I think one thing that makes this part slightly suspect for a release and performance is that 32nm was canceled last November and considering NI/SI was built around this, AMD would only have months to do a redesign to modify it to work on 40nm again, if they wanted to get things released this october. This in the grand scheme of things is not that long a time considering the planning process is years. I don't think they would have enough time to make huge changes, atleast to get 30-40% percent more performance unless this chip is 400 MM2 +. And I cannot see performance going up while not seeing an huge jump in power consumption on tsmc current process because at this point, I think with the timeframe AMD had to work with, SI has to be more cypress than NI.
One more thing is AMD has got to add something to increase geometry performance and thus tesselation performance. This is not going to come free from changing 5d shaders to 4 d shaders. One of this bigger priority of AMD at this point has to be delivering higher directx 11 support and I don't see how AMD is going to do this simply by changing the shaders to 4d instead of 5d.
They are are going to have to add something and this is going to increase the size of the chip substantially.
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