Posted here due to premature closing of the other thread, sigh.
So RV740 avialability 6 months after it was announced means that AMD didn't suffer as much, eh? And it's price parity with 4850 surely mean the same thing?
6 months after its announcement is past its end of life date. They stopped making them ages ago in preference for D3D11. I won't deny that if TSMC had done a better job RV740 would have been around earlier and later (well, maybe not much later if the rest of Evergreen came earlier).
Obviously I have no idea if RV740 turned out to be a loss in terms of its development costs versus the profit it earned (if any).
Apparently there's a laptop model or 2 out there with RV740 inside. No idea what the sales numbers are. Dunno if they are a significant factor in AMD's major growth in the laptop market.
Meanwhile, NVidia's losing OEM/ODM contracts and has GT21x cards that are currently only available in OEM systems. Clearly those cards aren't ready for retail.
It's not "safe", it's easier, less risky and it's done so that later you won't make the same mistakes with a bigger chip.
That's why I put quote marks around the word safe.
I don't have enough info for any conclusions right now.
And it puzzles me when I see someone who apparently does.
It puzzles me even more to read about G300 delays while the initally planned launch frame haven't even passed yet.
All we have right now is a delay of GT21x series for which TSMC is the one to blame. That's all. How it'll end up with GT21x power/price/performance and GF100 we'll eventually see.
TSMC is to blame, but saying NVidia is blameless is remarkable. NVidia might have re-strategised GT21x introduction based on the 40nm fuck-up - in the same way some would argue AMD should have waited 2 months to introduce RV740. I'd agree there's possible justifcation in Nvidia doing this if the costs were stratospheric. But bearing in mind how much NVidia "bought" marketshare during the prior quarters, I'm not sure if avoiding those costs (and as a result losing contracts that GT21x would have fulfilled?) was the right thing to do.
GT21x failure, in general, could be a big part of the reason why NVidia's been losing OEM/ODM contracts.
GT218 has worse power and performance than a 55nm chip that's a year old, while AMD's 40nm chips (that have been up and running at AMD since the first quarter) are notably better in both power and performance than their 55nm predecessors. Its lack of competitiveness might be just another reason why NVidia's losing contracts (though that battle might have been RV710 v G96/98 and GT218 was simply too late).
Jawed
