I'm going to throw my .02 into this. They are designing the 9700s along the same lines as the Hammer. These are meant to be scalable on a single card (like some of those sick quad Voodoos). Combine this with AGPx8 and you have a disgusting amount of GPU power. My understanding is that, like the hammer, each chip has its own RAM. When these things start using next-gen RAM and we start seeing 4 chips on one board with, say 256MB DDR2 to each chip all pumping through 8x, that's a hell of a lot of power. It goes without saying that there are already rumors floating about the next generation after the 9700 based cards. Alot of rumor and speculation, but its all we have to go off of now. I doubt that the power will be like he says (what board has the kind of bandwidth to handle that? The Hammer based boards will approach it, though), but next year we are going to probably see a change in graphics card power that will dwarf anything we've seen in past years.
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