Quote Originally Posted by kadozer View Post
I posed this question in another forum. What about AMD's sweet spot strategy. They always like to keep margins high with respect production costs. If this is true TDP would be more like 225W and smaller die than what is rumored. If that's the case they are just happy to sit within 10% of GTX 580 or just below it.
I'll quote my post at the beginning of this thread:

I posted this earlier elsewhere:

Hints about what Cayman has coming up next:

HardwareCanucks
November will see the release of the Cayman XT-based HD 6970 and Cayman Pro-based HD 6950 which have all of the features seen in Barts plus enhanced rendering scalability and off-chip buffering for DX11 applications. These will be the spiritual successors to the HD 5870 and HD 5850 and should go head to head with the higher end Fermi cards.

December will see the introduction of Antilles which is meant to be the lynchpin of AMD’s renewed assault on the DX11 market. The HD 6990 will bring untold performance to the table through the use of a pair of Cayman GPU cores and additional features we can’t divulge at this time.
[H]ardOCP:
The 6900 series will have a superset of features compared o the 6800 series. This means that there will be features and architecture differences between 6900 and 6800 series. This allows AMD to take more chances on the high-end enthusiast class GPUs and architecture things different, to really step up performance that enthusiasts demand. So, just to restate, the new 6800 series will offer performance of the 5800 series, at a lower price, with lower power, and a smaller chip.
PC Perspective
Later in the year we will see the release of future architectures that much more unique in the Cayman and Antilles product lines. We'll have to leave you with that tease for now and touch again on both of those items later.
Hexus
These arrive armed with improvements in the two metrics discussed above, soon to be followed by a genuine performance GPU in the form of the Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6970 'Cayman' parts and, a little while later, the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990, code-named Antilles. Phew!
Looks like AMD might be back to playing the high-end GPU game
This is corroborated in that Chinese/Japanese link with the chart. Basically, the sweet spot is still around, but AMD is now more willing to take chances/enter the high end GPU realm again, hence why Cayman is coming out later but with more architecture tweaks