The gtx 580 is not close to being a champion of power efficiency, so beating it should be no problem. AMD earns bragging rights if it signficantly beats its prior generation since it was actually good with power consumption. E.g barts xt uses 127 watts of power, if they increase speed by 50% and power consumption is 190 watts, they simply matched barts efficiency and have not surpassed it.
If the gtx 580 consumes 225 watts in gaming scenario's and the 6970 consumes 180 or 190 watts in gaming scenario's, which I can see happening, it's will be better efficiency than gf110 for sure but no better than barts(barts is great anyways at this as is cypress so no shame in this).
If the rated tdp of Cayman xt from AMD is 190 watts vs Cypress 188, I have a feeling AMD has become just more like Nvidia in its rating, because the memory addition alone should make it more than 2 watts greater than cypress. I think it has to increase more because increased efficiency, means less wasted shader because they are used more often, which translate into higher power consumption, which translate into higher performance. I have a feeling this is what is letting AMD increase the size of the chip only 20% but get more than 20% performance.
Basically what I am saying is there is no way AMD has increased performance over cypress 30-40%, has added 2gb of ddr3. That would have to mean Cayman xt consumes 30-40 watts less than cypress(which is incredibly efficient in this respect already) and performs 30-40% better. This chip is bigger and clocked higher. I am almost certain that this is impossible.
Zerazex, I believe 190watts could be the typical usage. This is completely in the realm of believability but I still think it will be a tiny bit higher.
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