New rumor about ATI Southern Islands

[tajoh111]

A "regular person" probably buys a 7600gt from maplins for £80 and does no research.
Normal people walk into shops and buy what they are told is best.

The only people interested in the naming shift is flamebaters and pedants.
The regular computer users with no strange emotional attachment will see the 6970 being the replacement to the 5870 and get over it.

Every main product line in the 5 series will have a considerably faster replacement.

Whilst nvidia's renames were inline upgrades, this isn't. It's a shift.

Old 5970 ---Replaced by New/Faster--> 6990
Old 5870 ---Replaced by New/Faster--> 6970
Old 5850 ---Replaced by New/Faster--> 6950
Old 5770 ---Replaced by New/Faster--> 6870
Old 5750 ---Replaced by New/Faster--> 6850

All have faster parts succeding them, different names and elevated prices but ALL faster.

The 8800gt -> 9800gt brought no faster part for the midrange to succeed it.
What you saw was what you got, the same card in the same category as the previous gen.

There was no naming shift to lower the actual real world performance position of the 800 card. ATI do have an actual replacement.

Names change to alter perceived positions of performance, part upgrades are sequential and bring full performance upgrades across the board.

Thank you for saying Cayman will be slower than the 5870, someone is bound to dig that up in the future.

Man, I can't believe your trying to put a positive spin on this renaming. NV gave an excuse which turned out to be somewhat true in the end for its renaming scheme, the board partners wanted it which I suspect is true, because if smaller companies like bfg have nothing to sell, they will go belly up, which sucks. It nonetheless the renaming still did suck.

Room for fusion products is a lame excuse because their current naming gives so much room for products, far more than NV, E.g 6x90, 6x30, 6x80, ,6x00, 64xx,65xx or even 6xx5. They have 4 digits to work with, that's plenty. Their are almost too many cards as it is. If they really wanted, they should have named, if they really wanted Bart XT as 6790, which would have been better.

They should have kept the 69xx series exclusive to their dual cards. This has nothing to do with fusion as their naming scheme is flexible enough that it can fit pretty much everything they could ever want and everything to do with pricing. AMD just wants fatter margins.

Whatever jowy, if your relating this renaming scheme to naming, your small minded. The bigger concern is it relates to pricing which is I think is everyone's concern, the 5870 was already 400 dollars with certain versions being 500. If they are going to start charging 500+ dollars for cayman, which is a chip under 400mm, that really sucks, which I can see them doing as the price of the 5970 was 700 or 600(I never have seen this price until recently). And I can see the new dual chips coming at 800+ street price.