The Specifications
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.
