Nvidia BigK GK110 Kepler Speculation Thread
- Thread starter A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y
- Start date
-
- Tags
- nvidia
Yeah I see GK110's fully unlocked Geforce card starting out at $599. Possibly even $649. I don't think that graph has GK114's initial MSRP correct, though. I don't see Nvidia pricing it $200 lower than the $500 MSRP it had in March. I think GK114 will have 10% more performance than GK104, lower power consumption a tiny bit, and start out at $399 for the top sku.
Inevitably will a salvage part from N core have a lower price for obvious reasons; it won't make much difference for future GK114 respective salvage parts.
The point is that it highly depends in which configuration and at what MSRP NV might release a GK110. If the price would be as low as $499 (whereby "low" is relative; that was the exact MSRP for the 480 and 580) and you'd consider that it'll have at least one salvage part, anything above ~$300 for a GK114 wouldn't make sense. If the GK110 price ends up higher than it'll keep a similar analogy from top to bottom in SKU pricing, with higher prices overall.
iMacmatician
Regular
So the K20 apparently has 5 Gbps memory, the same as the GK104 K10, does that point towards GeForce GK110s (or higher end K20s if they exist) and GeForce GK114s topping out at 6 Gbps (instead of, say, 7 Gbps), just like with the GK104?
Probably. I think the more memory controllers there are, the avg. max speed vram can run at will be a little lower (since each memory controller has it's own transistors and chances of minor defects).
Hopefully GK114 pushes it's reference vram speed up to 6.6ghz or even slightly higher. It will need all the bandwidth improvement it can get.
Both the K10 as well as that supposed 13 SMX/K20 have a TDP of 225W. The GTX690 has each core clocked at 915MHz (+turbo) vs. 745MHz (no turbo) on K10 and has 6.0Gbps ram instead of 5.0Gbps on K10. The GTX690 has also a TDP of 300W, which would be quite on the steep side IMHO for a desktop single chip high end SKU. For mGPU 290-300W (if not even somewhat more) isn't that much of an issue.
If those 13SMX K20 specs are true, NV clearly needs at least one good metal spin to get the GK110s in better shape if they intend to go for 14/15SMX cores with a 800-850MHz core frequency, 6.0 Gbps ram and a power consumption that wouldn't be all that much higher than 250W.
I think few other things people aren't taking into consideration is 1) the improvements made by a more mature node process and 2) Nvidia isn't done tweaking Kepler, hence the reasons we are getting refreshes. Despite their really good performance per watt this time around, there is still probably room to tweak and squeeze out a little bit more performance AND / OR draw a little less power. Add up these points, and it's not unreasonable to see GK110 performing ~50% faster than GK104 @ 250 watt TDP.
UniversalTruth
Veteran
I really hope this becomes reality because it is the only possible option to see low prcies from AMD, if we see significantly faster geforces, otherwise both will charge as much as they wish.
Isn't the assumption that the perf/watt of Kepler is due in a large part to it's castrated compute?
AMD cards are very low priced, honestly I don't know how much lower you expect them to go.
UniversalTruth
Veteran
How much compute castrated do you think GF114 is?
250$ for the 7970, otherwise they lose me as a customer.
So what are you gonna buy - one of those great value Nvidia cards?
You won't see 7970's at $250 because the 8870 is likely to be faster and cheaper before then. The days when AMD's top tier card dropped so far in price are over I think.
UniversalTruth
Veteran
So what are you gonna buy - one of those great value Nvidia cards?
Of course not. I will stay as long as I can with my oldie Barts. For several more years. And instead of giving my money for revenue, I will be in sleepy position waiting for the inevitable...
You need to get used to the reality of the situation - the desktop market is imploding and enthusiast parts will command enthusiast prices else there is no point designing and fabbing them. There is simply no point in AMD offering a card like the 7970 for as low as $250.
AMD just lost $200 million in Q3 at these current "high" prices.
It should be obvious to everyone what AMD's strategy at the high end is. They realise that no matter how much faster they are, people will still pay more for Nvidia cards. Tahiti probably has about 1/5th to 1/10th the wafer starts of GK104. Those claims that the 680 outsold the 7970 by 4-1? Undoubtedly true.
If you're all waiting on AMD gifting you cheap high-end cards again, you'll be waiting a while. Those wafers are better spent on the midrange and below where AMD can actually command a fair price.
Expect the situation to get worse - assuming they don't just pull out of the high-end altogether. What would you do if you were them and your customers were constantly waiting on price drops before buying?
It should be obvious to everyone what AMD's strategy at the high end is. They realise that no matter how much faster they are, people will still pay more for Nvidia cards. Tahiti probably has about 1/5th to 1/10th the wafer starts of GK104. Those claims that the 680 outsold the 7970 by 4-1? Undoubtedly true.
If you're all waiting on AMD gifting you cheap high-end cards again, you'll be waiting a while. Those wafers are better spent on the midrange and below where AMD can actually command a fair price.
Expect the situation to get worse - assuming they don't just pull out of the high-end altogether. What would you do if you were them and your customers were constantly waiting on price drops before buying?
Last edited by a moderator:
That probably has some effect on the big improvements Nvidia made. Getting rid of the hotclocks probably had a larger effect, though. The "compute" parts of the chip don't do much of anything when gaming, hence those transistors aren't going to be burning through too much power when playing BF3 or Crysis 3 or whatever.
I rarely follow IHVs financials but there's anything to substantiate the entire loss can be attributed just to that? Considering they're not selling only GPUs if there's nothing to back it up, it sounds quite an unfair conclusion to me; especially since their CPU offerings are quite a bit behind those from Intel.
Hold on a second. That strategy is NOT something that is holding on for years, but rather the exact opposite. And it's also quite debatable what "high end" really is in the end. A performance chip with a high end price definitely yes.
If any IHV watches its direct competition by an as high margin as you're claiming, then the only other sensible solution would be to further reduce prices. I'm not even buying that 4:1 analogy unless there's some serious statistic to back it up.
Any sort of detailed armchair analysis considering AMD's strategic decisions in total for the past few years won't help especially not in this thread, but let's just say that I disagree with a LOT of them from where I stand.
What I can tell you though for sure is that I as a user refuse to pay 400-500+ price tages for performance chips irrelevant from which IHV.
Similar threads
