Shockingly, i'd happily forego any performance improvement simply to have the cards shorter, cooler, and quieter. I think it's ridiculous how graphics cards are now longer than motherboards, and are by far and away the hottest, noisiest thing in a computer case.
Bring back the days of single slot coolers!
Why exactly, a mobo itself, without anything plugged in, uses some massive 20W under load, realistically cost £30 to make no matter the board, the chipsets cost £5-20 depending on the board.
580gtx 3billion + transistors, 175gb/s + bandwidth on a 384bit bus with thousands of traces in a tiny area and power circuitry to provide a steady 300W load.
Highest end mobo of all time, chipset hundred mil transistors, maybe, bandwidth 10-20gb's on a tiny bus with dozens of traces, massive area and power circuitry to provide a steady 160W.......
The question you should be asking is how could a mobo with mostly 5 year old technology that costs very little to make be so big, cost so much and fail so often and why gpu's aren't a heck of a lot bigger.
GPu is by FAR the most complex piece of tech inside a computer and its by FAR the most condensed and efficient in size piece of tech aswell.
Anyway, 28nm, 1024shader Nvidia same old same old architecture, 60-80% faster than they have now depending on the clock speeds they can hit and process quality.
AMD, Cayman + more tweaks(probably some stuff from barts, better efficiency per shader) at a guess aiming for about 2560 shaders, or the equivilent of 3200 "evergreen" shaders.
(Better support, better drivers and raw power to be able to play it).
