NVIDIA's Preemptive Strike: 8800 GT 256MB Info

It should be no surprise that AMD is on the verge of releasing a lot of new products. The company has been amazingly quiet on the CPU, GPU and chipset fronts for far too long now, something that's about to change. That being said, don't expect AMD's competition to stand idle while AMD regains lost ground. AMD is competing against two of the most fierce competitors in the PC industry: Intel and NVIDIA, on two different fronts, and you can expect responses from both.

NVIDIA's response appears to be in the form of a pre-emptive strike. The 8800 GT was the first part of that strike, and wow, what a tremendous blow it was. I haven't been this excited about a GPU in I can't remember how long. The 8800 GT completely redefined the competitive landscape, and while I know it's mostly a result of perfect timing, it's still a very good thing.

The problem with the 8800 GT is pricing, although it is supposed to be selling for $200 - $250, currently you find it more in the $250 - $300 range. Even though it still is what I'd recommend at close to $300, it'd be far more attractive at $200 and who do we blame for the current price disparity? Is it overzealous vendors pricing these things where they know they will sell? Is it NVIDIA's fault for not having enough chips in the market? AMD will tell you that NVIDIA simply can't make them at the prices they are promising, but I have a feeling that it's more a supply/demand issue. I don't think there are many 8800 GTs in the channel right now, thus resulting in the pricing that we're seeing currently.

The second part of NVIDIA's pre-emptive strike was in the form of a friendly reminder email today telling us that the 8800 GT 256MB will be available in the next two weeks, expecting the card to be pried in the $179 - $199 range. Now it's tough to say whether that is the expected street price or if we'll see the same problems that are plaguing the 8800 GT 512MB today.

The specs of the 256MB card remain unchanged from the 512MB with one exception: memory speed. While the 512MB version calls for 1.8GHz GDDR3 memory, the 8800 GT 256MB will run its memory at 1.4GHz - 1.8GHz depending on the board vendor. Obviously at equal memory speeds I'd expect the 256MB card to offer performance close to the 512MB card, but I'm not so sure about the 1.4GHz models.

I'd love to see the 8800 GT come in at ~$220 for the 512MB model and $180 for the 256MB model, and I don't doubt that we'll see cards at those levels, it's just a question of when. Before or after the holidays?

I'll close with some thoughts on power consumption and today's GPUs:

I was talking to a friend of mine today about power management on GPUs and he brought up an important point: why is it that GPUs aren't pursuing power management as aggressively as the CPU guys? Part of the problem is that the GPU, albeit a huge power hungry beast, hasn't hit the same point of diminishing returns as the CPU did during the clock speed wars a couple of years ago. That being said, this last generation of GPUs is probably going to be the last set of designs that was done without significant attention paid to power consumption. I think the 8800 GT was the turning point, whatever replaces the 8800 GTX architecturally will have been designed with performance per watt in mind much like the Core micro-architecture was.