Originally Posted by
tajoh111
Tweaks at this points are just that, tweaks. They hardly lead to big jumps because its not a new architecture. Adding more shaders is typically less efficient at this point because theirs a bottle neck in the architecture somewhere. The small difference between a 7970 and 7950 at equal clocks show this. Higher clocks and more cores = higher power consumption. Increasing utilization of existing shaders is going to increase power consumption further like what happened to the 6970 vs 5870.
30% is no small task at the same node, with no new architecture and GCN being kind of a energy pig as it is. Adding 25 percent more shaders an increasing clocks another 200mhz is going increase power significantly. I think adding any more shaders will require AMD to add more ROPS which will increase the size of the chip significantly.
Its no coincidence that Nvidia clocked their gk110 line lower. Making a bigger chip causes significantly more power consumption, more so than performance often because of leakage. It just happens that Nvidia's boost technology helps salvage a big more performance while it also seems Nvidia is less reliant on clocks this gen.
AMD brought 40 percent more performance initially over the 7970(not counting driver boosts). They had a new architecture and a new node. Although more came with drivers. GCN 2 is likely to be similar to gcn 1 and thus driver boosts won't be that much.
Getting the next 9970 to perform 30 percent faster while generally conditions are against it(gcn being big as it is and consuming as much as it is, no new node and no new architechture) make it something difficult to pull off, unless they want to make a 450mm2 plus chip.
If the 7970 was around 300mm and didn't consume so much power when overclocked, I could see AMD doing this. But the 7970 is 365mm and drinks power like a glutten at 1200mhz.