14 DAY TRIAL // With AMD's Radeon HD 6970 specifications out in the open, there was just a matter of time until the same thing happened to the HD 6950, recent leaks that found their way onto the Web detailing AMD's upcoming Cayman-based graphics card.
As was the case with the Radeon HD 5850 that came before it, the HD 6950 is a cut-down version of the Cayman core that is going to be used in its complete form only in the HD 6970 GPU.
As a result, AMD has deactivated two of the 24 SIMD units available in the Cayman chip and ended up with 22 SIMD units, for a total of 1408 Stream Processors and 88 texturing units, the whole GPU being clocked at 800MHz, 80MHz lower than its bigger brother.
Compared to the HD 6970, this card will also come with slower GDDR5 memory as AMD decided to clock it at 1250MHz (5.0Gbps effectively), although it kept the 256-bit memory interface and the 2GB of frame buffer.
All these changes have lead to a decrease in the card's performance numbers, AMD rating the HD 6950 at 2.25 TFLOPs using the IEEE754-SP standard.
The TDP has been set to 200W, although AMD claims that gamers will see a lower power consumption since the card will use only 140W in typical gaming scenarios, the idle TDP being rated at 20W, same as the HD 6970.
Since it is based on the Cayman graphics core, the HD 6950 features an improved architecture as it uses a new VLIW4 stream arrangement, dual tessellation units and a redesigned render back-end, all of these changes leading to an important speed increase when compared to the older Cypress graphics core.
No changes in the launch date have been made, the HD 6950, together with the HD 6970, being expected to arrive on December 15. (via Fudzilla)