On September 23rd, hot on the release of
Radeon HD 5800 GPUs, I wrote:
The previous Radeon HD 4000 cards hit the sweetspots just right, both in price, chip cost and performance. While the 3870 from previous generations was an underpowered card, the 2.5x increase in shaders provided enough power to compete with Nvidia and the GT200 based cards. The RV740 was even better, just building itself upon that success of die size and compute to bandwidth ratio, which was more balanced in the HD 4850 than on the 4870.
Today, these new cards are at least as expensive to build as the old G92a, probably more if TSMC's 40nm process is still a problem, due to the clear shader power overshoot that happenned with "Evergreen" chips.
