ATI Surprises… Again
Then ATI shipped the Radeon HD 4800 series, once again catching Nvidia by surprise. The 4850 and 4870 were clearly superior than any G92 product, at substantially lower prices. Nvidia didn’t really have a response.
Actually, Nvidia did have an answer — just not a good one. They had the GT200.
The GT200 was Nvidia’s glory GPU. When launched, it was a massive chip, built on a 65nm manufacturing process and sporting 1.4 billion transistors. There was no question it was fast, but it was expensive to build. Having to slash prices on a 1.4 billion transistor part built on 65nm was pretty painful. Prices for GTX 260 cards plummeted, and even the flagship 285 GTX had to come down substantially. Eventually, GT200 transitioned to 55nm, bringing down the cost per die and likely improving yields.
Still, not being able to charge a premium for GT200 products was likely reflected in a $105M net loss for the quarter ending in July. The loss actually resulted from charges needed to fix problematic laptops shipped with flawed mobile GPUs. But being unable to have a true cash cow certainly affected profits.
The whole affair with the mobile GPUs was another black eye. At last count, Nvidia’s had to set aside $300 million or more to fix problems with GPUs overheating or crashing in laptops, including HP, Dell and Apple units.
Then there’s the questions surrounding GT300. The rumor is that GT300 taped out in July. If true, then the company is lagging behind archrival AMD, which has been showing working DirectX 11 silicon since June’s Computex trade show.
I think that it would have made sense for Intel to buy out Nvidia, but Nvidia always cried and shouted. Intel is a big company. Anything that you will do to them they will always come back hard. Ask AMD that. You can’t get too confident about these things. I love Nvidia, and is the only GPUs that I get, but I will be keeping a close eye on Larrabee as well