jmke

This isn't by any means a G92 like debacle, if you recall that chip went from the 8800 to 9800 to 250GT to 300-something without anything more than an optical shrink. AMD just does a little name inflation that they seem to think is innocuous, but it has some nasty repercussions.

The short story is that the new 'Barts' chip fits nicely in a market segment hole between the older 5770 and the 5800 series. That $200 segment is a hotly contested part of the market where sales are decent and margins are too. It is a rarity, and caps the mid-range of the market where the GPU makers make the majority of their profit.

So, faced with calling the new chip a 6700 or a 6800, AMD decided to make it a 6800. You could make a case for it going either way, but the 6800 spec inflation has many more cons.

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/10/...g-scheme-6870/

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jmke

He has a very valid point, this card should have been called 6770 and 6750, but that would cause issues with their renaming scheme for the 5770... either way, if you see two product in store, 6870 & 5870, you'd think that 6870 is faster... but it's not.

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darkjeric

Well, it may seem that way. But actually ATI broke their naming scheme with the 5800-series already, and now they changed it to the 'right' schedule again. The x800-series have always been mid-range/high-end cards priced around €200-250 (like the 3850/3870 and 4850/4870). When the 58xx-series came out this changed to €300-€400, because the cards were actually that much faster and much more higher-end.

Now coming to the HD68xx-series, they put them back where they were originally, a price-point of about €200-250. So when you look at it that way, the 5800-series was named wrong. But yes, it does seem weird that the 6870 is a tad slower than the 5870, but then again it does cost significantly less. The 6900-series will be about the same price as the 5800-series but will offer a decent performance improvement.

jmke

only reason they were priced higher is because the market allowed it;
they would have happily chared €300-400 for 38x0 & 48x0 if they did not have competition from NV

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darkjeric

Actually with the 4800-series they could have asked more. The GTX280 was just out and seemed like a real performance monster. Suddenly the HD4870 came out with at the worst 10% less performance, but it cost like 1/3 at the time of its launch compared to the GTX280. So actually, nVidia had to lower their prices because AMD launched the HD4800-series so ridiculously low to begin with.

Don't forget that with the HD5xxx-series, AMD/ATI tried to do two things at the same time: Changing the architecture radically, whilst changing the manufacturing node to 40nm (ignoring the small HD5770-experiment). In the beginning, TSMC got some pretty bad yields and the cards were very scarce. So yes, the market allowed for the higher price, but I think ATI needed the higher price to compensate for the bad yields as well.