14 DAY TRIAL // During a local press event that took place in Taiwan, AMD showed the world one of its most anticipated graphics solution, the Radeon HD 6990, the card following to use dual Cayman cores placed on the same PCB, just like the previous generation HD 5970.
In the provided pictures, an AMD representative holds the card in his hand, clearly showing its impressive size.
As it can be noticed from taking a good look at the images, the back of the card reveals the fact that two separate GPU are used, confirming this is indeed the Radeon HD 6990.
Unlike the previous HD 5970, the GPU presented during the press event, seems to use a different cooling solution that places the cooler in the center of plastic shroud, this design reminding us all of the XFX HD 5970 that was released the last year.
Other details were not provided at this time, but the card could pack as much as 3072 stream processors, 192 texturing units and 64 ROPs, the two graphics cores featuring 2GB of video frame buffer each.
In addition, previous leaks suggest that the GPUs will be linked together with the memory via individual 256-bit memory buses, the total available memory bandwidth reaching a theoretical 307.2GB/s.
Just like the rest of the HD 6000 series models, Antilles will be built using TSMC's 40nm manufacturing process.
When released, Antilles will go head to head with Nvidia's most powerful solution, the GTX 580 as well as with a wide range of SLI and CrossFire configurations, including EVGA's dual-GPU Nvidia mystery card that was showcased during the 2011 Consumer Electronics show.
Sadly, AMD did not provide us with a release date for the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990, but a slightly older Fudzilla report claims that the card should come to market sometime in February. (via XtremeSystems)
