Originally Posted by
zerazax
Even better reasoning: Cypress is ~330mm^2. Barts is 255mm^2 but often matches (and probably will beat, given driver optimizations and game design changes over time) Cypress, while consuming less power.
Cayman is known to be larger than Cypress - conflicting reports put it at either largest ever for AMD (larger than R600's 420mm^2) or close to largest (confirmed its larger than Cypress though, so >330mm^2). Its also going to use more power than Cypress.
So *if* nothing else, and it reached the same scaling/optimization that Barts had, a Cypress sized Cayman should be a significant improvement. Now add in the fact that Cayman has a superset of the Barts architecture (i.e., more features/changes than Barts), and is designed from the get-go as a single GPU crown kind of GPU, then AMD has a known target and should get close to a 5970, if not beat it.
One thing is certain though: Antilles will be the fastest single video card you can buy