They are predicting that the initial variant will be 1GB and yhe a year later it will quadruple to 4GBs? I am looking for a new GPU but it seems like whatever I get will automatically be obsolete. And I was pretty dead set on the GTX 970. Sigh...

Ok, after reading it a couple of times (or more) I've realized that you were tyalking about why going with a watercooled solution for the 20nm cards. Talking about memory power and GPU power has confused me a little. It's a slow morning.

I agree that the smaller a chip is, the hotter it will get even if it uses a few less W, but is it really necessary to use WC? Sure, Intel had problems when moving past 20nm with its CPUs, but that was in part because they decided to use TIM between the chip and the heatspreader instead of welding it like they did until then. If AMD and Nvidia don't make this mistake, a good air cooler would be enough to cope with the extra heat density as long as all heatpipes make contact with it.

Don't AMD produce the GPUs for the PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Wii, and Wii U?

Surely they must be making some moola out of all that.

Nice...on the other hand not sure if it really matters, by the time they launch everyone and their mother will own 970 or 980.

AMD making all the right moves, definitely going to look into getting a 580x or 580x.

AMD is making ALL the right moves ? Umm, I'm an AMD customer too but that couldn't be much farther from the reality ...

In case you didn't know AMD just made a loss in the last two consecutive quarters and the outlook for the rest of the year is bleak. AMD is finished for the most part. Sub $5 shares, worth less than 3 billion dollars, has no semiconductor foundries, another year of losses, poor management, engineering teams in disarray, selling their products at a loss, along with countless of other afflictions will keep AMD crippled forever. After all that ordeal, I can't bear seeing AMD to keep suffering like this so the only reasonable thing for them to do left is for them to leave the microprocessor business. 

To be fair, AMD was never a semiconductor developer, they are designers of the hardware. Very few companies outside of perhaps Samsung and Qualcomm have access to emiconductor manufacturing in-house.

And yes, they made losses, but in terms of the end product, they have been superior in terms of power to performance. Nvidea has overpriced cardcomparitively, and that's why I buy AMD.

AMD actually was a semiconductor foundry until they were forced to spin-off that last fab to GF ... Sure they are microprocessor designers at heart but they did have a history of doing in-house chip manufacturing and Qualcomm doesn't have any fabs that do chip manufacturing that I'm aware of. The only big players in the semiconductor foundry business are Intel, Samsung, and TSMC with IBM dropping out the race recently. 

Power to performance ? Do you mean performance/watt ? If it is that isn't true at all since the nvidia Maxwell annhilates all of AMD's GCN current line up. If you mean performance/price you don't have much of an argument since the GTX 970 is an extremely good value for competing against comparable AMD counterpats. Nvidia's developer and driver support are also much better than AMD too so that's a big bonus right there.

As for AMD CPU's, their a bunch of sore losers on that front. 

I'm speaking of GPUs, not CPUs. Intel has AMD beat soundly in the CPU department.

I meant price to performance (what I get for posting after just 4 hours of sleep >_>), and in general AMD's high end cards are much cheaper than Nvidea while offering similar perfmoance benefits.

And yes, Qualcomm does't manufacture chips in house, don't know why I mentioned them (once again, I'm completely out of it right now), but it doesn't change the fact that very few companies can afford to run such plants.

CPU's do matter for AMD since their selling it at a loss ... 

It's true that AMD's high end part have been cheaper to produce but that's only because they designed their GPU's to be more performance/die area oriented to be able to achieve that target but now with AMD ever since they dropped VLIW it's become really hard to do that since they have to be more competitive on the feature set front against Nvidia.