AMD Radeon HD 6990M Release Date

The two contenders and unique players in the market of graphics cards are Nvidia and AMD, who challenge each other regularly introducing new architectures vie for the throne of King performance, a title which serves mainly for the prestige of the brand. After the launch of the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M performance and we knew it would not be long before its competitor AMD was also presented its new GPU reference. So here come the announcement of the new AMD Radeon HD 6990M, that the initial preliminary testing, seems in fact to be the new fastest single-core mobile card on the market, beating its own precisely the GeForce GTX 580M.

AMD Radeon HD 6990M: new GPU for gamestation

So the core Blackcomb Pro, a version of Barts, in turn evolution of the former Juniper Granville Pro-HD 68xx cards, we find as well that 1120 stream processors, for a total of 56 texture units and 32 ROPs. Comparatively, to make the idea, the previous Radeon HD 6870M had respectively 800, 40 and 16. The bus is wider, 256-bit and 128 against the core clock frequency is higher, 715 MHz versus 675 of the 6870M.

The only exception is that the GDDR5 memory on board before they reached 4 GHz, while here we stop at 3.6 GHz, but with an amount nearly double, 2 GB to 1. We have thus a bandwidth is almost double than in the past, 115.2 GB / s 64, and the computing power of 1.6 TFLOPS / s. The card, which of course supports DirectX 11 technology and HD3D (stereoscopic 3D displays), 1.1 and OpenCL DirectCompute 11 for encoding movies and UVD3 hardware for decoding the same hardware is also equipped with other technologies, such as AMD Dual Graphics.

This is a technology that allows not only to pass on the GPU integrated into the processor dedicated to that, depending on the workload, as was the case for the previous AMD PowerXpress, but above all to use both graphics processors together in a kind asymmetric in CrossFireX, when the workload demands it, thus providing a significant performance boost, much higher than the contribution that you get from one dedicated card.

AMD Radeon HD 6990M: new GPU for gamestation

The major limitation of this technology right now is that necessarily requires the presence of an APU AMD last generation, ie based on new core Llano. The availability of the AMD Radeon HD 6990M part even now, and there are already well-known manufacturers of gaming stations that have announced an upgrade of its flagship models also offer the new AMD. These include for example, Alienware has announced the availability of its Alienware M18x in configuration with either single card in CrossFire. Even Clevo 6990M will support the HD in his laptop P170HM, P150HM and X7200.

In fact, with this level of GPU, apart from the frame more or less, you can safely play with all the titles currently on the videogame market. What makes the difference so it’s mainly the price and, in this case, a glance at the lists. Alienware M18x For example, with two Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M in SLI costs about $ 700 more than the same laptop with two AMD Radeon HD 6990M in CrossFire.