Some details on AMD Radeon HD 6900 graphic cards has leaked

Several slides revealing details specs of AMD Radeon HD 6900 series graphic cards leaked from closed AMD conference.

AMD HD 6900 series cards will have 2 Gb of GDDR5 memory running at clocks higher that 5 GHz and will have a TDP level of less than 225 W and 300 W for Radeon HD 6950 and Radeon HD 6970, respectively.

The bandwidth of memory bus exceeds 160 Gb/s, the number of ROPs haven’t changed — it’s 32.

There are noticeable changes in core architecture:

First of all, Cayman GPU features dual Graphic Engine. Next, core now features new VLIW4 architecture. The number of SIMDs has changed too, it got bigger. Memory bus width remains the same – 256-bit. The render back-ends have been upgraded.

Apart from GPU being split, it also got new tessellation modules of the last (8th) generation:

According to tessellation slide, AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphic cards gets a significant performance increase compared to Radeon HD 5870 cards:

If to compare the above graphs with the ones from AMD Radeon HD 6800 tessellation slide, then it is fairly reasonable to say that Radeon HD 6900 series cards have good-looking tessellation improvements even in hard modes:

The size of a single Stream Processor(SP) of VLIW4 architecture got smaller by 10% VLIW4 which will result in overall area reduction, nonetheless it provides same performance level as its predecessor — VLIW5:

In addition to everything above, the cards will feature a new dispatch block which will be asynchronous as well as other enhancement of memory controller are expected:

Another slide reveals the enhancement of ROP block.

Computational power over integers has doubled together with x4 increase of performance over floating point operations.

One more important thing — the GPU now has an integrated power controller:

The new control system is intended to maintain card’s power consumption by dynamically changing both clock and voltages.

Summing up, we get totally re-worked graphics processor architecture.

The last slide presents the specs of AMD Radeon HD 6990 (Antilles) graphic card::

By judging from the number of Stream Processors, we can conclude, that AMD Radeon HD 6990 will be based on two AMD Cayman XT (Radeon HD 6970) cores, thereby proving our estimates of AMD Cayman XT having 1920 SPs.

The max compute power of AMD HD 6990 will reach the level of 6 TFLOPs. Note, the same parameter is only 4.64 TFLOPs for HD 5970.

In the end, the following table concludes all the information on AMD Northern Islands series cards we have:

*Subject to change