jmke

Our sources claim that in case of GF100 dies, nVidia is ordering per wafer and is paying around $5000 per single wafer. In case of nVidia, when 60% is the best you can expect and 40% is a realistic goal, you're ending up with the 240x240mm die costing $87, but realistically you're looking at $131 per chip. $131 isn't all that bad, given the current cost of single AMD Cypress die is $96. For as long as you're under $100 per die, you can count your blessings with TSMC's 40nm process. Unfortunately, A2 revision didn't come up with necessary yield increase. According to our sources, nVidia achieved a 25% yield with A2 silicon, coming up with around 24-26 functional dies per wafer. This puts the cost of a single chip into the $208 range, i.e. you can get 4.2 billion transistors [2x Cypress, i.e. HD 5970] for the price of a single three billion die. Truth to be told, given that GF100 kills both HD 5870 and HD 5970 in Tessellation and consumes less power - this isn't as bad as we thought the first time we did the numbers game.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...-analysis.aspx

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