A bit like it does not make sense to release a mid range card and pretend its a top of the range GPU, thats nvidia for you.
Well I've never bought this claim anyway.
GK104, I think, was always going to be the desktop GPU.
I think nVidia have just realised that they had to split the HPC chips from the desktop GPUs if they wanted to compete well with desktop GPUs, because these 550mm2 GPUs they were using for desktop chips were hideously expensive for them to produce.
The GK104 is nearly half the size of it. In fact, it's also nearly half the size of the GTX580's GPU, and only has about 15% more transistors, because they stripped the core logic down for a desktop only part.
They really needed to go with efficiency this time around because Fermi based GPUs were always going to be big, even on 28nm.
I was thinking about the performance claim of 85% of a GTX 690.
If they choose the games wisely it is easy to justify.
Just pick games that don't scale well in SLI.
Uhh yeah, and use those horrible graphs that don't start from 0 too.