I don't think AMD made any decree, but they have left board designs up to partners in the past. Hopefully reference models stay as robust as they've always been, but I was just hypothesizing and I certainly don't hope AMD heads in that direction. I would never waste my money on a $500 card that doesn't have overvolting capabilties unless there were no other options out there. Even then I'd probably grab the card that the guys at XtremeSystems or somewhere figured out a solder mod for and do that.
In the end any new part from either company will be competing against my 7970 @ 1.35GHz for my dollar. I wouldn't consider a card unless it was at least 25% faster at stock, so we're talking close to GTX 690 performance (which is about 33% faster than what I currently have), and then some ample overclocking room on top of that. While I'm optimistic about what both companies can put out, that's a high bar to reach without a die shrink. We'll see. :thumbsup:
IMHO it's not going to happen on 28nm. I also want a single card that outperforms my current cards in all circumstances preferably by a healthy margin, but I'm afraid that bar is set far too high for 28nm. I hope I'm wrong, I want to finally ditch multi-gpu quirks. Just look how unimpressive the refresh was on 40nm. It seems both you and I want what usually comes with a die shrink without that process shrink. Usually after die shrink flagship cards perform on par with the past dual cards or not even that. At launch 5870 couldn't quite match 4870X2. GTX295 to GTX 480 GTX was about the same performance. Then 7970 couldn't match 6990 at stock with launch drivers, but OC headroom more then made up for it. Right now 7970GHz is faster then 6990, but it took driver maturity and clock increase. GTX680 still can't match GTX590, but it always seemed to me like a clocked to the roof mid-range card, so no wonder why it can't match GTX590. So hoping for GTX690 level of performance on a single card at 28nm process is wishful thinking. I really want that to happen but if the history is of any indication it won't happen.
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