Here I was thinking we wouldn't see much toward this time of the year on the GPU landscape, but AMD are already close enough to the launch of their Radeon HD 8800 series with sources now leaking out some information on silicon that is codenamed "Oland".
Oland is built on the same 28nm process, throwing in 3.4 billion transistors onto a die-area of around 270 mm². If the news is solid, we're looking at the Radeon HD 8870 "Oland XT" outperforming its predecessor, the HD 7870 in both performance per watt, and cost-performance ratios.
If the chart is right, the HD 8870 could begin offering performance close to that of today's high-end offerings, which would really shake up the market. The HD 8870 clocks in at 1050MHz, with 1100MHz PowerTune Boost frequency, with its little brother the HD 8850 clocked at 925MHz with 975MHz boost frequency. Both SKUs have memory clocking in at 6GHz, providing an insane 192GB/s of memory bandwidth - even at a proposed $199 price for the HD 8850.
If the chart is correct, we're looking at some serious delicious GPUs to be offered up soon from AMD.