Dec 8, 2010 11:36 GMT  ·  By

With a more than high performing GF110 core in the wild and a soon to be released Cayman GPU things are definitely heating up in the graphics card world, but their supremacy won't surely that long lived since recent leaks claim that the Antilles-based dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 will be released in Q1 2011.

Although no exact date has been set until know, Fudzilla claims the launch is scheduled to take place in Q1 2011, moving the card's availability from the Q4 2011 release that all of AMD's partners were hoping for.

However, when it will arrive, the HD 6990 will be set to take the enthusiast space by storm considering this will pack two Cayman-based GPUs on the same PCB, effectively doubling the HD 6900 series performance.

Considering that even the highest performing single GPU graphics card available right now, the GTX 580, has a tough time competing with AMD's previous dual-GPU top of the line offering, the HD 5970, Antilles will surely offer out of this world performance.

Although these are only suppositions, Antilles leaked specs seem to confirm the HD 6990 graphics power, the card coming with no less than 3840 stream processor units that will feature the new VLIW 4 arrangement brought by AMD with the upcoming HD 6900 series, 128 texturing units and 64 ROPs.

Furthermore, the card will use dual 256-bit memory bus interfaces that should be able to deliver an impressive 307GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

Reports also suggest, the dual GPUs will be run 850MHz while the 4096MB of GDDR5 memory will run at 1200MHz, its TDP being rated at an impressive 300 while the idle power draw will be only 30W.

If these news are indeed true, then the HD 6970 and HD 6950 will be the last Norther Island-based graphics cards to be released this year, the HD 6990 following to come early in 2011.