AMD Radeon HD 5950 Scheduled for Q1 2010

Just a few days ahead of the official debut of AMD's much-anticipated Radeon HD 5970 dual-GPU graphics card, the Internet was loaded with pre-launch rumors on the specifications and features of the company's new card. Among those rumors, there were a couple of reports on a second dual-GPU AMD card, speculated to be a version of the upcoming Radeon HD 5950 card, a scale-down version of AMD's flagship model. It now appears that we have a couple of more details on the said card, reportedly scheduled for release in Q1 2010.

According to a recent article on German-language Hardware-Infos, the Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices might be planning a release of a new dual-GPU graphics card, which will be officially announced sometime in the first quarter of 2010. The specifications and features of the new card are somewhat similar to AMD's current flagship, the HD 5970, as both cards are based on the same 40nm RV870 graphics processing units.

Said article also gives a summary on the previous reports on the rumored HD 5950, including details on the GPU and memory clock speeds. Unfortunately, these specifications haven't yet been finalized and we are expecting the HD 5950 to work at between 650MHz-675MHz core clock, or 1800-2000MHz memory clock. Additional features include 2 x 1440 Stream Processors, 2 x 72 PBC, 2 x 32 ROPs and 2 x 256-bit GGDR5 memory.

Unfortunately there's no word on pricing, but the new card will debut sometime around the same period as NVIDIA's much-anticipated Fermi-based line of GeForce graphics cards. This should ultimately enable AMD to lower the prices on their latest generation of Radeon cards, as the Fermi-based architecture is expected to deliver an impressive performance boost, over the current GT200 family of GPUs.