AMD RV670 price cuts & 128-bit Radeon HD3830?

Friday 21st March 2008, 12:30:00 PM, written by Arun

According to HKEPC & Digitimes, AMD will launch the 128-bit HD3830 for $119-129 in April/May with 320SPs/16 TMUs/16 ROPs; so the cost saving lies in its memory controller redundancy and lower PCB costs. It's basically a HD3690 but won't be limited to China. At the same time, The Inq claims that pricing for the 512MiB HD3850 and the 512MiB HD3870 is going down to ~$145 and ~$159 respectively.

It seems to us that the HD3830 will compete head-on against a 192-bit/384MiB G94 with 24 TMUs/48 SPs; what makes this interesting is that the former will keep all of its processing power but the latter might have up to 50% more bandwidth and more video memory.

So those are two very different approaches and it's hard to guess exactly which will come out on top. From a financial perspective, the 192-bit G94 should have better yields due to the higher amount of redundancy but memory and PCB costs will also be slightly higher, leaving less money to charge for the chip at a given price point.

Regarding the RV670 price cuts, those are obviously very aggressive if true; $20-40 for the HD3870 and $15-35 for the HD3850. This is obviously great for competition, although from a financial point of view we can't help but wonder at what price AMD must now be selling the RV670 chip for the HD3870 given the PCB/memory/cooler/etc. costs associated with that SKU. Not that we're going to complain about a price war, mind you!

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amd ± rv670, hd3830, hd3850, hd3870, g94, 9600gs

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