[citation][nom]Soda-88[/nom]If AMD kept rolling new series every 12 months, this card would be half price now. Nvidia really made some dough on Kepler thanks to AMD.Also, I still believe this was supposed to be original 680 if 7970 wasn't so underwhelming. Still, I'd rather buy 7970 than 680 due to Nvidia pulling an Apple with this generation.[/citation]
You have it backwards. AMD made out better than planned due to Kepler's problems and delays. Tom's had an article out yesterday on the dismal state of GPU sales:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/GPU-fourth-quarter-discrete-embedded-graphics-market,21194.html
Anyway, AMD can't release a new generation every 12 months. TSCM makes the 28nm parts for both AMD and nVidia. However in the lastest case AMD got their parts(platters/chips) months before nVidia. All Kepler GPU's are less than a year old, some only a
handful of months old. nVidia was in a bad pinch and they did something radical. They gutted the mid level GK104 of compute ability, boosting graphical processing power and it was able to compete against the Radeon 79XX series in gaming. So all said and done, it kind of worked out ok for nVidia! As they could have been really doomed.
Who knows what will happen with the next generation. Maxwell and Volcanic Islands are the code names. But it's really in the hands of the fabrication companies. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing(TSCM) and their competitor, GlobalFoundries.