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AMD Radeon R9 290X with Hawaii GPU pictured, has 512-bit 4GB Memory

drunkenmaster said:
It's worth noting that if AMD said anytime before launch "btw these will be awesome prices, £300/£375", then Nvidia would pre-empt the launch and drop prices. If AMD suggest high prices, get reviews and give them prices the day before reviews go live then Nvidia don't have time to adjust pricing and push through price drops before AMD get cards out... and anything they do looks reactive.
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Surely AMD will be able to price drop lower than Nvidia due to the extra cost to manufactur a titan?
 
What are you basing Titan's manufacturing costs on? If it's memory GDDR prices have been quite low for the last few years. So I was told by someone in the industry anyway. *Shrugs and sits this one out* :D
 
Martini1991 said:
It's not as if these AMD cards are cheap to manufacture either..
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Not saying they are but bigger die, worse yeilds = more expense.

MjFrosty said:
What are you basing Titan's manufacturing costs on? If it's memory GDDR prices have been quite low for the last few years. So I was told by someone in the industry anyway. *Shrugs and sits this one out* :D
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See above. 6gb of mem vs 4gb is the only other thing i can think of though. I was hoping for drunkenmasters input when i said this.
 
LtMatt said:
I got you a birthday gift. Its hot, loud and is 12 inches in length. ;)


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ban :(
 
290x is looking better and better. It will last me 2 years I think.
All I want is BF4 in 3D to run around 30fps with no msaa since 3d does not support it. And my 7950 can almost pull it off so. This card should be good enough.
 
MjFrosty said:
What are you basing Titan's manufacturing costs on? If it's memory GDDR prices have been quite low for the last few years. So I was told by someone in the industry anyway. *Shrugs and sits this one out* :D
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A wafer is a set size and relatively set cost(obviously if a company commits to 100mil of wafer runs or 2mil, they'll get different pricing but it won't be far apart.

Ultimately if a 28nm wafer is costing $6k then bigger chips will always cost more and always get less chips on a wafer, with the same wafer cost, you get 200 chips off it or 50, then $6k/200 is $30 a chip, 6k/50 $120 a chip.

One chip is duff on out of 200 and it's $30 less and a marginal increase to each chip, one in 50 costs more and increases price of the rest more.

There isn't a chance Titan costs less than a R290x to make, but where it's sold is a different question. Companies can sell at a loss to gain market share, or just price it with not much if any profit to hurt the competition.

All we can say for certain is Titan chips will cost significantly more than R290x chips out of the fab, after there... who knows. At the same price AMD could make more profit per chip, I'm sure of that, it doesn't mean Nvidia isn't willing to undercut AMD and take a loss to do so while AMD wouldn't be willing to do that, or vice versa.
 
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Ta, I wasn't insinuating that Titans memory would be any cheaper just FYI as that would be silly. Just wasn't really convinced that the price difference (assuming the 450+VAT is semi accurate) would be large enough to account for the £900 price tag.
 
Release the 290X already, I can't wait any longer lol. Desperately need a new GPU to go with my new system :D

hopefully it will be as good they say and with a reasonable price, otherwise I'm getting a 780.

Will they be available on the 15th?
 
Anyone one know whether its likely the bf4 editions with have better chips on? I mean, do they think this way or is it going to be a lottery as usual?
 
MjFrosty said:
Ta, I wasn't insinuating that Titans memory would be any cheaper just FYI as that would be silly. Just wasn't really convinced that the price difference (assuming the 450+VAT is semi accurate) would be large enough to account for the £900 price tag.
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Not even slightly, Titan is a pee take, the 780 is the same chip(or at least afaik) which has a more sensible(but still not sensible at all :p ) price. Ultimately it's very hard to know the yields.

Roughly speaking you have 300mm wafers, so pi*r^2 gives you a wafer area of circa 70500mm^2, divide that by chip size and you get a bit under 130 chips per wafer for GK110, and around 160 for Hawaii XT or about 24% more chips. That assumes square shapes fit perfectly into a circle which obviously they don't. The smaller the chip the less wasted space so a Gk110 wafer could easily be (when you think the outside edge is largest and could effect almost every chip on the outside edge) anything from 5-15 less maybe. Titan is expensive to make, so is Hawaii, but it's not "that" expensive theoretically. What you get into is R&D costs, you might be making a chip that costs $250 with bad yields, but if you're trying to recoup 500mil R&D costs, you add a lot to that price before you even make a profit, which adds more again.

So it's very hard to judge where break even point is. I would think 2 years on from 28nm even Titan will be yielding well enough to be sold relatively cheaply and still make a profit. When you're talking about selling maybe only 5-10 parts from a wafer that are fully working as $2k professional parts, and maybe getting 20-60 more you can sell as various levels of cut down parts as Titan's/780gtx, I'd be very surprised if Titan's couldn't make an effective profit being sold at £500 and 780gtx's way less than that.

I really think if the market just turned it's nose up at Titan's prices they would have crashed it quite happily to £500-600 and sold with a profit. Nvidia just priced it high to see if it would get any sales, nothing stopping them dropping the price by £300 over a few months if it didn't sell, AMD had nothing planned for a while, they had nothing to lose and a decent amount of cash to gain.

Ultimately I don't know if AMD will try the same thing, and if then do and people still buy it, we can look forward to £500 + launch cards every gen from now on at least.

A sensible guess is for any given price AMD can make a profit on the R290x(which could be no where near the sale price) then Titan chips should cost a minimum I would think 30% more for the chip alone(with similarly good yields), probably closer to 40% more if Nvidia's yields aren't good(historically they've been meh for a few gens there) then the pcb/memory costs.... if that was more than $50 extra I'd be surprised.

SO if AMD could sell a R290x at £400 for decent profit, a titan should really be at most £600.
 
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