By now, most of you already know that AMD is planning to give the official treatment to its new graphics card lineup sometime next week. It is then that we will first hear about what the future holds for AMD's graphics subsidiary, ATI, and which are the next-generation graphics cards gamers will be using for their high-end gaming rigs. However, besides the highly anticipated Radeon HD 4850 and 4870, AMD is also expected to top the offer with a dual-core HD 4870 card, about which not that much has been said as of late.

As ongoing benchmarks reveal, AMD's Radeon HD 4870 will not be able to compete with NVIDIA's massive GT200-based GTX 280 graphics card. This may be the reason why AMD has waited until now to start dropping hints about the possible release of a dual core HD 4870 card. Perhaps two RV770 GPUs placed on a single PCB is what AMD thinks it'll take to compete with NVIDIA's current GeForce flagship model.

Nevertheless, if you don't know what to expect from the next AMD dual-core graphics card, then what you're about to read should definitely cast more light on the matter. Thanks to the Hexus website, we now know that the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is going to sport 1600 stream processors and 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The card is expected to be CrossFireX capable and to deliver over 2 TeraFlops of performance. Since it will feature two power connectors, it's safe to assume that the card will be quite a power devourer. The cooling system looks similarly to the one found on its predecessor, the Radeon 3870 X2.

Because the card hasn't yet been officially announced, further details regarding its performance are scarce. Also, there's no saying when we should expect the card to become AMD's flagship model, but some speculate August could be a potential date for it to happen.