a new version of the parhelia

[efty]

The cost of manufacturing is the card is no where close to the 399 they are asking.

What drives the card price so high is the 3 years they have spend developing it. Imagine only 10 engineers working juts to make the chip. Average salary 70k for 3 years. That would make a total of 2.1 million. Add to that software development, marketing and support this will drive the cost to the roof. Matrox will be happy if it sells 10k units and stay in black with this POS.

[GT98]

I'm gonna SWAG at it and guess that it costs them at least $100 bucks a pop per Parhelia just for Materials. Thats not including the R&D and what not that went into making it.

In another hobby of mine...plastic models, once they reach the store shelf and have all their mark ups on them your looking at going from $3-8 bucks to make them and wind up paying nearly $40 bucks after everyone takes their cut out of it. Not sure how well this translates into Electronic goods, but I'm assuming that longer something is in production and the process is more perfected the cheaper it becomes or they are just charging too much i.e. Intel CPUs that come out at $400 bucks and are less then half that price 6 months later

[Kurt]

MSRP: 399$

-15% retailer margin
-15% distributor margin (could be 5-10%)
-30% Matrox margin (could be 20-40%)

that makes about 230$. how much for material, packaging, marketing, etc, dunno.

[Kurt]

Originally posted by GT98
I'm gonna SWAG at it and guess that it costs them at least $100 bucks a pop per Parhelia just for Materials. Thats not including the R&D and what not that went into making it.

In another hobby of mine...plastic models, once they reach the store shelf and have all their mark ups on them your looking at going from $3-8 bucks to make them and wind up paying nearly $40 bucks after everyone takes their cut out of it. Not sure how well this translates into Electronic goods, but I'm assuming that longer something is in production and the process is more perfected the cheaper it becomes or they are just charging too much i.e. Intel CPUs that come out at $400 bucks and are less then half that price 6 months later

then again Intel sells millions of them and has a *net* profit margin of about 35-50%... Matrox probably has 30% *gross* profit margin (looking at what the others make).

[JaG]

Hard times!

I agree that actually there is no big profit or price flexibility possible for Matrox when no features are reduced. If there where one they would have, pulled down the price, at least after release of Radeon 9700Pro.

Besides all your cost arguments for developement, board design & production, there are the contracts with UMC for the Parhelia core. I'm sure that they agreed to buy a certain amount of manufactured cores or perhaps complete boards from them.

And UMC is similar how good Parhelia would sell. They are one of only a few firms with two fabs producing high integraded chips at 0.13 to 0.15 µ. So there are other 'options' for them. And they'll get their profit from Matrox.

If the issues like the bandings, are design defects, not production faults, this wouldn't have to care UMC either.

Well and there we are. Matrox sit's on a hill of ready manufactured (buggy) Parhelia cores or perhaps already manufactured boards... which are not too successful at all.

Perhaps one reason for selling the new 256MB Parhelias only with 200/250 Mhz clocks and the current AGP 4x revision is that these chips where originally build for OEMs who didn't bought it.

Well, but Matrox paid for this silicon. I am sure a 80 Mio. transistor chip which is as complex as Parhelia in such a number of pieces and packages (flip chip ball grid array) costs Matrox about $80 - 100 each.

It's realy problematic much more problematic I thought, in July, when I first heard the news of the upcoming cascade of R250, R300 & NV30. In that moment I thought, Matrox would have been already present all over the market when the competition appears... but it developed in an other way. So ATi makes the big profit at least until christmas and in high end areas. And the magazins elect nvidia further and further for the cards with the best power/price quotient... These are really hard times for Matrox that's a fact.

[knirfie]

production costs of a board? chip would be around 45 dollars (guess) dont know about ram prices, the whole thing including packaging, driver disc, cables would probably be around 100 dollars (production only), then there's development costs, R&D, staff, electricity, taping, hardware (computers and stuff), which will add a lot of million dollars, which is divided over the amount of cards they were hoping to sell. probably a total of $200, add profit margin +/- 30-35% is $260, add export, shipping costs, add import costs, add taxes, add importer profit + 25%=$325, add profit margin reseller, stock costs +20%=$390, add taxes (here 19%)=$460, voila, cheapest one here in the netherlands is €450 retail, if i remember correctly

[JaG]

I think $ 80 - 100 per chip more realistic, knirfie.

30 - 50 $ could be if Matrox would own a fab, if the amount of chips would be much higher and if the core would be possible to produce in a standard bga, like nvidias Geforce 4 series. But at least because of the 256 bit memory bus, the relative big die (mass connects) and the possibility of two TMDS, you need more interconnects, more balls... . Additionally it's difficult that all this was new with Parhelia.

Well and producing at UMC has the additional trouble that these guys may live nice although these bad times. Because they're one of a few. So offer & demand makes the price...

[bag_it]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by William
[B]

Let's see, last time we had some boards (4 layer, no components on them) made (5) we paid about £600 for the lot. I'm guessing that if we'd had 5 boards of Parhelia complexity done, it'd have cost about £1000 for a similar number. That's 200 quid before we start talking about anything that gets soldered on (of course, if we'd wanted 10 boards, we wouldn't have paid much more than maybe £700 -ballpark; we wanted 5).

The Parhelia is an 8 layer, blind/buried via, with something odd as the core (ceramic I think), for a 5 off you are talking about £300 each (including BBT, which would be a small fortune to do correctly). The only people I could trust with a board like that would be Express Circuits.

BTW, the PCB is a piece of art. I took delivery of mine at work and just stared at it for 15 minutes, my work mates thought I was mad... I then picked up a recent 4 layer PCB I designed and layed out and realised I was dealing with toy like boards at work!.

Matrox is God as far as PCBs are concerned, ATI and nVidia pale in comparison.

Robert.

P.S. I've just come back from a LAN party, I was the only one there with a Parhelia, I had one crash all weekend (I did something really stupid), the rest had ATI (5 off), 4 of them were crashing regularly. Kudos Matrox for stable drivers!