Im actually doubtful a manufacturer actually think about mining, even with thousands of card, it's still a drop in the water for them, that said, since they're dominated by nvidia in the gaming/embed world, possible they try to appeal to more markets, you never know, they did kinda the same with the opteron against intel for server CPU and were able to make quite a good hole with a pretty good product. Also the market of PC has been on the decline for a while now, so that may be a good way to make up for the difference.

We'll see ! I don't except that much difference price/performance ratio against the 470/480, but let's wait for the numbers