What I'd like to see are a few benchmarks directly comparing crossfire 6850 and 6870 vs a single 7850 and 7870 respectively. Granted, new architecture brings with it better power efficiency, lower temps, and faster workload execution but, what about those of us who already invested in a 6870 or 6850 and have a crossfire capable motherboard, and don't necessarily care about power consumption (within reason, though even with crossfired 6870's at full load, Extreme's psu calculator says my system ought to consume no more than 580 watts peak, and I've got a 700W PSU.)? Because if performance of two 6870's in crossfire meets or beats a single 7870, I gotta say I'd rather drop the $170 on another 6870, than spend $350~ish for the successor.
And while we're at it, how about some eyefinity performance investigations? Will that extra 1gb of vram on the new cards help at all? (Experience says yes, but driver optimization might prove to be an interesting metric)