Quote Originally Posted by Mad Pistol View Post
Barts seems to be the best bits from 58xx and 57xx range of cards with extra tessellation performance and a couple extra features. The result is a 6870 that falls squarely between the 5850 and 5870 performance wise on a smaller chip, which results in lower production costs. If AMD has been able to refine the architecture this much over the previous generation, Cayman is going to be powerful, and Antilles is going to be a monster. AMD shouldn't have to break the 300watt standard to hit their target performance range.
I think that most of the die-size reduction was cutting off shaders, and cutting off double-precision FP support. Nothing like the HD3xxx --> HD4xxx transition. That is also why they are not refreshing HD57xx: they have already done those tricks in it, so they could get half of the performance of HD58xx in only half of the die size.