Radeon HD 6950 & 6970 review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 12/14/2010 02:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

The Specifications

So then, based on Cayman, initially two product are thus released, the Radeon HD 6950 and 6970. At a later stage in time we expect the product under codename "Antilles" to have two Caymen GPUs for what we all know as a dual-GPU graphics card.

Here are the particulars for the two products released today placed into a table.

	Radeon HD 6950	Radeon 6970
Fab Process	40nm	40nm
Die Size	389 mm2	389 mm2
Transistors	2.64 Billion	2.64 Billion
Core Clock / MHz	800	880
Memory Clock / MHz	5000	5500
Memory Bandwith	160 GBps	176 GBPs
Memory type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Shader processors	1408	1536
Compute performance	2.25 TFLOPS	2.7 TFLOPS
Color ROPs	32	32
z/Stencil ROPs	128	128
TDP	140 W	190 W
Idle power	20 W	20 W

The Radeon HD 6950 comes armed with 1408 Shader processors, thus 22 SIMD based shader clusters, split up in a twofold engine. The domain and shader clock is locked in at 800 MHz. The card comes paired with 2 GB of memory clocked at (effective) 5000 MHz. The TDP of this product is 140 W which can be extended to 200 W board power with a new feature called PowerTune which we'll explain later.

The Radeon HD 6970 comes armed with 1536 Shader processors, thus 24 SIMD based shader clusters, split up in a twofold engine. The domain and shader clock is locked in at 880 MHz. The card comes paired with 2 GB of memory clocked at (effective) 5500 MHz. The TDP of this product is 190 W which can be extended to 250 W board power with a new feature called PowerTune which we'll explain later.

Let's have a quick comparative overview of some of the specifications representing a certain scope of other performance parts:

Specifications	Radeon HD 5770	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 6850	Radeon HD 6870	Radeon HD 6950	Radeon HD 6970
GPU	Juniper XT	Cypress Pro	Barts Pro	Barts XT	Cayman Pro	Cayman XT
Manufact. tech.	40nm	40 nm	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm
GPU frequency	850 MHz	725 MHz	775 MHz	900 MHz	800 MHz	880 MHz
Stream processors	800	1440	960	1120	1408	1536
Memory Datarate	4800 MHz	4000 MHz	4000 MHz	4200 MHz	5000 MHz	5500 MHz
Memory bus	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory buffer	1 GB GDDR5	1 GB GDDR5	1 GB GDDR5	1 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5
Power consumption	108 W	151 W	127 W	150 W	150 W	190 W
Idle Power	-	-	19 W	19 W	20 W	20 W

Both cards are of course up-to-date DX11 class product with a couple of new features.

Features wise, both graphics cards will be very similar to the last generation products and is merely an advanced, updated model. However some features like DisplayPort now follows 1.2 interface specification, HD3D, UVD3 and HDMI 1.4a are introduced. We also spot a new Anti-aliasing mode (Morphological AA), better Anisotropic filtering and improved Tessellation performance up-to twice the performance of that of the 5000 series.

AMD Radeon HD 6900 series

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