[Muro] NVIDIA's big Kepler graphics within seven billion transistors - Page 9

That's wouldn't be the same scenario. AMD doesn't have Tenerife out right now as a Firestream card, just waiting around for the 700 series from Nvidia.

I hope Nvidia has a 700 team that is working on making the line the best ever if they do have it in thier hands. I'd wait till December for a polished 384 bit power house again. Get'er done. Get'er right. Get 're out on time for competition and a price war off the bat for both sides of consumers to get the best pricing.

Doesn't make sense to do it from a business standpoint really. If they release a higher end card AMD will strike right back and make the 680 irrelevant. Right now the cards are kind of in their rightful place with the 5% or so slower 7970 being about 5% less money.

Nvidia is obviously making a major profit off this 680 if the rumor about it being planned as mid-range are true. From a business standpoint it'd make sense to milk this card for all it's worth.

Now if they want to introduce a new higher price point I could see that but again AMD released before them and probabally already has six months of pretty hard work already done on their next GPU. Both companies could afford to double the size of their dies considering how small they are and if Nvidia decided to strike soon AMD could come right back(especially considering there is no die shrink invovled this time around).

I don't know I just don't see how releasing six months after and only 3-4 months after the entire line is out makes sense but maybe I'm missing something.

I honestly don't expect anything til next February at the earliest.

You forget NVIDIA has around 10x the budget of AMD though. I'm sure AMD isn't "ahead" of them in any way, so that few month early release means nothing.

They released the 4xx series and 5xx series in the same year, so it's not unheard of.

well we will see i'm enjoying my 7970s atm but if this so call gtx 780 trample the hd 8970 then nvidia camp is where i'll be...but if they are trading blow in games/benchmark like we witness 7970/680 then i'll stay with amd camp.. i'm already excited for next upgraded...i swear to god my back account goes empty every march and November of every year ...i really think amd/intel/nvidia are robbing us severely

I agree with Jtom320 on this one.

Imagine:

Let's entertain this is their mid-level entered as their 'competing' level card vs AMD's flagship. That means they are ready or can be ready (even if they're not right now) by December when AMD releases the 8970 refresh in December 2012 which is it's target date.

I feel confident they will be on time, as we're hearing their approaching Samsung for supplying chips and won't be at the mercy one company any longer. Finally. Wouldn't be surprised if AMD takes a similar route.

Now let's give some thought to two scenarios:

1. That the 256 bit card is less expensive manufacturing on an architectural level. They're making more on every single card sold with greater profit percentage then AMD.

2. Let's say it's not less expensive to manufacture, then they're still competing on par without a loss anyway.

Is it wrong of them? Not one bit.

Nvidia produced a card that is right in line with the top performance line of it's competitors so they've done their job and possibly at less cost to themselves minus the almost three month being late punch in the eye they took.

So far Kepler over previous Fermi line have been running cooler, less power consumption, provided new features (TXXA, Adaptive V-Sync), Improved Tessellation, real-time destructible environments (coming), GPU Boost thru dynamic overclocking, all at competitive performance.

To top it off, whether one thinks the voltage cap is bad or good, we won't see fried cards returning for RMA at a company loss like the 570/590 reference cards had issues with last series. I'd call that a huge success.

As for the card on topic being discussed, it's either the GTX 690 or a new top of the line workstation Quadro GPU.
Edited by Arizonian - 4/21/12 at 12:12am

That's all well and good, but you forget that Nvidia has a MASSIVE stake in the HPC compute market, which they are currently being stomped in. They have a much larger install base because of CUDA, but that won't shield them from the competition forever. They absolutely HAVE to get a competitive compute card out there ASAP or the process of moving away from CUDA will accelerate. So it makes perfect sense that they would want to push out their new high compute performance GPU to market as fast as possible regardless of whether they hold the gaming performance crown or not.

There are two sides to this business, and the compute side is more important in all honesty. They make considerably better margins in that space, and it is a market that will always want them and need them.

That said, I don't think we will see a Geforce variant until AMD releases their 8XXX cards, but a Tesla/Quadro release should be as soon as physically possible.

The logical conclusion is that this is a quadro/tesla card and I don't think there has ever been a dual gpu quadro card. Why would Nvidia even be talking about/showcasing a GeForce card at a GPU computing conference? I seriously doubt anyone attending that conference gives a crap about GeForce cards unless they play games at home.

Nvidia NEEDS new and more powerful quadro/tesla cards allot more than they need to put out a new GeForce card. I'm sure this will also translate into a high end geforce card at some point but probably not until AMD brings out the 8000 series and nvidia changes to the 700 series. The quadro line and the geforce line of cards serve two distinctly different purposes and release scheduling are completely unrelated.

Releasing a Quadro card based around "big kepler" before a geforce card based on "big kepler" seems like a good idea to me considering that they hold a performance lead in the geforce market but are lagging in the professional market. Given the popularity of cuda, releasing a quadro card that stomps the firepro could give them a very strong grip on the professional (profitable) market.

Well hasn't the trend for quadro/tesla cards been that they share the same core of the highest end GeForce card? So in this case they still need to release that core because they certainly aren't going to be building Quadros from the GK104 in the 680, they will want the GK110 or whatever they're calling it for that.

I agree with everything you said.

*IF* the rumor was true about the 680 being a mid-range card (and I'm almost 99% sure that's not the whole story but I'm sure there is some truth to it) Nvidia has got to be making a huge pile of money on these cards. Several reviews have even pointed out that the 7970 is a more expensive card to manufacture.

Anyway if that is all true logically and from a business standpoint Nvidia is exactly where they want to be right now. They were going to outsell AMD anyway and will continue to do so unless AMD pulls a 9700pro and really shakes up the market. The 7970 while definitely lessening the gap between the two I don't think does enough to really change market share in any appreciable way. The same people who bought 6970s are the same type of shoppers looking at the 79** series and the same people who bought 580s are going to be buying the next top end GPU. Nothing has changed aside from Nvidia making way more money per card (most likely).

This rumor I'm guessing is some kind of workstation card. As far as I can tell I think Nvidia is trying to differentiate their GeForce and Quadro lines. And why not they end up making even more money that way. People forget that these big corporations are purely profit driven. Neither really cares where performance lines up if their card is selling. Nvidia has zero reason at the moment to put out an expensive monster GPU if they already have an inexpensive monster GPU. They will both likely sell these cards for the next year and I'd be willing to put money down on next year they both refresh at around a similar performance level again (relatively).

The only thing that would really shake the market up is either a huge blunder by Nvidia (GeForce FX) or a hugely successful architecture by AMD (9700Pro). Both have happened before so it's not really unlikely but on the same hand chances are things will go the way they have. Again there is no incentive really even for AMD to put how a huge hot and expensive monster GPU out. Both cards are fairly small and well designed and likely making back a good chunk of money per unit sold.