Two misconceptions about IPC and GPUs

[sirmo]

That's mostly a myth. The transistor density between the rx480 and 1080 are almost the same. Clock speed isn't really based on transistor density once heat is controlled.

The 1080's cores are just designed to go faster because they are larger and have a longer pipeline. The fact that the 1080, has the potential to reach the same overall clocks as the 1060 although the latter has a lower transistor density is proof of this.

Nvidia's transistor count is very similar to AMD at this point, so the gap should be closing but it is getting larger and larger.

What we have is Nvidia has been focusing on improving the cores of their architecture, while AMD has been adding supplementary components while keeping the cores the same. When AMD changes the cores, they will have a new architecture. Until then it will be GCN.

The longer pipelines are less dense by definition (I didn't even mention transistors, that's your assumption).. also I wouldn't agree that only Nvidia has been improving their cores. Polaris 15% faster than Tonga clock for clock. Whereas Pascal is pretty much the same as Maxwell in terms of clock for clock perf. So if anything it is AMD who's seems to have improved their cores more.