Dave H said:
My guess is that this won't really have a huge effect on R350 release date. For one thing, ATI will still want it to hog the spotlight for as long as possible before NV35 comes out. For another, let's not forget that even if this news is exactly as Kyle reported it, the Ultra will still exist, albeit as a very rare part (pre-orders only). This is different from e.g. V5 6000. Point is, don't expect websites to retract their Ultra reviews. (Kyle already said he won't be.)
Seriously, though...now that the news is out that the product has been cancelled, who'd want to buy the noisy, hot thing...? I mean, if nVidia has such little confidence in it that they are withdrawing it from the market before it ships, why should a consumer pre-order it?
On the other hand, this might give ATI reason to hold back the review NDA on R350 until a little closer to shipping than they might otherwise have done. (Presumably they'll still "launch" at CeBit, but that could mean anything.) And presumably the price of the 9700 Pro will be a bit higher than it otherwise would have been.
I think ATI would be wise to press ahead while it has the advantage. The more distance it can put between its products and nVidia's, the better. The worst thing a company can do, as has been proven by more than one company, is to withhold its viable technology from the market when it is able to ship it. For instance, it would have been far better for nVidia to have shipped the nv30 non-Ultras last year ASAP, and to plunge immediately into nv35 development, than to do what it did. ATI needs to do exactly as nVidia did and pace itself by itself, and let the "chips" fall where they may. nVidia didn't "wait" on 3dfx or ATI to ship products prior to nv30--it shipped them according to its own internal time table and didn't much worry about what the other guys were shipping. This is the attitude ATI should adopt, I think. I hope they do.
Frankly I have a difficult time seeing how this was a smart move for Nvidia. They've already taken the credibility hit/ridicule for the FXFlow, so where's the benefit in pulling the part now? Perhaps yields in the 500 MHz bin were too low, or there are cost problems for 500 MHz DDR-II, but if that's the case, better to quietly scale back volume of the Ultra part rather than cancel it altogether. After all, "Ultra" parts are allowed to be rare.
Problems with the reliability of the Dustbuster?
Perhaps concerns they'd need to swallow too many returned units from irate retail customers??? Perhaps indicated by some recent consumer testing with the new and slightly improved fan version...?
I think the "slightly improved" fan version is nothing but the original fan tuned to turn completely off when not running a 3D game, and at a slightly slower speed when running on high.
No doubt the fan would prove the achilles heel of the design, not only from a marketing standpoint as many would find it distasteful enough to warrant them overlooking the product entirely, despite any other assumed superlatives it might have had, but also from a warranty standpoint as the fan would be a likely candidate for failure (compared to the other components) which would provoke an immediate RMA. This is no ordinary fan which a consumer himself could easily and cheaply replace if needed.
A concern I had about the fan from the start is how an end user would keep it clean. Kyle at [H] so far has been the only one I've seen comment on this practical aspect, and he mentioned the use of canned air. My opinion is that you'd have to remove the card from your system, unscrew the plastic fan housing, and then blow or wipe the accumulated dust and dirt off, reassemble and reinsert it into your system. The question would be of how often this would have to be done, of course. The heat-pipe baffling inside the fan housing makes a perfect trap for lint, dust, and dirt particles. If it gets stopped up, the card over heats, the clock-throttle comes on, and your MHz drop to 300--until you clean the fan.
Even with a clean and properly operating fan there were certain objections to the clock-throttling mechanism by people who looked at it. Anand said that when he tried a modest over clock the clock-throttle activated and dropped to ~300MHz, right in the middle of the game. So as predicted, the over-clocking potential of the Ultra is nil, since the card was already over volted and over clocked right from the factory--the clock-throttle was necessary in case of fan failure, or in case of general overheating of the chip. Some of the artifacts I saw in the [H] review which were attributed to the drivers looked suspiciously like artifacts I have seen in the past when trying to overclock a 3D chip too high, resulting from over heating.
At any rate, the thermal and electrical problems inherent in the design undoubtedly complicated manufacturing of the product and added to the expense, and I think in the end someone at nVidia just simply "woke up" and realized this was a choice of cutting your losses now, or continuing on ahead and risking millions of dollars more in losses. The company did the right thing, IMO, both for consumers and for its shareholders.
