It is high end for sure but at this point Nvidias 3rd best card (GTX 770) is beating AMDs highest. 

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-770-performance-unveiled-10-faster-radeon-hd-7970-ghz/

Also, the only reason why GTX 780 (~30% better than 7970) is $650 and Titan is $1000 is because AMD has nothing to compete with those two. Those cards would be $499 and $700 if AMD had competitors at that performance level. 

Price rises when there is no competition, which is the point of my thread...I hope to see AMD equilize the performance gap as its the only way we will see Nvidias price to performance ratio get better.

There indeed many GPU accelerated programs that see massive gains using AMD GPU's over nVidia's  Namely those that use OpenCL, OpenGL, Folding and encryption really stand out.

It's undeniable that Nvidia has caught AMD off-guard, but I think this is more because of AMD than because of Nvidia.

If we look at past gens (since the HD4xxx), AMD used smaller chips than Nvidia because they were focusing mostly on gaming performance while Nvidia was pushing CUDA, which meant extra transistors that made their chips bigger, expensive and more power hungry for little extra benefit in games.

But this time it looks like it was AMD who focused too much on GPGPU performance (maybe a result of their push for APUs?) while Nvidia's new architecture was more balanced.

But I agree that AMD needs to come back with something competitive.

I'd say almost definitely and they should be HEAVILY criticized for it... since they aren't so much toying with AMD as they are the consumer.

No doubt they wanted to maximize what they could make off the old tech, then swoop in with new tech at the last moment to crush AMD and stay the top dog people have to spend crazy money on again.

When you have a huge lead it makes the most sense for you to hold back your technology.

Volta won't be out until like 2016, I don't think you really have to worry about any time soon.

Intel - I was dead serious in my previous post.

Next Xeon Phi will deliver 3TFLOPS of DP peak performance, 14-16 GFLOPS/W - Maxwell will have 8-16GFLOPS/W.
I think they will eventually target streaming gaming once it switches to casting/tracing - from everything I've read I was under impression that working with Xeon Phi is way easier than with GPGPUs, and if they have similar performance I can see why they might be obvious choice.

They clearly are, there is no reason for them to push things when they already have a lead

I am sure they are focusing their work on mobile and low end stuff to get a foothold in tablets and compete with integrated graphics, so they already have the advantage in the desktop space, so spend their R&D elsewhere and wit to deploy their higher end stuff

Here is one interesting question, now that AMD is pretty much the sole player in home consoles, does anyone thing NVIDIA will go all out to release a monster upgrade to make the consoles feel obsolete?

Knights landing isn't due for release until 2015/16, Maxwell is 2014/15. Nvidia is much better positioned for a streaming path-traced gaming future thanks to Nvidia Grid and their partnership with Otoy anyway. As they are the only people I know of currently developing a real-time cload based path-tracing engine http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=29544.

Their current high end crads dwarf the consoles in terms of raw performance numbers (upper Mid range GTX 760 offers 2.2TF vs the PS4's 1.8). Maxwell will bring with it GDDR6 (fingers crossed) in higher densities and even greater GPU performance of course. They really don't need to go to any special lengths to make console hardware look obsolete, not that games will take advantage of it any time soon.

Consoles are basically using last years mid range GPUs slightly tweaked.