AMD 2400 & 2600

[W1nTry]

Well... this is certainly good news:

ATI 2400 and 2600 deliberately priced low

Aiming for big OEM wins

By Charlie Demerjian: Thursday 28 June 2007, 09:51
ATI PULLED A pricing move that we weren't expecting, and that will have some very serious consequences in the market.

Luckily, all of them are good, both for OEMs and users like you. The 2400 and 2600s are going to be dirt cheap.

The performance of the 2900 did not set the world on fire, nor did it claim any outright crowns, but it did match up nicely on price performance with the 8800GTS. This is not what we would consider high praise, especially in light of the 215W power consumption.

The big problem with the 2900 was it is made on an 80 nanometre process, it's younger 2400/2600 siblings are based on a 65 nanometre process. In theory, they should be about 50 per cent smaller transistor for transistor, and consume less power.

The 2900 has about 700M transistors vs 390 for the 2600 while both run at about the same core frequency and memory speed. The 2600 has about half the RAM. With half of everything, you would expect the 2600 to pull about 110W, right?

No, it pulls 45W, about a fifth of the 2900's draw. Going from the 80HS process to the 65G+ seems to be quite the winning trick. The 2400 has about 180M transistors, slightly lower clocks and memory, and pulls about 25W.

Keep these power numbers in mind for later, they have a lot of relevance. In addition to being less than half the power of their leakier big brother, they hit a few magic numbers.

HD2K series pricing

That brings us to the pricing. If you remember, ATI said they would price the 2400 at less than $99, the 2600s from $99 to $199 and the 2900 at $399. A check on Newegg shows the 2900s are in at or below that price point, undercutting the stated opposition by a bit. So, for the early available models, all is well.

The problem is that ATI was fibbing in the above slide, the prices for the 2400 and 2600 are way below that point. The high end HD2600XT is going to be in the $119-149 range, a huge discount, and the HD2600Pro is in the $89-99 range. A high end HD2400XT will run you $75-85, while the lower end HD2400Pro will only cost a meager $50-55.

These basically bracket the equivalent Nvidia products while offering equivalent or higher performance. Basically, they kill Nvidia on price/performance. This in itself is good news, but potentially more important are those wattage figures.

If you look closely at those wattage numbers the 2600 is 45W, well under the 75W cap that can be supplied by a single PCIe 16x slot. This means the board can get away without a 6-pin PCIe connector. The equivalent Nvidia cards, the 8600 line, all need a 6-pin connector.

On the lower end cards, the 2400Pro, as pictured above, can be passively cooled. It may not need a 6-pin, nor does the NV 8500(1). The 8500 does however require a fan.

Why does this matter? To you, and the end user, it really doesn't. To OEMs like Dell, it matters a lot, and it sells cards by the millions. To a Dell, pennies matter, and dollars matter more. Whatever it can save in materials costs and labour gets magnified in the end user pricing.

In the 2600 vs 8600 fight, the 8600 requires a more expensive power supply and an extra step in manufacturing. A dollar or three here and there, in addition to the higher cost of the 8600 means that Dell can offer a cheaper and higher performance system with ATI.

On the 2400 side, passive cooling is a plus, cheaper and quieter cards. OEMs can spec a slightly smaller PSU but not by much. Fan vs no fan is the big winner here, especially if you don't have to jump through hoops to engineer a copper habitrail on a card to make it passive.

Toss in the extra hardware that you do not need when making an ATI 2x00 board, HDMI chips, evil HDCP DRM infection hardware, VC-1 support, and sound hardware, and you have a clean kill for OEMs. You can make an ATI system for notably less than an Nvidia one.

From what we are hearing, on the low and mid ranges, ATI is cleaning up on the OEM side. It may be late to the game by a quarter or so, but ATI seems rather serious about making up for it. The critical back to school season hasn't started yet, so this round of sales has yet to begin for real.

The low end of the ATI line is in great shape. The mid range, 2600s, is where the money is for GPU vendors and the low end, 2400s, is where the volume is. ATI looks to have winners in both categories if you are an OEM or an end user. µ

Mid Range and Low end for the Win!

[Arcmanov]

Wow.  Quite interesting.  A VERY wicked strategy here. Can't compete with performance, so kill with lower prices.
They've tried this with their CPUs and failed (well kinda), because the parts themselves were weaker than the equivalent competition.

In this instance, its the other way around (well, kinda).  Better performing equivalent parts for much less.
Then there's the power envelope thing.

Have ATi executed the proverbial 'master stroke'?
Only time will tell.