Benetanegia
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The problem is that the die of those fermi's are huge, so the same space ATI can put 2 or even 4? chips nvidia can only use for one, and then there's less room of the round wafer for them because you can fit less large squares in a circle, and more chance that if there's a defect on it it ruined a bigger percentage of the output they produce, so basically they are forced to make the price high, and seeing the price of the HD5850 I don't expect any fermi to be cheaper than $370, unless they make a small core version later, but that will be less powerful and industry experts wonder if they even can in the first place, the thing is designed to be big.


On top of that even with the big die and low yields the card won't cost more than $200 to produce. Cypress costs way less than $150 according to Demerjian and TheBrightSideOfNews (each with his own sources) and the retail price is just the one they decided to put. Fermi will cost $200 to produce? But the retail price will be whatever they choose to be. They could decide to capitalize on Tesla and Quadros and sell Fermi based GeForces really cheap in order to expand Fermi installed base, which would be good and necessary to move their GPGPU initiative ahead.