip performs like the $140 5770 and is the over 50% bigger in die size than Juniper.
I will say that they are good price/performance for the consumer, and that GF104/6/8 are yielding good enough to sell, but Nvidia can't make money on the high-end unless something changes there.
The 6xxx series is going to kill their price/perf even. I'll bet heavily that the GF100 parts will be cancelled, because selling a GTX 470 at $200 is not something Nvidia can even do.
