air_ii That's true (about BD), but if you constantly say something is going to be crap from a certain IHV, you're boud to be right sometimes ;). I'm not saying he's right or wrong, only that he's not a reliable source.

I only know him for his very early BD reports. At the time they seemd horrible and people said he was just a troll so I didn't believe them. Then the architecture was completely revealed with all details, I made my calculations, they seemed to support the idea that BD was not as good as it was first being reported. According to my calcs (10-20% faster than 2600k) it wouldn't be as bad as he was saying, but the huge difference between the hype and his numbers started to shrink. According to the specs and how resources were arranged and shared, the efficiency of each resource and IPC needed to increase by a lot in order to increase performance over previous gen. It didn't so in the end he was fully right.The pattern is similar this time, so I'm afraid that it could actually be true. This time is the reverse tho, I've known the architecture for a long time, but without knowing the specs I could not make any assuption regarding final performance, then the specs came in, then his performance numbers, but the effect is the same.With 2048 SPs you really need them SPs to be a lot faster/efficient than they were if you want the card to be significantly faster. It is fairly posible to have much faster SPs, but like with BD we again depend on a net "IPC" increase in order to get a significant performance gain. Since I don't want to believe in fairies again, I'm counting on SPs being fairly equal hence with 30% more SPs and 30% more TMUs and similar clocks, 30% performance increase is kinda the maximum I would expect. According to OBR numbers, net "IPC" or perf-per-shader might actually be slightly down and wihle it was not something I would have expected, it's not really something completely imposible.