The small size of Nv chips in these forums, if anything has been more of a negative for Nvidia this round atleast for the debates around here. I hardly see people taking about performance per mm2 and saying it is crazy fantastic. What I do see alot more arguing about is for people to complain is how NV could charge so much for a small chip and I think the same thing applies for both companies. I have to agree gk104 is priced too high and the same argument applies to AMD this round too(not as much after the pricecuts).

I think the big thing why people are lauding NV performance per mm2 if for any reason when it comes to debates is this(plus this is the gtx 780 thread)..If the mid-tier gk104 performs a bit better than a 7970, then just imagine how the doubled up gk110 going to perform? The performance per watt and mm allows for a much grander flagship for the enthusiast from NV which honestly anyone should get excited about since the performance is simply monstrous depending if they screwup or not.

As someone that can appreciate AMD efficient designs in the past, imagine if AMD announced it was going to make a near 600mm2 version of their architecture. You or anyone on this forum would be excited at the performance potential of taking an efficient architecture and scaling it up. NV has made an efficient architecture like AMD, but has the balls to scale up like it has in the past.

What has hurt AMD image this round with the reviewers and the debaters is this. If your going to raise the pricing bar, you better bring the performance to back it up, especially when your on a new manufacturing node. By making only a moderately sized hybrid gaming/GPU computing card(rather than a moderately sized gaming part or monolith GPU hybrid), you simply leave so much room on the table for the competition to make you look bad. Did AMD really think it's pricing would hold with a card that is 20% faster than a gtx 580 while costing 10% more for the next generation?

AMD should have designed a larger chip to compensate for the die area that the compute area was going to take up and clocked higher(but really 75mhz would have hardly made a difference, check the original 7970 thread for expectations of AMD performance this generation) or priced the chip more appropriately. Because of AMD pricing this generation, the gk104, got promoted to gtx 680 status and with the pricing to match and still was the much better deal out of the gate with this inflated pricing.