TOAO_Cyrus
Member
The Nvidia Geforce GTX 465 released in 2010 with a die size of 529mm² for $279 (unmatured 40nm node). A Geforce Titan is only slightly bigger with 551mm² (matured 28nm node). ^_^
Thats because it was a salvage part. It was a GTX 480 with only 11 out of 15 SM's enabled. If nVidia didn't sell it at a lower price point they would have just been thrown out. The 480 was 499$ which was lower than nVidia would have liked because nVidia was facing price pressure from the AMD 5xxx series which was already mature and had a much smaller die. Titan is an anomaly and only produced in small quantities.
You are basing your perception of GPU prices on when AMD's small die strategy was in effect. The 4xxx series and 5xxx series where designed with performance per mm2 as a major focus and for two generations AMD was able to compete with nVidia with significantly smaller GPU's. Since then nVidia has erroded that advantage and AMD. Other then those two generations from AMD, new top of the line GPU's have been 500-600 dollars since 2004 at least.