Did ATI hold back on R520 to make room for R580?

ATi cannot over-inflate R520's prices and increase revenue in the current market situation. The only tool manufacturers have to inflate prices is restricting supply - and by doing so they limit market penetration, sales and revenue.

If there is plentiful supply, the market will do its thing and retailers will compete in price and the price will drop just as it did with the G70 series.

 

I'm not sure thats the case. A manufacturer can position their chip price given the competetive environment, and that may yeild a high margin if they end up with a high performance relative to their costs. What you'll probably find is that the manufacturer will probably try not to move that price for a while, instead offer increased incentives ("marketing" rewards) which give the AIB's a little more leeway, and only after they are stretched at that point are they likely to lower the chip cost.

 

Dave, maybe I'm daft but I don't see how this addresses what I outlined above. Where does consumer demand and market competition factor into your analysis? A manufacturer cannot wilfully conspire with AIB's to keep prices high in a competitive environment. The price always tends to an equilibrium point - any tactics they use to try to manipulate that to a large extent will result in lower sales/revenue.

 

I think your putting way to much faith in market forces and thier influenceon a market that is closer to a monoply or oligoply than a "Free Market".

 

You may be right. But I think the e-tail market isn't as organized as maybe the BestBuys and CircuitCity's are. I'm sure most high-end hardware is bought online - and I see more evidence of undercutting other stores prices than any kind of cartel behavior.

 

Hehe. Actually the search engine on this site has come in handy on occasion when I've had codename nightmares.

 

that's true for the retailers and the AIB but what about the manufacturers of the chips and the reference designs that are stamped out by the majority of AIB's? It seems the AIB's in some circumstances use cards provided to them from 1 manufacturer and just re-badge them. They(IHV) dictate price policy that flows down hill... because they can when "in Season". That's the market I am referring too. I'm just glad that the 'single IHV' policies of companies like ASUS and MSI have gone.

 

I dunno why ATi would hold back since this product was so late to begin with. R520 should have been here 6 months ago according to their timetable.

 

No.

They may have held back on the memory clock because they didn't need more bandwidth for this part and to have this increased memory bandwidth as a selling point (oh, it looks so pretty on the box/spec sheet) for the R580, but that's it.

If you look at the rumored specifications for R580 and comapre them to R520 you will see that R580 (like RV530) marks a special shift in the performance mix with hree independent shaders per pipe as opposed to a single one. This means that R580 should be a shading beast compared to R520 and that no clocks on the R520 could save it from utter defeat by its sibling. What this means, in my opinion, is that the R520 represents a new implemenatation of the classic configuration and proportions, while the R580 will be part of the new wave of incredibly shading capable GPUs. Because of this, no clocks on the R520 really matter as this will mark a changing of the guard.

I do think that ATI may have used slightly more conservative numbers on the R520 than they initially planned, but I don't think R580 is the reason. Instead, I believe the reason to be that R520 has been a "problem child" from the start and there were no incentives to take more risks of it becoming one in retail. Lower clocks mean higher yields and fewer problems with the products sold. Both of these factors help profits as long as the part is still competitive, which it is. This is supported by thesupposed last-minute change from a 650MHz core clock to 625MHz, a small degradation in performance that probably makes yields, power consumption, heat, and RMAs more manageable.

 

So basically R520= ok but R580 is the beast everyone wanted

 

Sure only a beast can save ATI now.

 

Not being overly dramatic there at all, are we?

 

I think that those already go pretty fast. Unless you need to play Quake 3 at 9000 fps

 

sireric has voted "Ati will release its r580 monster and sweep the floor with nvidia" on a recent poll at Rage. Funny stuff

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33833964

 

Why would ATI create a successor like the R580 if they didn't think the important thing was to advance shader performance?

 

As well, did you notice Komb's smiley re "R580 won't be released any time soon"? There begin to be Signs and Portents showing up in public that Anand's "CeBit" prediction may have been too conservative.

Those public portents haven't reached critical mass yet, but they do seem to be growing.