He should clarify his self more ont that statement. Amd 6870 as of right now is their Current high end product in the 6000 series. In terms of high end graph cards its the 5970. When the other 6000 series we will know how the market stands between nv and amd.
This won't do, we'll need to clarify it further since we have two different meanings for "high end" here that leads to confusion such that both the 6870 and 5970 are being called "high end" when they are very, very different.
So we seem to have the idea of
absolute high end which would be the highest performing graphics card available. That would be the 5970.
Then we have the highest performing card within a given card series, in which case we might call the 6870 a
current relative high end when we compare it to the other cards that are both currently available and within the same family.
But the relative high end is pretty strange. There are only two cards in the current 6xxx line, so is the 6850 the low end, in relative terms? That seems like an abuse of language to me.
It also seems arbitrary to use the current relative high end term until all the prospective cards that we would reasonably expect in that series to be released (e.g. 69xx's and the lower-end parts 67xx and so on). What I'm suggesting is that before you give something a determination of relative position, you need a class of relevant objects to organize in that class.
Finally, it seems there is no principled way to decide the "grain" at which we would apply the current relative high end. Is the 5770 the current high end of the 57xx series? Is the 5670 the current high end of the 56xx series? The terminology doesn't seem useful since you would be calling cards that are mid- or low- end on the "absolute" scale as "high end" on the current relative scale.
What might be more
reasonable and simple is to say that the 6850 and 6870 are the mid-range cards of a series that has not yet been completely released and that the high end is, as we all understand, yet to come.