The RV770 Story: Documenting ATI's Road to Success
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 2, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Building a GPU for the Masses
AMD put up this graph at its recent Financial Analyst Day:
The performance segment of the desktop CPU market is only about 7% of the pie and although it generates a disproportionately large amount of revenue it’s neither the biggest segment nor the biggest revenue generator in the market. That would be the mainstream segment.
ATI realized much of the same thing back in 2005. These high end GPUs were getting more and more expensive, while R300 tipped the scales at $399 over the coming years we’d see GPUs hit $499, $599 and go north of $600 at launch. The higher prices were due to increasing die sizes and techniques such as harvesting, ensuring that regardless of how big the GPU, revenues were protected.
A $399 R300 was close enough to the mainstream price points that ATI was able to scale it down months later to address other markets, but these days the time between the high end GPU introduction and the mainstream revisions of it has increased to 6 - 9 months. We still don’t have a mainstream derivative of NVIDIA’s GT200 architecture and chances are that we won’t until around 9 months after its introduction. With the GeForce GTX 280 launching at $600, for it to take 9 months to make a $200 derivative is doing the market a disservice in ATI’s eyes.
It was time to refocus. Instead of tailoring to the needs of the high end, ATI wanted to make a product that would be the best in the $200 - $300 range. To do so would mean that it would have to reverse the strategy that made it successful to begin with, and hope that somehow NVIDIA wouldn’t follow suit.
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VaultDweller - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I wish you had gotten greedy! I want to know about RV870, and about nVidia's first DirectX 11 part too.I had been thinking about building a new gaming rig in Q1 2009, but presently it looks like I'd be spending too much for too little improvement over my current box. I'm hoping that changes by late summer. :)
murray13 - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Kudos to you Anand for a G R E A T article!!!And to AMD/ATI for making this possible!
Now if only AMD on the cpu side could do something similar...
jzodda - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
This is one of the best articles I have read here and there have been so many over the years. In the more then 10+ years I have been coming here I have always enjoyed this site and Anand continues to produce great content. Here's to another 10 years!pcfxer - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Not only does anand do engineering, he writes like mad!"Passion has a funny way of being a person’s strongest ally."
prophet001 - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
great article. thank you for writing this :)rqle - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
awesome article, very good read, thankswingless - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Anand, you and all the hard working people at this website have just outdone yourselves. You raised the bar yet again.Your readers are probably as amazed as you are that AMD/ATI came out with such personal and intimate information as to what goes on behind closed doors. Your conclusion is on point as well. Without competition, we know these other companies will run wild with their prices. Unfortunately for us, the fate of competition in both the GPU and CPU market falls on AMD which needs a little financial lovin' right about now.
My strongest desire is that the CPU team over at AMD pulls out all the stops with their next CPU to Bulldoze the competition (or just their prices). We need to make $1000 CPUs a thing of the past. Maybe your site and others can put pressure on AMD to bump up their CPU roadmap about a year so we see Bulldozer in 2010.
Zoomer - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Yup. I have always voted Red with my wallet though! The only two green cards I had were the Riva TNT and the 7600GT. Got rid of that after a couple of months though: it was noisy and the drivers sucked.Radeon DDR 32MB, Radeon 8500, Radeon 9500Pro (Unlocked ;)), Radeon X800XT, Radeon x1950 Pro, and finally the Radeon 4850!
wingless - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I know that is an unrealistic hope. I understand AMD has made it's road map decisions very carefully given their current situation. I can dream though....Bull Dog - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Awesome article Anand. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and I hope for more articles like this in the feature. Many thanks to AMD for letting this happen.