When ATI Technologies first unveiled its RADEON 9700 PRO based graphics cards, a lot of analysts said that the board with 256-bit memory bus and the R300 chip, made using 0.15 micron manufacturing technology, are too expensive and the Markham, Ontario-based graphics solutions developer will have very low profit margin on the product. The others added that ATI will be very hard to decrease the prices on the R300 derivatives, namely RADEON 9500, RADEON 9500 PRO and so on, due to the chip’s high complicity. Well, The Inquirer now says it is not true. The yields of the RADEON 9700 based cards and the VPU itself are, apparently, “Excellent!”

The reason why ATI offered its AIB partners to resell the original RADEON 9700 and 9500 families of graphics cards is because they wanted the products to reach the market as rapidly as possible (although, they still had to delay the RADEON 9500 because there were a lot of RADEON 8500 GPUs in stock) and allow its partners to fully test the PCBs developed by them before starting to sell the actual products. They seem to have accomplished both tasks, however, their market share might slide a bit down.

At the moment the yields of the R300 VPU can also be described as excellent, because ATI now supplies its chips both to AIB partners who manufacture the devices on their own facilities as well as builds the graphics cards on its own factories (which belong to PC Partner).

At the moment I cannot share any details on the actual costs of the parts, however, I can make a number of allusions. Keeping in mind that ATI was planning to increase its profit margin this fiscal year, they should have a basis to do so. This basis definitely is the low cost of the current product lineup. ATI and partners now sell the RADEON 9500 powered solutions with 64MB of memory for as low as $165 (see this news-story). Keeping in mind that the unit utilises the same PCB as the RADEON 9700 PRO (which costs about $320 now in the USA) and a bit lower clocked VPU, we can conclude that the new R300 family is not so expensive as it was said originally.