I disagree. There are plenty of people waiting for the holidays to purchase the 69xx cards. AMD will want these cards to sell like hotcakes, thus launching them before the new year. I don't care if they delayed the launch until then, but people will rage if there is a delay on a card promised to launch in late November/early December. A society built toward instant gratification will do that to business.
Yeah, I hear ya on that one.
To me, gpus are but one part of a videocard. There's the pcb, the VRMs and other surface-mount parts, the display output, and the memory.
Alot of my thoughts on Cayman are a direct response to the memory. I'm not sure if I posted in this thread or was talking on teamspeak, but I expect 2GB/gpu with Cayman, and for the same basic reasons that the Eyefinity6 cards have 2GB.
Plain and simple, 1GB isn't enough for Eyefinity resolutions. There's not much more than 1GB needed, but unless AMD increases the ram bus, the only way for them to increase buffer size is to double up on the memory.
That memory, at the speed needed, just went into production at the end of September, and I do not have real info on yeilds, but I haven't heard good things, either.
AMD almost always under-specs the speed of thier gpu ram, but at the same time, they often also tighten up latencies as well.
Anyway, 2GB of ram adds cost. That added cost HAS to translate into some sort of performance increase, and they can only do that in so many ways, due to process/cooling limits. As far as I am concerned, everyone should know what Cayman is by now.
