A French website has listed the two upcoming AMD Cayman graphics cards, revealing their expected prices and delivery estimates. Two MSI cards are listed; the Radeon HD 6950 at €398.22 (£334.23) and the Radeon HD 6970 at €496.02 (£416.32). Delivery estimates are 11th and 23rd December respectively. These prices are very high - it may be safe to assume that by the time of launch they will be more reasonable. This will depend on the performance, which there is a little more information on below. The HD 6970 is expected to go toe-to toe with the GTX 580, and at the advertised price this puts it in exactly the right range amidst rumours of it supposedly retailer cheaper.
Source: TechConnect
There is also more technical information available today:
We got some official data about AMD's Radeon HD 6970 card codenamed Cayman XT. The card runs at 880MHz and the card has the memory that runs at quite impressive 5.5GBps. The memory of choice is GDDR5 in 256-bit flavour and the card has 2GB of it.
The card has 96 texture units, as well as 24 SIMD and 1536 ALU streaming processors. It has 32 ROPs and 128 Z stencils.
The card has 96 texture units, as well as 24 SIMD and 1536 ALU streaming processors. It has 32 ROPs and 128 Z stencils.
It's difficult to glean much more performance information from these additional specifications at this stage, but the memory bandwidth is impressive, and although already known for some time, 2GB of VRAM adds an extra 512MB over Nvidia's GTX 580. This may pay dividends if you plan on gaming on a large resolution monitor or with an eyefinity setup.
Source: Fudzilla
Some more information on power consumption of the Radeon HD 6970 has also come to light. The card is now expected to sport a TDP of under 300W, depending on definition, meaning the way in which the manufacturer decides to measure the total power consumption. Nvidia and AMD have defined this in different ways in the past, mainly to make consumption figures appear lower. In this case, the maximum TDP can be constrained to 250W to 300W for the HD 6970. This is somewhat higher than was perhaps expected, and AMD appear to have abandoned their 'performance per watt' design philosophy somewhat. Perhaps this was the only way to beat Nvidia's flagship single-GPU, time will tell.
Source: Fudzilla
Expect the Cayman-based Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 to arrive next week - December 15th at 5PM. We're all very excited about this release at Vortez - share your thoughts with us in the forums!
