Interesting coincidence --- ATi's quarterly results and the launch of the X1xxx series.

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Lewis
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J

John Lewis

ATi's Q4 and fiscal year results will be announced @8:30AM EDT
October 6, and the countdown (presumably to the public launch of the
X1xxx series) on ATi's website is approaching 5 days. Today is
September 29.

ATi is expected to announce a 30 cent/share loss for Q4. If they don't
have X1800s loaded in retail and ready to ship <<in quantity>> to
customers synchronous with the X1xxx launch, expect a lot of flak and
a large negative bump in the already depressed share price.

John Lewis
 
Why are you concerned about ATi's (or nVidia's) financial performance? Why
aren't most of your investments in oil? In times of economic uncertainty,
sleep with the devil.
 
Do a search for posts by John.... most of them are dumping on ATI.
Click to expand...


At the moment.... During the days of the FX5800 fiasco, dumping on
nVidia.....and earlier during the nasty wars between 3dfx and nVidia.
Bouts of management bungling and/or technical and marketing
incompetence in otherwise stellar-technology companies do
provoke me to comment. The current state at ATi can probably be firmly

laid at management's door. I suspect that the chasing of the M$$
golden mirage with the Xbox360 on a ridiculously-tight schedule
has been responsible for the huge negative impact on the next-gen
GPU schedule. Meanwhile, ATi marketing has been let run riot with
that half-baked Crossfire scheme... seems a classic case of Maketing
convincing management to order engineering to come up with
SOMETHING to compete with nVidia's SLI.

Well, if the upcoming R520-series GPU chips do not dump the Master
-Slave function and build symmetrical functionality INSIDE the GPUs (a
la nVidia) with some sort of simple bridge-board (a la nVidia's SLI
bridge )--- instead of the Xilink "bag-on-the-side" and the stupid
dongle ---- so that all the video boards of each flavor of the X1xxx
series are hardware-identical, then Crossfire may have a very short
life indeed. What manufacturers and retailers are ever going to try to
predict the numbers of each of the Master and Slave boards of each
flavor of the X1xxx series to build or stock?? (Two different SKUs for
every flavor of X1xxx board and much customer confusion amongst the
less technical as to which to buy.... the typical Fry's video-board
customer ) And with the lower numbers of each, lower margin-profit,
or maybe an insistence by the ATi partners that ATi subsidize their
costs until certain volumes are attained... if ever. Or maybe the ATi
partners will insist on only building Slave boards of the new series
and leave ATi to build the Master boards and take all the risk with
the unpredictable (and lower) volumes and lower $$-margin. The
partners call the shots here, and if I were CEO of one, I would firmly
but politely decline building any Crossfire Master boards.

John Lewis
 
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