Now that AMD has been taking the lead in performance and power consumption for a while, Nvidia has been forced to take all necessary measures to recoup the performance crown. One such measure is abandoning the high performance computing (HPC) and GPGPU capability which was one of the cornerstones of the Fermi architecture which powered the GTX 480 family.
According to Nordic Hardware nearly 300 million transistors were cut down this way, making the new card smaller, more efficient, cooler and cheaper.
According to initial reports, GeForce GTX 580 will feature 775 MHZ GPU clock speed with 1544MHz shaders and 1536MB GDDR5 clocked at 4008MHz. The new card is rumored to be launch on November 9th, 2010, well before AMD launches its high performance Radeon HD 6900.