Interesting Info from COO of ATI

2 development labs

It's sorta funny how people are saying that the R350 is just a bumped up R300.

Both ATI and Nvidia realizes that this is hardball now, and that a company can't get any credibility by doing something like that. ATI want's not only to get the lead but to hold on to it.

Just like Nvidia (and the big chipmakers now), ATI run dual labs (or more) to make these amazing products. It takes much longer than one year to design, test and make these high-tech chips. That's why with dual labs running parallel, they can accomplish it at such a breakneck speed.

The R300 was the first chip made from the new Marlborough lab in Massachusetts, formerly known as ArtX (the Gamecube guys). The R350 is designed at the Toronto lab and in the process of being taped out (not quite done yet, but close).

As far as specs go, I couldn't squeeze anything out of my friend (not surprising), but this is NOT just a OCed R300. It's going to build on it, but of course using the stuff learned from the R350. It wouldn't be surprising to see some quite different innovations due to the difference in labs producing these chips.

And as far as the margine goes, it's been said that a 9700 sold is equal upto 10 9000's sold.

 

Re: 2 development labs

Heh, you mean like a GeForce 4?

 

source rage3d.com


Question: What does ATI feel about DDR II memory?
Answer: Mentioned technology demonstration on Tech TV. Believes that DDR II is real but does not provide enough of a step-up in bandwidth compared to GDDR3. It does provide more headroom and they are ready to use when it ships in volume. ATI did not want to rely on DDR2 to supply the bandwidth needed for R300 so they went to a wider bus. For spring they will have 256bit bus and DDR II.

 

R9500 has only 4 pixel pipelines, the others have all 8. From all accounts, it's an R300 with 4 pixel pipelines disabled.

 

Re: 2 development labs

But the real funny thing is that certain people forgot the official ATI text: every new architecture besed "less_than_a_year"-cycle. (Italic expression taken from last year stockholder info brochure)
And also pay attention what Orton said around last May: R350 will be a refresh part, not a new technology.

...which can be achieved easily with a simple clock bump. Cheap, fast and still effective move - why do you expect more? Due to GFFX's 128bit, (as of today) an overclock to should be enough to hold the crown.
Imagine this: 4x0+MHz core w/ 256bit 450MHz DDR memory... ~29GB/s!

And? Nothing new... and it's not contradict for me.

(BTW, I heard the same thing from the tape-out. )

From what?

Otherwise IMHO it should be based on R300. That's why it's called R350 and not R400.

It would be very-very suprising: do you seriously think they didn't work together? They are not working from same resources, sketches, everything?

C'mon...

Moreover this is contradiction in terms: if they really work separately then it's quite impossible to design any kind of (refresh-)part based on the last core...

Dunno but it's possible.
Actually I think the sales ratio could be something similar...

PS: Actually I do love your prediction...

 

Hmmm... sounds cool...

But I still doubt it...

 

When is Microsoft's console segment going to BEGIN to show profitability, never mind return to it?

 

Who cares? What does that have to do with an ATI conference call? Lets not get too pathetic with our fanatical devotion to a company, we already have enough of those floating around.

 

A pot calling the kettle black username...the 1st one to Nvidias defence...with childish cheap shots and little to no content posts

 

maybe ATI would use infineon's Graphics RAM , if so, i willl be very impressive, but i am curious, why infineon can put the DDR speed more closer to 500MHZ.

http://www.infineon.com/cgi/ecrm.dll/ecrm/scripts/prod_ov.jsp?oid=13531&cat_oid=-8007

 

Re: 2 development labs

I doubt that statement is true.

The R300 likely costs around 30 dollars to make; they likely sell it for 60. (for 50% margin). This means $30 of gross profit. The 9000 would have to mean 3 dollars of gross profit.

You're suggesting that the 9000 costs $9 to make, and they sell it for $12 (for a 25% margin). (If you inflate the 9000 cost too much more, the margin on the 9000 falls to a point where no company wants to participate)

I seriously doubt the 9000 cost $9 or less to make, knowing the cost to manufacture our much smaller chip.

 

It came from a summary of the Q&As session of david ortons talk at CSFB conference

link:

http://www.rage3d.com/articles/csfbnotes/

Theres also a link to where the full thing can be listned to at the top of that.

 

Re: 2 development labs

He might mean that it is 1 9700 GPU sold for every 10 9000 GPUs sold, which to me does make sense.

Of course, Ati might be willing to take little profit on the 9000 cards simply to flood the marketplace with DX 8.1 chips so more and more ISVs are willing to target those, helping Ati in the end like the GFMX series and nVidia.

But thats just a wild off the wall, lack of caffiene guess.

 

Re: 2 development labs

You're implying, then, that the margin on the 9000 is probably much less than $3? Which would mean that the gross on each 9700 would be far more than 10x as much?

 

I'm implying they aren't making 10x the money per 9700 sold vs. 9000 because I know their chip cost isn't less than $9, and I suspect they aren't taking less than 25% margin on any product they have. (High tech investors don't like numbers like that AT ALL)

 

Re: 2 development labs

Wow. Some months ago, IIRC back in June/July, there have been estimations from PVR that a R300 costs over 100 USD to make in 0.15u. Of course prices have come down since then, but by more than 60% in two quarters??

 

In one of these threads was a my guestimate cost of the NV30, but here it is in short:

1 wafer = $3000
131 chips per wafer (from pictures of the wafer)
80% yield (generally acceptable OK yield)

Plus packaging puts it at about 30-35$. (I'm guessing their fancy packaging doesn't cost more than 7$).

The R300 is using a smaller design, on a larger process. I believe the numbers end up being approximately a wash, so I'm calling them essentially equivalent.

But pick any number, and its very tough to have 1 chip make 10x the gross margin as another if they're roughly the same product, and cost structure.

 

Well, ATI is a board vendor as well as a chip vendor. From your analysis it sounds like it would be much easier for a complete board to have 10 x the gross margin. Is it possible he was talking about margin per board?

 

Work out the math, it gets even worse as your costs go up. The only way you can get the 10x equation and still make happy margins on both parts is when one costs about 5x more than the other.