Of course, but AMD felt the need to respond, because the GK104 based 680 was more than enough to compete, I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall here.
First of all, the bump in clocks was more to conform with the whole "ghz race". Similar to cpu's in the past it was a race and nvidia decided to knock the clocks. The mere 75mhz was just so there was no longer a claim of nvidia being the only one with a reference 1ghz on the core clock. It also proved to be more than enough to best it in a clock to clock ratio (Since both overclock about the same).
Hmm bit of a random statement there, nothing of which changes what I said.
You did not get my point...The Tesla series of cards are not normal and do not conform with the similar laws the desktop and quaddro series follow. In most cases they do not even have the ability to output video to a monitor (Recent C Series have a DVI but not the K20's). They also are deigned in such a way that make it very hard to run in normal or even many professional environments without modification (passive coolers) or special rack mount servers. The K20X for instance has a massive passive heatsink opened up and designed to receive airflow from blower fans inside a machine.
The Primary Focus of these cards are as follows:
Large Scale calculations (Floating Point)
Cuda/OpenCL
Large Scale Image Generation
They are essentially with those series cards almost just saying "Here is a powerful GPU, have fun we will see you later". Your not getting the same type of package as with a Quaddro or Desktop card...
The Teslas are a special breed of cards designed with super computers in mind and do not need to have certain attributes designed for those in mind. They are meant for people to program things to utilize their GPU cores for calulations and have professionals spend time working on them. Nvidia can release GK 110 chips on these even if they are not ready for the mainstream because even with a poor early binning process they do not expect many sales of the cards. It is a very limited market (Even in the Oak Ridge Super Computer has 18,688 GPUs that are K20X but that is still an insignificant amount of GPU's out there) and Nvidia knows that which is why putting out a GK 110 chip early to a very niche market still meant they could work and improve the chip for the main market. I still call upon my last quote "they had enough trouble even getting the GTX 680 out which was out of stock and basically required camping your computer night and day to get one". They were not ready and even the K20X still did not have the full powered core (K40 does) because the process of creating those chips was still difficult like it was for GK 104. If they had been fully ready to release the chip, they would have done so even releasing gimped GK 110 chips (Like the 780) but they were not ready to push it out onto the market (Just like AMD was not ready with Hawaii or else they would have done the same). But they were not ready and had not perfected the binning process yet and a company likes to be prepared with the best product. They do not like having to release products that do not meet standards, they do not want to waste money and maximize profits and getting a bunch of poor quality chips that cannot run at the fullest power is a sure fire way to waste money.
Can't believe the GK110 is like 2 years old already, what a monster.
This suprises you how? Most GPU's, CPU's, or other chips all have existed out in the development for quite some time (A year or so) but does not mean its ready to be used. There are exceptions of course but most GPU's are made awhile in advance and go through rigorous testing including working on simple things like making the GPU in a cost effective way with having the least amount of failures (Or poor performing chips). Nvidia nor AMD does not just plop out a chip the month they announce it, its not like they experiment and the chips appear with a chemical reaction and they go "BY GOD WE HAVE DONE IT!!! Quick make the annoucement", its a long and tiring process that includes much testing and refining.
GM 204 is the same, its takes along time and they have been working on it for quite some time. They were well aware at a point they could not drop down a node and began working on the GM 204 using the old process and working on it. It has existed for quite some time and we will see all the work they have put into it very soon.
Again hating on GM 204 saying its a poor GPU is going to show to be foolish. GM 204 is going to beat the GK 110 by a decent margin probably at least similar to how the GTX 680 beat the GTX 580. Even though its on the tick cycle where they introduce the new architecture and save the final chip until they have improved/refined the whole process, your going to get a better performing chip. Until we have more information however, most of this is still speculation. The only thing I am sure of (Unless something really wierd happens) is that it will be the top performing single GPU chip from Nvidia once its released at the time!