2011 is the Year of the Tablet. With all due respect to the rabbit, who would have otherwise been assigned to this year, I think the tablet has earned the right of representing 2011. If you followed CES at all this year, you’d know why.

I decided pretty early on that I would make a huge post with all the tablets we looked at instead of posting each one individually, simply because the sheer number of tablets on the show floor meant that I would have taken over AnandTech’s front page with tablet-related posts. It would have been impossible to cover all the new tablets, but I think we managed to get our hands on most of the high profile tablets in addition to some of the more promising new tablets out there.

Everyone, it seemed, was debuting a new tablet. The usual suspects were out in full force, with Motorola showing off the first Honeycomb tablet to hit the market, ASUS releasing a quartet of highly specced tablets, Dell’s 7”, Tegra 2-based follow-up to their first Streak tablet, Acer coming up with new 7” and 10” Honeycomb tablets, Samsung releasing a convertible slider PC tablet to go with the newly LTE-infused Galaxy Tab, and RIM showing off the PlayBook prior to its imminent launch this quarter.

But they weren’t the only ones. Notion Ink had the production Adam on hand, with the first US shipments going out this week. Panasonic’s Viera range of tablets was unexpected to me, since it’s been ages since Panasonic had a consumer-level computing device in the US. Razer debuted a pretty sweet looking dual screen gaming tablet running Oak Trail and Windows, though we didn’t get a chance to go hands on with it. And then there were new companies like Enspert coming out of the woodwork with new devices amongst all the big launches. So let’s get this party started.

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After being AnandTech’s senior GPU editor for nearly a year and a half and through more late-night GPU launches than I care to count, there’s a very specific pattern I’ve picked up on: the GPU market may be competitive, but it’s the $200-$300 that really brings out the insanity. I’m not sure if it’s the volume, the profit margins, or just the desire to be seen as affordable, but AMD and NVIDIA seem to take out all the stops to one-up each other whenever either side plans on launching a new video card in this price range.

Today was originally supposed to be about the newly released GeForce GTX 560 Ti – NVIDIA’s new GF114-based $250 video card. Much as was the case with the launch of AMD’s Radeon HD 6800 series however, AMD is itching to spoil NVIDIA’s launch with their own push. Furthermore they intend to do so on two fronts: directly above the GTX 560 Ti at $259 is the Radeon HD 6950 1GB, and somewhere below it one of many factory overclocked Radeon HD 6870 cards, in our case an XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition. The Radeon HD 6950 1GB is effectively the GTX 560 Ti’s direct competition, while the overclocked 6870 serves to be the price spoiler.

It wasn’t always meant to be this way, and indeed 5 days ago things were quite different. But before we get too far, let’s quickly discuss today’s cards.

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As unfathomable as it seems now, at one point in history the product refresh cycle for GPUs was around 6 months. Twice a year NVIDIA and AMD would come out with major refreshes to their product lines, particularly at the high-end where a quick succession of parts brought great performance gains and left us little time to breathe.

Since then things have changed a great deal. GPU complexity has grown by leaps and bounds – although by the time the term “GPU” was even coined GPUs ceased being simple devices, they were still fairly small chips put together at a block level by a relatively small team of engineers. The modern GPU on the other hand is a large, complex entity. Although the development cycle for a GPU is still shorter than the 4+ years for a CPU, GPU complexity has approached the CPU in some ways and exceeded it in others. Meanwhile in terms of die size even midrange GPUs like GF106 (GTS 450) are as big as modern CPUs like Sandy Bridge, never mind high-end GPUs like GF110. As a result the refresh cycle for GPUs has become progressively longer by relying primarily on die shrinks, and in modern times we’re looking at close to a year between refreshes.

The reason I bring this up is because NVIDIA has found itself in an interesting position with the Fermi architecture. We’ve covered the problems NVIDIA had in the past, particularly with the first Fermi – GF100. NVIDIA since corrected GF100’s biggest production flaws in GF110, giving us the Fermi we originally expected nearly half a year earlier. NVIDIA is now in the process of cascading those production improvements down the rest of the Fermi line, churning out the fully-enabled Fermi GPUs that we did not get to see in 2010. Whether it’s intentional or not – and we believe it’s not – NVIDIA has fallen back in to the 6 month cycle.

Late last year we saw GF110, the first of the revised Fermi family. GF110 brought with it GTX 580 and GTX 570, a pair of powerful if expensive video cards that put NVIDIA back where they traditionally lie on the performance/power curve. Now it’s time for GF104 to get the same treatment. Its revised counterpart is the aptly named GF114, and it is the heart of NVIDIA’s newest video card: the GeForce GTX 560 Ti.

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