Depends on what you mean by 'profitable'.

The high end stuff always makes more margin. (I.e. more money back per dollar put in)
The lower end stuff makes more volume.

And I'm really not buying any reasons trying to say "delaying will make them more money". It just doesn't make sense.

it still comes down to ati chipsets sucking compared to the competition.

No it doesn't and that's why noone has been able to put forward a viable way in which they could accomplish this. You don't forego revenue today in order to make it up tomorrow. That's not how it works - time value of money and all that. So not only does R600 have to spur post launch sales sufficiently to make up x months of lost revenue it also has to make up the interest lost on cash receipts in that period!! And it's worse if R600 is impressive relative to G80 because that means sales would have been high should it have been on the market.

It's also highly likely that the delay incurred additional expenses, further reducing income from R600. But there are those who continue to believe ..... :)

sorry put more things together, the batching of the ALU's if the granularity is smaller, less ALU's per cluster, so when doing things like GS, it might be possible to have more free units to do other things. The comments that DICE made sounded like there might be something that is holding back the g80 when doing geometry shaders compared to the r600, I'm just throwing out ideas.

This only works out if the volume of the high-end part is sufficient to amortize development cost. Engineering design time, testing + redesign/re-tape out costs, PCB design and testing costs et cetera, are specific to the R600, and I'm not at all convinced that the part will see sufficient volumes at sufficient margins to recoup those given the size of the chip and the cost of surrounding silicon. It would still make sense to release it given the hit already taken, and even at a net total loss it could still be worthwhile for AMD in terms of brand recognition. But as a consumer I'm not thrilled with the money poured into the high-end parts and poster child technologies such as Crossfire and stream computing. These technologies definitely don't seem to be paying for themselves, which only means that the associated costs are carried by the rest of the product line, making it less competitive. And that is not even taking into account the human resource aspect of tying up talented people in endeavors that ultimately will affect very few, rather than engaging them in making the high-volume projects more successful.

It would be really, really stupid if the basic development wasn't common/shared for the whole lineup of the R6xx gen. So I don't think there are any huge extra costs involved there. The initial costs went into the high-end and the mid-/low-end gets the cut-down version if they planned with any sense for reality.

Well, if the conspiracy theories are correct, RD600 would have been entirely non-sucky, but was actively crippled at the request of AMD. That means ATI is capable of producing a chipset that doesn't suck, it merely hasn't yet been allowed to do so.

The Inquirer sort of confirms that audio output via HDMI will be found on R600 as well as RV6xx:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38714

:shock:

It's still not a sucky board.

Obviously this is the way it works.
I'd say that even so, it is questionable if the R600 will pay for itself.
A hint may be where the rest of the line-up is in terms of price and silicon costs. Look at the additional cost of the R600 die (yield?) and surrounding silicon, factor in development cost and low volume...
My guess is that the R600 is made for marketing purposes more than anything.

No rumours on its performance except the not so good ones, but lots of hype/rumours based on GPGPU, sound/audio and video engine etc.

Im starting to get a feeling that AMD or ATi got way too out of focus.. like theyre covering up something with other not so important stuff for what a GPU should be. Performance and quality for 3d apps should be the foremost highest priority.. but im not hearing much about that other that teraflops, sound card, etc etc.

The high-end is a source of revenue just like any other market segment. Yes, of course cheaper, high volume parts bring in the most total revenue. But to imply that the high-end is a negligible source of profit is a bit of a stretch. And I would think they contribute considerably to overall gross margin as well. Think of how important the X19xx series was given the mediocrity of X16xx.

Also, did you consider how market dynamics would change if you aimed low and your competitor aimed high? You would get muscled out of lucrative market share faster than you could say uncle and be relegated to the high volume, low margin segment.

I wouldn't come to that conclusion, but it is fun reading these threads before launches.

Well we did get wind of devs claiming GS performance was more promising on R600. But yeah I agree - a lot of fluff and promises and no substance so far to the rumours. We have ATI claiming that everything is peachy and drivers are top notch - but these are the same people that claimed Crossfire would work perfectly with every title and never require profiles.....

There is actually a direct quote from an AMD guy :idea:

Would it be a great surprise, if AMD was going common sense and realized that with GDDR4 and immense clockrates those cards would be to expensive for "normal" buyers and cancelled the high-end models, reworked the top-class to accomodate the more affordable GDDR3 RAM and a silent dual-slot-cooling solution? :)

So they can sell enough cards to the segments that really matter. After all, Athlon FX and Pentium/C2D Extreme Editions are for a very very small market also.

edit:
Reason for this: Look at Kombatants citation floating around in one of the signatures here: A pleasant surprise to many people (with pleasant and many in bold). Additionally, Vijay mentioned in our interview not something about a performance hammer or G80-Killer but rather stressed the point, that R6x-Familiy will deliver a very good price-performance-ratio - which is usually not found in the high-end.

Also did get out of that nice interview and other quotes that the R-600 family may offer some nice flexible price points and really target performance/value offerings. Only time-will-tell for most of us to truly know.

However, didn't get out of it no flag-ship product at all. Let's say this theory is right and there is no flag-ship product offerings at all.........you leave a sector and price-point alone for your competition. It may give the wrong message to potential customers and gamers over-all. The product can't help build the name-brand. The product can't help build mind-share. The product can't show more technology leadership for important bullet points like DirectX 10 and Vista. The product can't help sell more product in other sectors that matter more to consumers. You leave potential revenues and margins on the table over-all for others to take.

I don't see why ATI/AMD can't offer great value and performance by creating a flexible R-600 family to target more potential customers and offer a Flag-ship as well.

Don't see why great value and performance translates into no Flag-ship at all.

I don't think the concern is about having a flagship - the concern is that ATi is stressing everything but dominance at the high end which is what most of us care about the most. Midrange price/performance is great but that's not what we've been waiting for :)

That is also my feeling. Another way of looking at it is not that they got too out of focus, but that they are having to focus on other things besides what is typically important for a GPU.

Teraflop performance is interesting, and certainly useful for some applications, as is an HD sound solution. Those are nice to haves; but generally, most people care about what features as far as being a graphics card it brings to the table. Unfortunately, everything that has been rumored so far about it's GPU performance has not exactly been favorable.

As others have pointed out, there just doesn't seem to be a good reason for the delay besides problems. First, we have the rumors of massive power consumption. That wouldn't be enough to put off some buyers, but it would definitely put off a lot of people if it required an exorbitant amount of power (relative to the competition) without delivering an equally exorbitant amount of performance.

If the performance is there, I would think that rumors would abound by now. Is it possible that they are delaying to sell off the older parts, in order to make as much profit off of those as possible? Every single reason that I have heard for the delay being "a good business decision" just doesn't seem to hold water.

Unless of course, there is something wrong. Then delaying is the only business decision that could be made.

I'm willing to entertain any other theories, though :D. One thing that we haven't heard yet, is from "the press" on this particular forum ;) Is anyone here under NDA yet, or have any idea when that will happen? Or is that something that those under NDA are unable to talk about - i.e. are you unable to say you are under NDA if you are?

(Side Note: Wow, that was a tough question to phrase...before too long I'm going to be comparing great products and what to call other great products that are as much greater as other great products...! :D)

Since we're in another one of those transitionary phases I thought this article would be a cool read for those that have never seen it. It basically tells the 3D story from NV1 up to R300 and outlines the pitfalls and triumphs that the companies have encountered along the way. Who knows, maybe ATI's acquisition, the emergence of DX10 and the R600 launch might have a significant impact on the future of 3D hardware and the fate of the companies involved.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000292

suck at what? There is no sucking ATI chipsets. There are performance wins and losses, but none suck?

huh. I don't care if high-end card has dual-triple-quadro slot cooler. I won't buy it, so WE (people like me who are not proffesional gamers) care about price/performance.

I don't follow chav. What we've been waiting on is a new architecture, new features and better performance. Why exactly are you waiting on R6xx in particular for price/performance? The currently available solutions don't do it for you?

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that the mid-range market isn't important. But are you really waiting for better price/performance in general or are you waiting to see what R6xx based cards are capable of?

I think it is clear why we have heard so little about R6xx performance in games vs G8x. In most games on the market today, R600 really doesn't have a significant performance advantage, if any, over G80. AMD/ATI believes that the R6xx cards will have more of an advantage in DirectX10 games. That is why their employees keep talking about having the best DirectX10 cards. However, it's pretty risky to bank on the fact that DirectX10 performance will be superior.

The man catches my drift... One other thing to consider would be the omnious answer (and geos - i believe - signature of the nes 6800 GT wearing red) Vijay gave regarding the gap between G80-GTX and -GTS.