Anandtech is reporting that due to yield issues with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TMSC) 40nm process, prices are headed up for the ATI Radeon 5870 and 5850. Wafer yields have apparently fallen from 60% to 40%. Simply put, ATI is passing on their increased manufacturing costs to consumers. While the MSRP for the 5870 is $379, Newegg is showing all of the 5870 cards as out of stock and with a price of $399.
This shortage was first revealed in a story by Digitimes on October 30th. Because of this, several vendors are delaying their mass shipments of systems with the ATI Radeon 5870 and 5850 to the first quarter of 2010. Additionally, the mobile version of the 5000 series, which will be used in notebooks, will be delayed to the first quarter of 2010.
Both NVIDIA and AMD manufacture their GPUs at TSMC. Therefore this impacts both graphics card makers. However, AMD is currently selling their latest graphics cards, the 5870 and the 5850. NVIDIA has yet to release their latest graphics card, which is codenamed Fermi. NVIDIA will be releasing Fermi in the first quarter of 2010.
While ATI was first out of the gate with their latest graphics cards, and has an advantage over NVIDIA, the delay works to NVIDIA’s favor since the shortage is forecast to exist until Fermi comes to market.
