GPUs are not made in 2 days. Work on the GF104 started probably around the time that GF100 was taped out. It's always like that in Nvidia's strategy. Ever since G80 the strategy is always the same, make a GPGPU chip that is good for both consumer GPU market and HPC market, then start work on a refresh that is mostly good as a GPU. For HPC you need wider memory buses and other things that make the chip bulky.
This might look like a bad strategy, but it's not, for them. In HPC Fermi is purportedly selling like hotcakes. Not as many cards as in the consumer GPU market. But the margins in HPC ar easily 10-20x bigger. Meanwile Fermi as a GPU is not that good, but here "good enough" is the strategy: it doesn't matter if the chip is big and margins are lower than Ati cards, since the money from the GPGPU (read G80, GT200, GF100) is going to be made in the HPC and Quadro markets, 6 months later the refresh is released and they start making money on the GPU front. This strategy is better than making two different chips for the different markets, since 90% of what makes a chip a good GPUit also makes it a good stream computing HPC part.
Fermi turned out to be much worse than expected, but it's not the fault of the architecture as can be seen from the GTX460. It was the chip. GF100 could have been better, better meaning that since it's somewhat 50% bigger than GF104, power consumption should have been at most 50% bigger than GF104, that is 150 + 75 = 225w and 100w less than 320w.
Then it would have made a far better GPU and would have fullfilled the "good enough" status that G80 and GT200 did get. GT200 didn't saw a refresh, but that's another story alltogether.
As to the reviews great work Wizzard. Not 1 but 4 cards tested. This cards are really tempting since I've been waiting for a 200 € (always 200-250 from now on) that could move tesselation at playable framerates. I must resist though, the 384 SP version will probably come soon, and having 15% more shaders and probably be made of binned parts capable of higher clocks, it's going to surpass the GTX470 for sure and maybe even the HD5870. I think I should wait. Not to mention the price drops. I don't feel like I'll need a new GPU until Crysis 2 comes out anyway.
