OCGuy, what do you mean by "were good" vs. "was mid-range"?
HD6870 was a mid-range product too. The reason HD7870 was priced so high is because NV was late. HD8850/8870 are mid-range Sea Islands products. Right now no new info has leaked about HD8950/8970 parts but we can expect them to compete against some higher end GTX700 series. If NV is late again with GTX700 series, and HD8850/8870 end up as fast as GTX670-680, it's possible they will again be $299-349. It's hard to say since we don't know their actual launch date, NV will once again be behind by 6 months+ or if their performance actually lives up to the GTX670 level claims.
Also, the article mentions that AMD continues to push towards Heterogeneous System Architecture:
"For 2015 the current codename is "Pirates Islands", this lineup reportedly brings tribute to pirates like Blackbeard, Captain Hook, and Captain Jack Sparrow. AMD's engineers are targeting the 20nm process with 14nm APUs in mind, but work on these chips only started recently. By 2016, AMD should have completed its Islands cadence, and the GPU should have equal capabilities of communications as the CPU and be able to directly address and accelerate CPU routines."
The key redesign and shift towards compute has been AMD's new strategy starting with Fusion. GCN was the first major redesign on the GPU side to allow AMD to go towards this route. The next steps are natural evolution of bringing GPU and CPU closer such as Unified Address Space, shared memory, GPU Pre-emption. Nvidia is expected to follow suit with these technologies as well.
Both NV and AMD definitely want to push the GPU towards being a more general purpose computing device to expand the usefulness of these devices outside the general gaming needs.
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