How much more does it really cost Nvidia?

[Snapzz3]

I know there's no definitive answer for this but how much more does it theoretically really cost Nvidia to make a 980 or 980ti over a 970? Would/does it really cost $200-400 ish more to manufacture those two over a 970? I'm just curious.

[Minsekt]

like 50,- propably even less. but its the research youre paying for not the material itself.

[DaltonM]

Yeah the R&D on electronics, along with the marketing, make up the majority of the cost of the product. 

[TidaLWaveZ]

There's just so much to account for. Like @Minsekt and @DaltonM mentioned, they have to fund research and development.  They also have to fund marketing, testing, programming and everything else ever.  But to be cut and dry, it literally does not cost them that much extra to make the higher performance variants.  If it did they would be driving themselves into the ground financially.

[Glenwing]

22 minutes ago, Snapzz3 said:

I know there's no definitive answer for this but how much more does it theoretically really cost Nvidia to make a 980 or 980ti over a 970? Would/does it really cost $200-400 ish more to manufacture those two over a 970? I'm just curious.

The manufacturing cost is only a small portion of the price, the majority of it goes to R&D, as the designs for the GPU don't just appear naturally, they're the result of huge teams of engineers working for years with a high salary; that money has to come from somewhere, so the cost of the GPU isn't just about manufacturing cost.

 

Since GPUs are made in batches from silicon wafers it's a bit difficult to put a price on exactly how much each one costs. But the lower end GPUs like GM204 are in fact much less expensive than GM210, because GM204 has a smaller die size and therefore a larger number of GPUs can be made from each wafer.

 

GM210 (Titan X, 980 Ti) has an area of 601mm² while GM204 (GTX 980, 970) has a area of 398mm². This means in the area of, say, 100 GM210 chips, you could fit ~151 GM204 chips, so with a given number of silicon wafers you can produce 50% more GM204 chips, and that's not accounting for the fact that since wafers are circular, the larger the GPU die size the more area is wasted at the edges of the wafer, so it may be slightly higher for GM204, maybe 55% more, it's hard to say. So given a mass quantity of GM204 chips, you would need 50-55% more wafers to produce the same number of GM210 chips, so we can say GM210 (980 Ti, Titan X) costs 50-55% more to manufacture than GM204 (980, 970). What the actual costs are though it's hard to know. Since NVIDIA contracts out the manufacturing process to TSMC, you have to consider additional money since TSMC has to have profit margins on top of that so... It's whatever price NVIDIA and TSMC have agreed upon. No way to know what that is.

[Enderman]

no, it costs probably $20-100 for the materials and manufacturing costs

then another $200+ for all the R&D