P256 on sale

[chaoliang]

An interesting article from X-bit labs:

Matrox Parhelia 256MB for Sale. For Whom?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1038514032

[Daven]

Time for some sick and twisted humor or am I joking?

History repeats itself. New for 2002, the M3d, err I mean P256; whoops!

It's really a crayon. It's brown, smells like poo, looks like poo, but Martox is telling us it's a crayon.

Ok, umm, think fast guys. We can slow down the core, slow down the mem., add loads of software, keep mumm on all of the issues and, ah, call it a workstation product, err crayon... Yeah, that's it, a workstation product! Lets go with it!

Sorry its just too comical to resist.

[GNEP]

It actually reminds me of a business game I took part in once... basically you could set manufacturing output; investment levels; sales prices; regions etc. Because this was a game, most of us realised quickly that there was no point in trying to run a sensible, prudent, profitable but boring "company". You either came first or you didn't. My team won eventually by expanding hugely over the game rounds, and leveraging ourselves up hugely to do so.

All of the results etc were worked out using a computer and some fancy algorithms between rounds. So one team decided to do something completely different: offer one unit of the "product" for sale in each market for a sum of about 1,000,000 times the "market" price.

And then they went to the pub for 2 days .

There was a small chance that the computer would "sell" one of their units, thus putting them so far ahead of the other teams that further competition was pointless. Assuming of course some sort of normally distributed model.

I kind of get the impression that this is what Matrox is doing here - hoping for that random sucker to come along and pay over the odds for a product which has a fat margin on. Shame the world doesn't really work like that what with price elasticities and so on (...even just in theory...)

G

[Marshmallowman]

the fact it has 256Meg would make it a good card for SPECIFIC applications...I would not buy it for playing quake tho

[The AngeL]

Oh i know it. the PArhelia has already started to getting sold in Germany too, but for 739 euro. That's really very expensive.