Not enough 40nm chips
Fermi is
finally coming and it should be in shops in the next two to
three weeks and now all eyes are on ATI and what their plans are.
Our sources
are telling us that ATI still struggles to get enough Radeon 58×0 based cards
and that partners are quite happy to keep the prices of cards around €375 for
the card in European etail with VAT on. Naturally TSMC is to blame and our
sources even suggest that Nvidia booked majority of 40nm wafers for its
notebook DX10.1 parts for Calpella and Fermi chips.
Since this
will roughly be the price of Geforce GTX 470, which should start selling for €350
and since current Radeon HD 5870 price tag is some €75 lower than the pricing on Geforce GTX 480 cards, people are expecting some price cuts, but at this time
there are no any indications that this will happen.
Knowing the
mind of ATI's sales machine, we know that ATI will wait until the last moment, but
they are most likely to react with a price cut. The main advantage is that
Radeon HD 5970 remains the fastest card on the market for at least few more months.
ATI still has a week or three to prepare before
Fermi becomes available.
