Quote Originally Posted by ElSel10 View Post
Not at all. RV870 is far more closely related to the RV770 (and hence R600) than Fermi is to GT200 (G80).



The only similarities Fermi shares with R600 is that it is hot, power hungry and ~6 months late. The fatal blow to the R600 was that when compared to the competition (G80), it was woefully underpowered and slow, and in fact, the X1900 cards actually outperformed it in certain circumstances when AA was enabled.

That is not the case for Fermi. Yes it's hot, power hungry and late, but it at least maintains the title of fastest single GPU, a big differentiation from R600. Further, AMD was and still is far closer to bankruptcy than Nvidia.
2900XT was slower than G80 but was priced very good, about 8800GTS 640mb I believe, and was a good alternative to it in a number of ways.

GTX 480 might be the "fastest single GPU", but it's by no means the fastest card. It's just a (good) alternative to the 2nd fastest card, like 2900XT was.

There'll definitely be a dual GPU version but how, without a die shrink, I can't understand. It looks like even a B1 revision (which won't happen, according to some people) and increased yields won't allow a <300w dual Fermi. Maybe they'll scratch the 300w limit. Heck, it looks like they've gone over it with the 480 sp single GPU version!

R600 sucked but the architecture proved to be upwards scalable. It appears that Fermi design is downwards scalable (=GF104 and 108 coming), so by logic it should also be upwards scalable And that should make some great chips after node shrinks.