Wednesday, August 7th 2013
Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" Prices Slashed to $699, Targets GTX 780
In a bid to step up competitiveness of its Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" dual-GPU graphics card against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX TITAN and GTX 690, AMD add-in-board (AIB) partners slashed prices of the card by almost a third. What was once retailing for $1,100-1,200, is now down to $699.99. Prices of the card on American retailer Newegg.com, are ranging between $699.99 to $789.99, with two AIBs capturing the $729.99 and $749.99 price points, along the way. With the right kind of CrossFire profiles, a Radeon HD 7990 can offer frame-rates rivaled only by GTX Titan and GTX 690. Then there are also AMD's recent CrossFire micro-stuttering fix, and eight Never Settle games with realistic resale value of $100 to account for. These prices should also give GeForce GTX 780 buyers second thoughts.
94 Comments on Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" Prices Slashed to $699, Targets GTX 780
They must be trying to get rid of whatever stock is left over before the 9000 series drops.
But note that the 7970 went from $550 upon release, to $375 today (not including MIR). A $170 (32% difference). While the $680 went from $499 upon release to $420 (16% difference). Pretty big drop from AMD there versus what one can consider a normal market price drop on the $680.
As I stated, AMD usually lowers their pricing to be even more competitive in the market. This is not impressive, ballsy, or shocking in the least to me.
Good move nonetheless :toast:
Let's hope this is a sign they are going to roll out their new GPU generation soon.
ima do some benches one day showing the day 1 upto now improvement in performance from Amd drivers on five series and next time ill be doing the same ie bigest pocket dent for a day 1 next gen card then a year later on get another:) Its the way.
Not sure wth happened there honestly. :rofl:
No, their cards aren't overpriced due to a "dev. team". They're overpriced due to a lack of competition.
TSMC – Indicated early on 28Nm production would be more costly... "by somewhere between 15-25%"
Nvidia – Would start purchasing full wafer production, not per chip as had been the case previously.
AMD – Foresaw GK100 being expensive given the die-size, but then when it was cancel AMD assumed they had cornered that market. Then they received less than optimum Tahiti's from TSMC production, but still figured they could go for brass ring asking $550.
Nvidia – Finds they can have GK104 best Tahiti with the implementation of Boost, even if that adds cost they can easily under-cut a 7970 @ $550.
Nvidia – Surely designed Kepler knowing they'd buying wafer production, and designed the whole "multiple variants" from a single wafer (not 2 and then one gelding as AMD traditionally). They've binned 5 different variants from every GK104 wafer, which absolutely gives them a price advantage. That alone was the early strategy that really turn to be the boon for Nvidia against AMD LE/XT harvest.
AMD – Tahiti doesn't have the efficiency to offer higher clock performance. I always thought Tahiti XT was to be a GHz offering, but at first because of TSMC production issue they released with 7.5% lower clocks believing good production could provide a straight-up 1GHz card. Even once good production was the norm, AMD found going with TSMC "HPL" (lower power) process and GCN architecture wasn't working out as well as first wafer trials might have indicated and took a page from Nvidia also adopting the Boost approach.
Nvidia – Kepler architecture was from the beginning designed to be extra efficient so it could profit more from the "HP" without being inefficient. The problem was at first GK100 was still a unwieldy. I think Boost was originally something conceived/experimented to aid the GK100 although quickly realized Boost could make the GK104 a contender to Tahiti. The cancelation of GK100 was because of realization for Boost performance worked on the GK104 (also believe due more to cost, maturity in the TSMC process, but also a fix or two). So canceling and delaying things a little help; lengthen time for good HP GK104 wafer production, while time to develop/implement boost. That was another great boon to Nvidia.
That might be how the cookie crumbled… just one person’s thinking. So AMD had miss-steps, but assumed they would come out on top... So why underprice what traditionally Nvidia had always shown to do? Nvidia had done things smarter, but had they not found some windfalls they might have had to do things different. So Nvidia came to the table in a healthier position than ever, and pull the rug out from under AMD. I'm fairly certain Nvidia could move further on price when AMD made cut and added bundles, but Nvidia needed to hold firm to maintain pricing, so when stacking the 780 and Titan on top of the revamped 6XX cards pricing appeared apropos down the road.
:roll: