14 DAY TRIAL // Even though ATI didn't even have a whole year to sell its DirectX 11-capable graphics products, it seems that chances are rather high for total sales to amount to one whole million by the end of 2009. This is quite noteworthy considering the rather large prices of said chips and products based on it. The cheapest card costs $140 (ATI Radeon HD 5750) and the most expensive, namely the ATI Radeon HD 5970, amounts to $600.
ATI (business unit of Advanced Micro Devices) sold a total of about 500 thousand ATI Radeon HD 5700-series “Juniper” graphics processing units (GPUs) and 300 thousand Cypress GPUs, those used in the graphics adapter series ATI Radeon HD 5800 and HD 5900. Obviously, the main factor behind this large amount of sales is the fact that the company's rival, NVIDIA, doesn't, currently, have any DirectX 11-capable GPUs available on the market. Coupled with the holiday season, and the fact that NVIDIA still won't be releasing a DirectX 11-capable card before the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, ATI might actually reach one million total sales by the end of the year.
Such a high amount of sales would further improve AMD's financial situation, which already greatly benefited from the $1.25 billion received from Intel. The only factors that may still affect the number of sales are the general consumer interest, which has been high so far even despite the economical crisis, and the actual availability of cards. The latter factor may end up as the more relevant, considering that both ATI ad NVIDIA have been having trouble meeting demand since their inventories were not exactly at the desired levels because of continued manufacturing issues at TSMC.
What remains to be seen is if the continued issues with the 40nm manufacturing process will be resolved in time for the main episode of the holiday shopping sprees (which have already started). Even if AMD does its best to deliver shipments on time, TSMC's performance will still, likely, be the deciding factor.
Nevertheless, AMD seems to have, at least in part, alleviated the product-shortage issues. Only time will tell if the desired one million sales will be reached.