low yields from pre-production does not mean they can't make one, it means nothing in fact.
Pre-production, end of august/early sept production yields are HORRIBLE, pre-production yields infact mean everything, it means, yields are crap and realistically in terms of manufacturing, yields is the ENTIRE ball game. It dictates profits, viability of products, end clock speeds, price, it dictates EVERYTHING.
but it means they don't have demo products yet, but insist final cards will be out late November, which simply is not true. THey also insisted, several times to multiple people this card is a final working product, when quite clearly its a fake mock up. They didn't say "this is a mock up" they said, specifically, its a working final card and they have plenty of working cores from great yields.
Yet its very new silicon, VERY new, and its still A1, and as leaked rumours of yield numbers, its numbered in a way that suggests the rumours about yields are true.
Infact, every single last thing about this press event suggests it was done purely to stem the flood of people moving to ATi and to hurt ATi's release, which it has done successfully.
However it everything they said turns out to be false, in terms of dates we see product, the fact the item they were holding was fake and that yields are beyond abysmal then they'll hurt themselves more in the long run.
For every person who know waits till next month for an Nvidia card, and then waits another 3 months till they appear, you'll have a pee'd off customer who will realise he could have spent less on an ATi card that may prove to be faster and have had it for 3-4 months already. So you'll be making a lot of extra ATi customers in the future.
I have to give it to charlie, his numbers, his dates and his theories seem to all pan out to be true. The fact Nvidia put on such a huge press event with fake products pretty much shows how desparate they are.
Its not like I want Nvidia to fail, i do dislike the way they've been conducting themselves, but I like competition, the only generation of Nvidia I haven't tried is a GT200 based card. I've played with almost everything ATi/Nvidia have released for maybe 8 years or more.
But realistically I see them moving out of graphics and being solely gpgpu guys as Intel/AMD shove them out of the market.
Frankly thats better for us as end users, in 2 years we'll have two FAR bigger players competing with better cards in better competition with both companies producing their own GPU's in house so even cheaper prices and more competition. Nvidia can't afford fabs, at all, not even close, when AMD moves production to New York State or Dresden, Nvidia would simply not be competitive anymore, Intel however will be.
Intel/AMD will bring better graphics than AMD/Nvidia would in the future, so win win for all end users IMHO.
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