[Fud] Fermi yields still under 50 percent

[Stuntin]

 Originally Posted by Fudzilla
According to Digitimes, Nvidia's Fermi is still plagued by poor yields, but the company is still expected to have enough cards at launch.TSMC's yields are apparently still under 50 percent and it is unclear whether they can or will improve anytime soon.

Not great news for nvidia, guess the yields really were as bad as people made them out to be.

Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/18172/65/

[NavyChief]

Not good news at all for Nvidia. I guess once the cards are officially launched and the reviewers start benchmarking them the real facts will hit the fan. Hopefully it not as bleak as everyone makes out. I will wait for the official numbers before making any judgements.

[Schlup]

The only thing this news effects is supply and how much profit nVidia will make on these cards.  They've already announced pricing for the new cards GTX 470 = $350 and the GTX 480 = $500.  So those won't be changing, however, if they can get the supply there this will cause the ATI card prices for the 5830 and up to come down a bit.

[tehfunk101]

If they're lowering the performance of the card, shouldn't the price go down too?!

[Schlup]

If they're lowering the performance of the card, shouldn't the price go down too?!

Yields have nothing to do with performance.  Yields are how much of each wafer they are able to use.  You see a wafer is a very large chip that has tons of little chips embedded in it, for ease of explanation let's say that each wafer has a 100 chips on it.  Due to the manufacturing processes only a percentage of those chips will be viable to actually use in production.  Each chip powers one graphics card.  So out of each wafer they are manufacturing they are only able to use 50 chips or make 50 cards out of it.  Since the wafers are expensive, the higher the yields are on it the better the profit is (or the cheaper the card is able to be passed on to consumers at).  Hopefully this makes since.

It's the same thing is true for CPU chips...

Here's a couple pictures...

[Fud] Fermi yields still under 50 percent

[Fud] Fermi yields still under 50 percent

[Fud] Fermi yields still under 50 percent

[Fud] Fermi yields still under 50 percent

[tehfunk101]

Yields have nothing to do with performance.  

I was referring to the reduction in cores for the 480.

"To ensure adequate supply of GTX 480, NVIDIA has therefore decided to reduce the core count to 480 on GTX 480, while GTX 470 will ship with 448 cores. The site also says that while the launch will occur on the 26th, volume shipments won't begin until April 6. Prices will be $499 for the GTX 480, and $349 for the GTX 470."

[Schlup]

Yeah, but those prices weren't announced until after the news that the core count was what it is now.  So those prices reflect final specs on the card, nothing new has happened since the card prices were released.