14 DAY TRIAL // After the successful launch of the HD 6800 and the HD 6900 graphics card series, the only GPU left for AMD to release in the high-end market is the HD 6990, recent reports suggesting this will arrive in the latter half of February or even early March.
According to Fudzilla, the delay is caused by the Chinese new year, as AMD was forced to postpone its schedule to include this event.
Other details were not provided at this time, but previous reports suggest that the HD 6990 will be built by pairing together two Cayman cores on the same PCB, in a similar way to the HD 5970 that was released more than one year ago.
This means that 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.
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.
Together with the HD 6990, Fudzilla also suggests that AMD plans to launch another dual-GPU graphics card, presumably based on the Barts core.
Other details were not provided, but a fully functional Barts core (as found in the HD 6870) packs 1120 stream processors, 56 texturing units and 32 ROPs as well as 1 GB of GDDR5 video buffer and a 256-bit memory interface.
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.
At the moment, the HD 5970 is AMD's fastest graphics card, the HD 6990 being destined to replace this board.