14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that news regarding AMD's Radeon HD 6900 series graphics cards abound lately, the very last bits of information about the Cayman core making their way onto the Web detailing the GPU's typical power usage as well as its die size and transistor count.
While details about the Cayman architecture have been out in the open for quite some time now, the same thing can't be said about the power consumption of this GPUs, some very shady rumors suggest this figure to be around the 300W mark for the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 solution.
However, a recent report published by Fudzilla claims the typical gaming power consumption of the Cayman XT core sits somewhere around the 190W mark, idle power being rated at a rather nice 20W.
Compared to the Radeon HD 5870, this translates into a negligible 2W increase in load, although Cayman XT features 20% more shader units than the 5870 thanks to its new VLIW4 architecture.
The figure is even more impressive if we take a look at the die size of the Cayman core as this carries no less than 2.64 billion transistors inside its 389 square millimeter core, the GPU being built using the same TSMC 40nm manufacturing process that was used for the HD 5000 series.
Compared to the GF110 chip, that is used inside the GTX 580 as well as the GTX 570, Cayman is about 30 percent smaller in size and packs 15 percent fewer transistors.
Although these aren't the most surprising details uncovered until now about the upcoming Radeon HD 6900 series, these do pretty much complete the specs list and give us an idea about how Cayman stacks against its competitors.
Although the HD 6900 series performance level still comes as an unknown, there isn't that much time left until these are out in the open too, as AMD has Cayman scheduled for a December 15 launch.