I was speaking about the scenario in which Nvidia Pascal is awesome and does crush current offerings, as it's forecasted.
I wouldn't worry too much about Pascal vs current offerings. If history is any indicator, Pascal and AMD's Arctic Islands should be close in performance. That will determine the market segment lineup.
AFAIK, GP100 will (at least initially) be exclusively deployed as Tesla products in HPC/ Virtualization/ Visualization/ Neural Net environments (the latter being
a potential high dollar goldmine technology going forward). By the time a GeForce variant arrives I would expect both AMD and Nvidia to be fairly competitive (as usual).
Arctic Islands will be produced on 14nm process, Pascal will be made by TSMC on a 16nm process.
Source?
Latest rumour has TSMC's 16nmFF+ as the frontrunner (with GloFo tapped for 14nm LPP for Zen in late Q4 2016 and entry/mainstream GPUs). Probably because they are already shipping large Pascal silicon, where Samsung 14nm LPP has yet to deliver anything tangible, and the current 14nm LPE seems to be running into some problems. Samsung were originally tasked with the bulk of Apple's A9 production, but even though
Samsung's 14nm LPE A9 is slightly smaller than TSMC's 16nm FF (non "+" the bulk of deliveries seem to
favour TSMC. It doesn't auger well for 14nm LPP vs TSMC 16nm FF+/FFC. At least Samsung's HBM2 is made on a mature (20nm) process.