AMD breaks it's own naming scheme with the 6870
@ 2010/10/24This isn't by any means a G92 like debacle, if you recall that chip went from the 8800 to 9800 to 250GT to 300-something without anything more than an optical shrink. AMD just does a little name inflation that they seem to think is innocuous, but it has some nasty repercussions.
The short story is that the new 'Barts' chip fits nicely in a market segment hole between the older 5770 and the 5800 series. That $200 segment is a hotly contested part of the market where sales are decent and margins are too. It is a rarity, and caps the mid-range of the market where the GPU makers make the majority of their profit.
So, faced with calling the new chip a 6700 or a 6800, AMD decided to make it a 6800. You could make a case for it going either way, but the 6800 spec inflation has many more cons.
The short story is that the new 'Barts' chip fits nicely in a market segment hole between the older 5770 and the 5800 series. That $200 segment is a hotly contested part of the market where sales are decent and margins are too. It is a rarity, and caps the mid-range of the market where the GPU makers make the majority of their profit.
So, faced with calling the new chip a 6700 or a 6800, AMD decided to make it a 6800. You could make a case for it going either way, but the 6800 spec inflation has many more cons.
they would have happily chared €300-400 for 38x0 & 48x0 if they did not have competition from NV
Don't forget that with the HD5xxx-series, AMD/ATI tried to do two things at the same time: Changing the architecture radically, whilst changing the manufacturing node to 40nm (ignoring the small HD5770-experiment). In the beginning, TSMC got some pretty bad yields and the cards were very scarce. So yes, the market allowed for the higher price, but I think ATI needed the higher price to compensate for the bad yields as well.