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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
116 Comments
View All Comments
pastyface - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Great job on the article! Generally today's reviews consist of me quickly going to the benchmarks portion and seeing if a new game was used or if any screwy results came out. This article however was much different. You had my attention from the get go and I didn't take a break in my reading until the whole article was finished.It is a real shame that so much of the work in reviews are overlooked in favor of simple graphs but this article was different and I thank you for that.
MarchTheMonth - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I really enjoyed the read, and it really gives me an appreciation for the card i just happen to get (hd 4850).I may not speak for others, but these are the kind of articles I like to read, the kind that really explain in detail what's really happening. Anand, you did an excellent job of giving perspective (be in ATI's shoes in 2007 when nvidia was doing this...etc) to the article that gave definition between the "so obvious" hindsight we have now to the "this is suicide!" view that it must have seemed like to be there in 2005.
Now, for my own counter-perspective, I can understand why AMD, Intel, and nVidia may not do this very often. On the flip side of the coin, I'm not a mainstream user, and I don't exactly build 1000s of computers that ATI can sell. Bottom line speaking, a story that's interesting to me, I don't bring them $$$$. And on top of that, this story is also giving a lot of info to the competition, which can be at best a double edged sword, and at worst too much information to be self-destructive.
belladog - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Excellent article, we love this stuff. Benchmarks gets a bit boring after a while.I wonder what affect if any, the revelations about price fixing(between ATI and Nvidia) had on the pricing of the RV770 GPU's??
I mean if the lawyers hadnt broken up the party maybe the 4870 could have been $80-$100 dearer?
Anyway, interesting article.
Griswold - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
The price fixing took part before AMD bought ATI. And it would be safe to assume that it stopped at the latest at that time, but it probably did stop well before that (the earliest evidence is an e-mail from 2002). AMD should know better than to point the finger at Intel and do something that is equally wrong in another segment of their business.feelingshorter - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Keep up the good work and never let the haters get you down! There's always people b!tching when they don't know how hard it is to write well (any moron can "write"). But its good stories like this that has been the bread and butter of Anandtech.
The pressure of deadlines, writer's block, or not having enough to write. I appreciate what you do and I know its stressful at times. Others can sympathize but I can empathize having been an amateur journalist myself (in high school and at the university newspaper).
san1s - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
If this article was about an nvidia GPU then the ati fanboys would proclaim it reeks of bias.good article though anamdtech
Adul - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
That was one of the best article I read in a while. It was very enjoyable to get an idea of how things are worked out years in advanced of when the product launches.This was a huge gamble on AMD/ATI part. My hats off to them for having the balls to do something different.
dani31 - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Speaking of AMD, it would have been nice to have more insight on how the acquisition of ATI fitted in the design process.But this topic seems to have been deliberately omitted in this article.
JonnyDough - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Maybe that's because the interviewed the ATI chip designers and not the AMD head haunchos? Just a thought.lifeobry - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Really fascinating article. The amount of work put into creating these cards and the competition between the two companies is compelling stuff.