What happened to living on the bleeding edge? *shudders
When inflation changed the units of blood into Vital Organs to stay balanced on the edge, which may continue to increase to that of Pets.
As for AMD releasing the 67XX first... maybe it'll kick the ass of Nvidia's 460 and 470, or perform more in line with AMD's own 5850, possibly 5870. So when Nvidia come out with their own revisions, they can trounce them with the 68XX...... or maybe they really are having some issues.
I think this release was meant to be Southern Islands, rather than Northern, due to staying on a larger manufacturing process. AMD had to create a hybrid of the new architecture and put it on the larger process due to complications of 32 or 28nm. So rather than release the high end chips with cut back abilities due to manufacturing limitations, it's releasing the mainstream on the larger process while sorting out the smaller process for the higher end chips..... Something like that anyway. (I'm terrible with names)