I doubt it.
After this gen we know ATi is going multi-core. I can't help but wonder if one R700 core will be something along the lines of 1/2 the spec of R600 (obviously with some differences) on 45nm, with 1, 2, or 4 cores on board depending on the marketing segment.
You get your terms backwards. core = logical thing doing one job.
chip = physical piece of silicon.
The rumour is that ATI is going (back) to graphics cores consisting of multiple chips, ie. chipsets(like voodoo1 and voodoo2).
And those chips will propably
a) not be similar chips. load-balancing and memory sharing between chips is a problem if the chips are doing symmetric work. ( reasons why crossfire and SLI usually give much less than 100% improvement, and on some games don't help at all).
Actually xenos is already a chipset consisting of 2 chips doing diffferent things, one for shaders and another for ROPS and edram.
b) Maybe come in one multi-chip package. ATI is already doing this on both xenos (two chips of the chipset) and mobility radeons( gpu and memory chips )
It would make sense on every scale to produce one GPU...
and we already know crossfire is both infinitely scalable by figure of 2
"inifinitely scalable" ? yes, you can add many chips. But your performance improvement is far from scaling linearily with number of chips.
, and that two-core crossfire can be done on one board without need for a crossfire motherboard (unlike nvidia).
??? (then what is GF7950GX2?)
but anyway these inabilities to work on competitors dual-16x-pcie boards are just marketting / product segmentation stupidity. They just want to sell both the motherboard and gfx cards so they market them together. It has nothing to do with what they technically can do with multi-chip solutions today and even less what they can do in the future.
Why not four cores per board? The size of such a core would certainly seem to make it feasible, and again we know ATi has said they will transition to 45nm is 2008...Right along the time frame of when we should expect R700.
That's where I see the future heading. Perhaps more surface area through more dies, but each core will be smaller.
Beyond the R7xx/G90 generation it's unknown. My personal belief is that we will see ray-tracing taking off within the next five or so years. When that becomes feasible through bajillion core general purpose cpus (which we know are coming) or even dedicated gfx cores on a cpu as AMD has hinted, gfx may indeed become fused into the cpu, making stand-alone cards obsolete...and then you won't have to worry about big GPU dies at all!
ROP units needs lots of bandwith to framebuffer memory. (so for high performance, the memory needs to be directly connected to the chip containing the ROPs).
And to avoid load balancing problems, there should be only one framebuffer.
This practically means that for high performance gpu, you want to have only one chip (with a wide memory bus) containing the ROP units.
Texture memory might also be a problem if you have many TMU-containing chips ( SMP or NUMA; and if NUMA, then duplicating data on all memories or accessing it slowly from other memories? ).