ATI cuts 6950 allocation

[555BUK]

Gibbo already stated the likely prices 360-400£ for 6970 which is the 580gtx territory.

If that is the final release price, it's performance will cleary not be 30% greater than Fermi.

edit: Please excuse my grammar and poor spelling. English is not my first language. I come from a country where Mercedes are Taxi's and BMW's are considered equal competitors with Ford, and where their pricing is similar. Everyone from my homeland knows that Audi's are the best built cars.

 

[Broken Hope]

ATI's 5870 arrived at £300 and that was 20% slower than the GTX 480.

Did you not even notice my post, the 5870 came out 6 months before the GTX 480, why didn't ATI price it much higher than the £300 they did even though it was the fastest card available?

 

[Rimsy]

If that is the final release price, it's performance will cleary not be 30% greater than Fermi.

30% performance over 580GTX would suggest a price of around £470+ - amazing how people cling to the 30% performance increase and same price point prediction... guess they'll be expecting a free car thrown into the deal too!

It would make ZERO sense for AMD to price their 580GTX destroying beast at the same price with things how they currently stand.

 

[Jokester]

Did you not even notice my post, the 5870 came out 6 months before the GTX 480, why didn't ATI price it much higher than the £300 they did even though it was the fastest card available?

Because Fermi was going to be released the following month, or the month after that, or the month after that, we need more wood screws, has anyone cottoned on yet that we don't have a working product?

Anyway, I will be utterly shocked that AMD release it at more than £300, it just wouldn't be nice of them would it.

 

[Monkey Puzzle]

30% performance over 580GTX would suggest a price of around £470+ - amazing how people cling to the 30% performance increase and same price point prediction... guess they'll be expecting a free car thrown into the deal too!

It would make ZERO sense for AMD to price their 580GTX destroying beast at the same price with things how they currently stand.

And yet AMD continue to offer better value cards time and again. They must be crazy...

 

[Mr Krugga]

The only reason why Radeon 5870 was sold for £300 rather than £280 was because of initial shortages in supply. Demand was higher than supply in the UK thus price gauging by the retailers. If you were lucky, you could have had these cards at launch for £280 though

You must realise that not many people can afford graphics cards priced £400+ and that it is more beneficial for AMD to undercut Nvidia's pricing rather than retain their high prices. AMD will aim to sell as many cards as possible before their next launch in a year or so.

After all this industry evolves way quicked than automotive industry

 

[Journey]

It would make perfect sense for them to price a card lower than that of the 580GTX even if it has superior performance, it gives people then a zero diubt reason the chose Red for their high end card purchase.

Pricing it higher will make people doubt if it's worth that spending more for a higher performing card, and especially those who have a Green bias.

Pricing it lower also puts Nvida at place where they cannot retaliate without hurting their own profits and therefore shareholders, it's not always about making more money when you look like you are behind the competition.

 

[Mr Krugga]

It would make perfect sense for them to price a card lower than that of the 580GTX even if it has superior performance, it gives people then a zero diubt reason the chose Red for their high end card purchase.

Pricing it higher will make people doubt if it's worth that spending more for a higher performing card, and especially those who have a Green bias.

Pricing it lower also puts Nvida at place where they cannot retaliate without hurting their own profits and therefore shareholders, it's not always about making more money when you look like you are behind the competition.

Exactly what I meant earlier, AMD was able to make huge profits of their sales because they sold more cards than Nvidia in the past year. It's all about market share, they must win the consumer by any means, when they finally do, pricing will stabilise. Until the next launch that is

 

[Broken Hope]

Pricing it lower also puts Nvida at place where they cannot retaliate without hurting their own profits and therefore shareholders, it's not always about making more money when you look like you are behind the competition.

The worst thing is Nvidia can't retaliate even if they want to since they can't make enough GTX 580s it seems.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Well, I do work in the electronics industry and I provide technology for some rather big names. I also know that if you are the owner an established brand and you manufacture the best product, you do not undersell it. If ATI's 6970 clearly beats the GTX580 it will be priced equal to or above it's oponent (irrespective of how much less it costs to produce). Why start at a lower price point when you do not have to?

ATI's 5870 arrived at £300 and that was 20% slower than the GTX 480. If the 6970 noticeably outperforms the 580 and arrives at <£350 I will eat my hat, and plenty of humble uninformed pie.

As pointed out, firstly the 5870 was the SAME cost as a 285gtx available at launch, why didn't they price it at £400 plus, why, because theres 50 times the volume of sales on a £300 card than a £400 card, and you create a lot of bad feeling(like Nvidia consistantly have) when you launch at card at £400 to get the suckers who will pay £400 a card, then drop the price a month later to £300 to get everyone else. Theres not much point launching at £400 and dropping to £300 a couple of months before the new generations are out, too many people want to wait and you won't get nearly the same amount of sales.

People keep coming up with these idea's that simply fly in the face of the publically announced plan of AMD, their strategy, their good value strategy, its not for the good of us, its for the good of there pocket.

25million sales with reasonable profit = more actual profit than 10million sales with great profit.


Its really simple, get yourself an exponential graph, with price of card on one scale, starting at £1000 for an Ares type card, and £30 for a budget card, your other scale is amount of people willing to buy at that price.

Simple fact is the cheaper the card, while still profitable, the more people will actually buy the card.

Again we go back to the 4870, it easily beat a 260gtx in performance, yet launched over £100 cheaper, why, because they could sell a heck of a lot more cards at £190, than at £300, they get known as the company that won't screw you out of every last penny they can and at the same time watch Nvidia drop their prices by, heck, not far off 50% and see LOTS of 260gtx buyers very unhappy they just lost £100-150 buying a few weeks earlier.


I don't expect Cayman to cost the same as Cypress, its a bigger core, it should have somewhat lower yields, it should cost more to make, but most importantly, the amount of R&D that went into it, for what seems to be one of the shortest generations of products for AMD, often means higher than normal costs to get it out quickly.

Problem is, we simply don't get competitive pricing here in the uk for gpu's, almost everything else seems fine, but we have several more enthusiast computing stores who know GPU's are the biggest ticket items, and tend to up the prices on them and blame everyone else, oh the exchange rate screwed us(when in reality it goes from 1.60 to 1.59, and costs all of £1 more yet price goes up £40 ).

I expect price gouging straight off,

heck Gibbo seems to suggest they've ALREADY PAID for the cards on the way, yet they are deciding if they will go for £350 or £400, which suggests to me, theres healthy profit at £350, but can they get away with £400 and a lot more profit in their pocket.

heres a really good way to stop that happening, STOP BUYING ABOVE RRP.

Thats the insane thing, most of the rest of the planet would be like, what the what, and ignore it, prices come down, and we get okay value, at least the prices we should pay.

Going on what Gibbo said, the RRP is probably £250/£330 or so, and they've decided they will easily get away wtih £270-300, and £350-400, and are waiting to see how much other stores screw us before deciding on final prices.


RRP is designed to give a pretty decent profit to retailers, and AIB's, and distributors, its sad that retailers have the need to screw us even further, and worse still that UK customers can't stand up for themselves in the slightest.

 

[Lightnix]

It's probably worth considering that AMD doesn't see the 6970 as their 'top of the line product', that's reserved for the dual-GPU 6990 and the existence of that card necessitates that they leave a bit of space at the top for it. Ultimately there comes a point where no matter how fast your card is, nobody will buy it. I can't see AMD pricing the 6990 at much above £500 (much more and nobody bar the richest of enthusiasts will look twice at it), so really the 6970 has to be sub-£400 or people will probably just plump for the extra to get the dual-GPU card.

 

[Monkey Puzzle]

I don't expect Cayman to cost the same as Cypress, its a bigger core, it should have somewhat lower yields, it should cost more to make, but most importantly, the amount of R&D that went into it, for what seems to be one of the shortest generations of products for AMD, often means higher than normal costs to get it out quickly.

Are they planning to use basically the same architecture for 28nm?

 

[kylew]

Additionally, if the 6970 is £400 odd like people are speculating, that leaves a massive "gulf" in the £200-£300 region. Realistically, I can see the RRP of the 6970 and 6950 to be around £240 and £300. That leaves room for around a £400 RRP for the 6990, if it's dual 6950s, as their dual cards are always under 2x the cost of the single GPU versions.

 

[kylew]

Are they planning to use basically the same architecture for 28nm?

I think they've got a new shader design for 28nm chips. The 6 series are a "hybrid" between their next generation, and the Evergreen chips. They use the front and back ends of their new design, while keeping the shader structure of the evergreen chips.

 

[Rroff]

snip...

If only it was that simple, selling more cards at a lower price eats into your profit margin as you have to pay extra staff hours for handling the cards through the pipeline, your more exposed when things go wrong i.e. a batch of faulty cards can potentially wipe out a lot of your profit. And a whole load more to it.

A lot of things you cite above had nothing to do with any benevolence but things like fluctuating exchange rate, component supply levels, etc. for example you buy a bunch of GTX260 in at a price and have them in stock theres a limit to how far you can manouvre the price on what you already stock, if the exchange rate then fluctuates newer lines can be purchased at a better or worse price.

 

[kylew]

If only it was that simple, selling more cards at a lower price eats into your profit margin as you have to pay extra staff hours for handling the cards through the pipeline, your more exposed when things go wrong i.e. a batch of faulty cards can potentially wipe out a lot of your profit. And a whole load more to it.

That goes for any company manufacturing any product, to imply that it's some how bad for this situation only is a bit strange.

A lot of things you cite above had nothing to do with any benevolence but things like fluctuating exchange rate, component supply levels, etc. for example you buy a bunch of GTX260 in at a price and have them in stock theres a limit to how far you can manouvre the price on what you already stock, if the exchange rate then fluctuates newer lines can be purchased at a better or worse price.

You seem to forget that we're talking about the end price of a product that costs the same to manufacture regardless of what price point it's put in. Are you really arguing that a 5870 at £300 wouldn't make AMD more money than a 5870 at £400 based on the economy of scale? Okay, economy of scale might not be the best way to describe it, but there isn't a linear scale when it comes to cost and how many sales are made.

Dropping down to a lower price point brings an exponential increase in demand to the point where the lower price point is earning them more money simply because they're selling a lot more than they would have sold at the higher price point. Steam sales are a great example of this.

 

[Final8y]

If only it was that simple, selling more cards at a lower price eats into your profit margin as you have to pay extra staff hours for handling the cards through the pipeline, your more exposed when things go wrong i.e. a batch of faulty cards can potentially wipe out a lot of your profit. And a whole load more to it.

A lot of things you cite above had nothing to do with any benevolence but things like fluctuating exchange rate, component supply levels, etc. for example you buy a bunch of GTX260 in at a price and have them in stock theres a limit to how far you can manouvre the price on what you already stock, if the exchange rate then fluctuates newer lines can be purchased at a better or worse price.

How ever simple it is or not is not the point AMD has pulled it off one way or another.

 

[Final8y]

That goes for any company manufacturing any product, to imply that it's some how bad for this situation only is a bit strange.

You seem to forget that we're talking about the end price of a product that costs the same to manufacture regardless of what price point it's put in. Are you really arguing that a 5870 at £300 wouldn't make AMD more money than a 5870 at £400 based on the economy of scale? Okay, economy of scale might not be the best way to describe it, but there isn't a linear scale when it comes to cost and how many sales are made.

Dropping down to a lower price point brings an exponential increase in demand to the point where the lower price point is earning them more money simply because they're selling a lot more than they would have sold at the higher price point. Steam sales are a great example of this.

Exactly the demand for the services that we provide at where i work has been more in the recession than out simply because we are cheaper & the demand as grown to the point that we have expanded in a recession & have taken on more workers while others in our field have gone bust.

 

[Journey]

DM is right in what he is saying about this, and the price gouging. I still have some contacts left in the UK IT supplier market. I shall contact them this week and see if I can get a proper trade cost ex. VAT so we can see just how much these will be artificially inflated by e-tailors taking advantage of the zero stock availability on the 580GTX's.

In the mean time I'm going to go purchase a hat incase I need to eat it if I am incorrect.

 

[Rroff]

Dropping down to a lower price point brings an exponential increase in demand to the point where the lower price point is earning them more money simply because they're selling a lot more than they would have sold at the higher price point. Steam sales are a great example of this.

Your comparing steam sales to manufacturing?

Your economics might sound great and sometimes work, but generally very very few companies operate this way and those that do survive on thin margins and AMD certainly does not do business this way*, if theres one thing I admire about AMD its their business acumen.


*Thats not to say they haven't used these methods tactically but its not a foundation of the way they do business.