Maybe someone can explain this to me from Charlie's article:
"This means Nvidia can't take the time to respin it. ATI will have another generation out before Nvidia can make the required full silicon (B1) respin, so there is no point in trying a respin. The die size can't be reduced much, if at all, without losing performance, so it will cost at least 2.5 times what ATI's parts cost for equivalent performance. Nvidia has to launch with what it has."
It, i.e. GF100, is faster (even Charlie admit's that) by some varying percentage, and, at max. 80 percent larger (600 vs 334 sqmm), yet it's supposed to cost 2.5 times as much? I fail to graps the math here…
But then, it must be really hard for Charlie to admit that even an unmanufacturable salvage part with way missed clock targets and disable units is beating the HD 5870 perf wise. So he calls it slow. I wonder what that does to the performance of an HD 5870 in his view? More than slow? Me, I'm quite happy with the perf of my 5870 and didn't even see a need yet to try and overclock it.
I also wonder, what he was expecting the voltages to be in Nvidias planning. According to HT4U.net, they're quite low especially under load:
http://ht4u.net/reviews/2010/nvidia_geforce_gtx_480/index10.php
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 GPU 50 / 100 MHz 1,004 Volt 700 / 1401 MHz 1,011 Volt
RAM (GDDR5) 67,5 MHz 1,584 Volt 924 MHz 1,583 Volt