The number of cores is not "drivel", and it's also not new. This kind of information is absolutely standard fare when talking about GPUs nowadays.

See for instance the (huge) tables at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_p..., under the "Config core" column you can see each model's configuration of cores.

You can see that the idea that a GPU has several types of core, and various amount of each, goes back 5+ years.