[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]now correct me if im wrong, and i may as well be. but chips, as in the cpu, gpu, anything that takes massive r&d costs, cost almost noting to make, in the big picture.intel so long as they have the fastest processor with little to no competition, prices there products, that may cost in total materials and man hours, maybe 50$ at most, and sells them for 1000$ each to recup the plants cost to manufacture, and the r&d. and if any of the rummors during the femri are to be believed, they had ALLOT to recupe and they need to do it somewhere, with amd pricing lower than they do for close to if not better preforming cards (in the price range) desktop isn't making them there money back fast. so why not gaming laptop where you have less of a choice what goes in. thats just my opinion though[/citation]
The production cost is usually small compared to the engineering cost, but in the case of the GF100 it's not so clear. The GF100 GPU is fairly large, wafers are fairly expensive, and I don't think Nvidia's yields are all that high on GF100 parts. They could probably make a more powerful mobile GPU at lower cost using the GF104.
I'm going to take a wild guess that the 480M costs around $100 more to make than the Mobility 5870, since it has both a more-expensive GPU and higher memory density. It also performs better. The problem is, it doesn't perform 100% better yet is priced over 100% higher, a fact that should make it hard to sell once people read reviews like this one.