Yeah, that's what i'm thinking. I don't know of anyone who would be crazy enough to pair something like a 290 with an i3, that is ridiculous. And yes I know Mantle can be used on anything GCN, but AMD touted Mantle for their high end 290 cards. That was the basis of their entire 290X marketing launch campaign from what I remember, all the way back to that GPU14 event in Hawaii. And again...nobody is using that stuff with i3's, Pentiums or Celerons.
So i'm really interested in seeing if AMD marketing will try to manipulate the benchmarks that will be released (supposedly) in the next few days. Will they require benchmarks to be done only on low end hardware? I would hope not, but that would definitely muddy the waters and give users incorrect expectations if they do.
Either way, i'm personally glad that it is apparently being released soon - we can just end our speculation about Mantle (finally) and see real benchmarks. Hopefully benchmarks representative of what high end PC gamers are using and not PR twisted benchmarks, but nonetheless, a good thing. If it deserves props, like I said, I will do just that. Just glad the speculation is about to end, really.