Quote Originally Posted by Calmatory View Post
What needs explanation? Nvidia being surprised of RV770's 800 SPs? No way. People working on the field for over 15 years for sure know about pads and the limitations they yield for small chips. So no, they were aware that 480 SPs core would be padlimited if using 256-bit bus, they had to expect more.
Uh, first of all, maybe instead of throwing out terms such as pad limited, you should realize that 480 would not have been for the RV770. Seeing as how they were on the same 55nm as RV670 which also had a 256-bit memory but *gasp* 320 SP's.... how in the world would 480SP's be pad limited?

They did overprice their GPUs to milk. The only thing which probably surprised was AMD's aggressive pricing. Not the RV770 chip itself. I remind, they have people working there who have been designing the GPU architectures for some 15 years, if not more. I refuse to believe that random chaps on forums could come up with better guesses/explanations than those people with their expertise.
The 'experts' built the Titanic as well. Just because they are experts at GPU design doesn't mean that they
a) Know exactly what their opposition is going to do
or
b) Know how that opposition will perform

If that were true, then R300 vs. NV30 never would have been a surprise