AMD Announces Radeon HD 6900 Series of Video Cards

Yesterday, during AMD’s financial analyst day, they officially announced the new Radeon HD 6900 series of video cards.

The nominated launch date is currently set for 29^th November and we should see the two “Cayman” graphics cards or otherwise known as the Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 launched together. We’re also expecting the dual gpu Radeon 6990 nominated “Antilles” to be launched on Q1 2011 and should be the AMD flagship graphics card for next year.

Tech site Fudzilla have posted some specs of the soon-to-launch AMD Radeon HD 6970 card. They rumored that the Cayman coded card pack 1536 stream processors, 32ROPs, 96 Texture units and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The card comes with two DVI ports, 2 mini Display ports and HDMI. The TDP of the card is still unknown at this present time.

Here are some hints about the specs :

Rumored specs of 6950:
SP: 1536
ROP: 32
TMU: 96
VRAM: 2GB GDDR5

Believed spec of 6970:
4-way VLIW SP: 1920
Core clock: 900MHz
VRAM: 2GB GDDR5 @ 6GB/s

The Radeon HD 6950 is supposed to be faster than the current 5870 and on par or slightly behind the GTX480 from Nvidia.

On other hand the Radeon HD 6970 is rumoured to compete with a 5970 and GTX580. Until the cards are actually released and comparison tests made, we can only take these as said ‘rumours’

Remember back when AMD released the 5000 series? Supply and demand meant that the cards were in short supply for the first couple of months. Lets just hope AMD have learnt from this and we will hopefully be able to get our hands on this new series of graphics cards soon before Christmas.