What will NVIDIA do?
Regardless of its attempts to deflect attention away from the issue of outright speed, NVIDIA's bound to want its crown back ASAP. We ask Byrne what he thinks it will do about it. "From a personal point of view, I believe that the competition will respond with price drops (as they repeatedly did in the last few months)," he says. "They will try to play the price-performance game but I have great belief that we will remain in a position of strength."
"I would also expect them to rush out the + versions of GTX260 and GTX280 i.e. with 55nm [process], causing more confusion on their stack. I also think Hexus described what it thinks they will do quite well ‘It'll focus on its Cuda environment and PhysX support, but those are almost incidental features - limited to a few games.'"
"They will try to play the price-performance game but I have great belief that we will remain in a position of strength"
In the next paragraph of the same article, we said "We'll have to wait for the GTX 200-series to go on a process diet, to 55nm, and then, just perhaps, we'll see a GX2 based on GeForce GTX 260." We ask Byrne if he thinks we got that one right too. "I think they will also produce an X2 variant of gt200 but boy will it be expensive," he said.
Moving back to the 4870 X2, we ask how AMD is positioning it. "4870X2 is the fastest graphics card in the market, and was built to be just that, the undisputed FPS leader. This is the second step in our three step strategy to bring to market higher performance products that offer our customers incredible value."
AMD appears to be putting a lot of effort into producing a product that hardly anyone can afford, let alone have need for, but it comes as no surprise to hear that the pursuit of the ‘halo effect' is a major factor. "Winning the performance crown creates a halo effect that helps drive demand for the entire 4000 series," says Byrne. "Having said that, please remember as we discussed previously that it is also our goal to offer price/performance winning products in each segment first."
