haha, 3.2 billion transistors, considering it will be 50% bigger than ATi's core(minimum it would seem), and ATi have crap yields that have inflated prices by a good £50-100, just imagine what price the Nvidia cards will be.
There is no way, in a million years these will be cheap. Their problem being, if 2x5850's are cheaper, offer more peformance and will be far more widely available, whats the point of a £500 Nvidia card that might be great performance(might not be that good).
The problem being, its a huge monolithic core that from many many rumours, seems to be moving further into the gpgpu market and further away from being a dedicated graphics card. More shaders and paralel processing, but very possibly a lot less specific acceleration for graphics features, meaning it loses a lot of speed in lots of area's.
We've really got to see what happens when it launches as the one thing every rumour and Nvidia themselves agree in, its a completely new architecture, its impossible to say its got X amount more transistors than the GT200 so it will have X amount more performance, they won't be remotely comparable.
As for bandwidth, its really not important, theres only so much you need to move around, bumping memory speeds on the 5870 gives almost no performance increase, while clock speeds scale almost linearly, its not even close to bandwidth limited.
They've been on 3 for a long time.
