We are discussing 2 different things here. You are supporting the technology at ATI which I agree is as good or better in most cases as Nvidia's. The point I continue to make is that ATI has stumbled badly on yet another product launch (regardles of ATI not officially providing launch dates) and Nvidia has another uncontested high gross margin pricing environment.
...and I'll try to show you once more where and why I disagree...
The result of this repeated and systemic culture of missed product cycles and late launches ATI has lost their huge advantage in mobile market share and have seen margins crater into the 20's.
In a market where power consumption for each unit is probably at the highest priority, wouldn't also want to think that any delay is less relevant than what each GPU consumes in the end? What convinces you for that particular point that things would have been vastly different if R520 launched at the same time as G70?
This left the company vulnerable to a takeover which AMD exploited and took advantage of.
You make it sound like ATI was either desperate to be taken over or that AMD made a hostile takeover. None of the two seems to be the case IMO.
ATI's quarterly revenue is estimated to have fallen to $380 million with a negative EPS of about .23 cents. They were up well over $600 million just 1 or 2 quarters ago. Once you peel away the loss of Intel chipset business they still have continued to lose share to Nvidia for one simple reason...late to market. It is a common theme in mobile, server, midrange and now once again the flagship desktop.
Trouble being that you cannot hang it all on one factor alone. I never said that there's no influence at all. Shall we crank out older numbers from the entire NV3x era and compare quarterly earnings for NV instead, which would get us where exactly?
Ever since ATI got away from the lower clocks, smaller die sizes and using mature manufaturing processes like they did with R3xx they have stumbled badly on product releases and time to market. ATI instead went with higher clocks, new and unproven manufacturing processes, bigger die sizes and overall hotter and more complex chips than Nvidia. Why? This is where my "infatuated with the technology" comment stems from. Ever since an engineer (Orton) was elected CEO this has been the mantra...push the technology and manufacturing process envelope and be late to market.
That belongs to the entire strategy ATI has adopted since R3xx, to which I also disagree with. What I'm not certain of is whether they have good reasons or if there are specific interests behind such strategies, since no one can easily convince me that ATI is not aware of the risks and implications of consistently picking the lowest available high performance manufacturing process.
You still haven't told me though what ATI looked like before R300, since I neither remember any particular timely releases, nor as competitive hardware
and drivers as since R300.
Who learned from the R3xx vs NV30 fight? Nvidia did. ATI switched places on die sizes, clock speeds and manufacturing processes. The end result is undisputable once you look at the market share, revenue, gross margin and operating income from both companies. ATI is simply incapable of leading the GPU market and has responded to Nvidia in every instance for the past several years.
I said above that ATI and margins don't fit well for me in the same sentence for a reason. I look at the grander scheme of things though and it includes both advantages and disadvantages. If there's one IHV that really can stand up to NVIDIA it is ATI.
Granted ATI could do a lot better, but if you really want to hang the blame on just one individual (which isn't particularly fair) then at least have the decency to also acknowledge his positive contribution; and in that regard IMHO always there are more positives to count than negatives. Unless of course you consider the pre-R300 or Lord help the Rage era as something that is close to ideal.
There are so many improvements ATI achieved for it's own products ever since that someone would have to be blind to not see them; and no I'm not concentrating on the underlying technology itself but from what I as a consumer can benefit from fierce competition.
