[tt] gtx660

[RussianSensation]

f1sherman, you posted Revenue, which is an irrelevant metric for valuing a mature semi-conductor company. What you want to look at is cash flow, or at least start with Net Income and arrive at discounted net cash flow. The amount of $ NV actually makes from Professional Graphics is what counts, NOT revenues (that's just what you sell the chips for). Trefis looks at Cash Flows of each product line, which is the only thing that matters for valuing this type of business, which is why their #s are more relevant.

You can value each product line separately if you want and the Professional Graphics is worth 30% of the company right now, making it the most valuable segment of the firm.

And yes, there are Desktop and Notebook Graphics Division product line segments; but they are aggregated under Consumer Products umbrella. You are already starting from the wrong angle assessing the value of a product line based on revenue, ignoring profit margins for starters, ignoring actual net cash flows, etc. which is not how you would value the Professional Graphics unit to begin with.

We are seeing random hot deals on various AMD models that have been out for a while in the channel, that launched at much higher pricing.

What they launched at 6-7 months ago is irrelevant to today's discussion of price/performance, which is the whole point. My comment that AMD is leading in price/performance currently is without using special sales. HD7850 is going for $200-210, HD7870 for $230-240, and 7950 is going for $300-320 on Newegg.com. These are regular prices. Against these prices, 660Ti is very much overpriced vs. the 7870 and 670 is overpriced vs. the 7950. That's not some special pricing.

Let's take a look. You can go out right now and buy an HD7870 without any special sale on newegg for $240. That means the 660Ti costs 20-25% more and offers just 9% more performance. That's worse price/performance which is what I stated.

Similarly, HD7950 can be purchased for $318 without even trying. A similar 670 is $400, or 25% more expensive once again. Worse price/performance at stock speeds and 25% more expensive with no performance advantage OC vs. OC.

HD7970 GE is faster than GTX680 and costs just $430-450. Again, not using any special pricing while 680 is going for $500+. Once again worse price/performance for NV and actually worse performance too.

If we actually looked at special sales, then NV isn't even on the price/performance map right now. For example, you can now find HD7870 Asus DirectCUII for $225 all in or $200 HD7870 HIS IceQ, sold out already, or that MSI TF3 7950 for $275. But even looking at regular prices, NV needs to drop prices to offer better value. 660Ti at the same price as the 7950 is absurd.

 

[blastingcap]

Take a look at Q2 and see that it was Geforce that drove the profit. Tegra margins are slim and needs even more babysitting than Pro, which accidentally was down.
GeForce eats tons of Pro costs, but is still the most important Nvidia asset - by far. And it doesn't look like this will change any time soon.

That is correct, but not in a way you suggest.

I don't know what you are reading into my statement but I think it's pretty clear that pro graphics are far more profitable per chip than selling the same chip as GeForce, and the NV is looking strongly into HPC, Tesla, and Cloud gaming, among other things, rather than relying on just GeForce and Quadro. Yes, GeForce/Tesla/Quadro share a lot of R&D, and the GeForce segment is a great way to spread costs via volume, but the same GK104 GPU powers a ~$500 GeForce GTX680 and also the Tesla/Quadro cards that sell for multiple thousands of dollars. There should be no question that pro graphics are more profitable on a per-chip basis.

For sake of argument say you can sell a GK104 (fully functional) for $250 as a GeForce GPU or $1000 as a Tesla/Quadro GPU, which would you pick? Of COURSE you'd pick Tesla/Quadro. But you can't reserve 100% of those GK104s for pro cards or you will lose too much GeForce (consumer) market share. So you do allow a limited supply of GK104s to reach market at GeForce, enough to satisfy gamers but no more.

Gamers also get harvested parts (GTX 670 and 660 Ti) to help meet GeForce (consumer) demand, because the harvested parts do not go into pro cards (at least not for Kepler; Fermi was a different story if you consider GF100 to be harvested from the get-go). Supply of harvested chips may go up due to volume, or down due to yields; there are many factors tugging in various directions, but it can get complicated.

Far less complicated than the GK104 dance is the smaller die used in at least one version of the GTX 660. This means Nvidia won't have to walk a tightrope with pricing like they do with GK104. Yes, they are still 28nm constrained, but at least they don't have pro cards siphoning off a bunch of the dies. So expect NV to be more flexible with pricing of GTX 660, which will no doubt sell well.