With its launch not too far, AMD partners are busy sending their Radeon HD 6970 samples to reviews. It is inevitable then, that some would actually post pictures of those on the web ahead of launch. Some such pictures made it to HardwareLuxx.de, which shows PowerColor Radeon HD 6970 in fresh out of its retail box. The card, and the box itself, reveal quite a bit about the HD 6970. To begin with, Radeon HD 6970 (and HD 6950), are high-end single GPU graphics cards based on AMD's new "Cayman" high-end GPU. The HD 6970 is about as long as a Radeon HD 5870 (which it's intended to replace), and retains product design carried forward from the HD 6800 series graphics cards.

The HD 6970 from PowerColor sports 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, perhaps some of the memory chips are located on the reverse side of the PCB, which is why a back-plate is used to cool them. The top side of the card reveals the power connectors: one 8-pin, and a 6-pin PCI-E power; two CrossFire bridge fingers, and a tiny switch. It is rumored that this switch lets users select between two BIOS ROM chips present on the cards; one chip is programmable, and partners can store an overclocked profile, while the other is not programmable, and stores the AMD reference profile. It gives users a nice fallback in case they brick the card with a bad BIOS.

With the introduction of AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs, we were made to expect a massive architectural change in the way AMD arranges its unified shaders. That, however, didn't happen with the Radeon HD 6800 series based on the 40 nm "Barts" GPU, which continued to maintain the VLIW5 configuration (comprising of SIMD units with 4 simple and 1 complex stream processing units). A recent presentation leaked to the internet reveals that the much talked about architectural change was saved for Cayman, the company's upcoming high-end GPU, on which will be based Radeon HD 6900 series graphics cards.

In VLIW4 architecture, equipotent stream processing units are arranged in groups of four along with general purpose registers. Although the four have equal capabilities, two out of four of these (occupying 3 and 4 issue slots) are assigned with some special functions. AMD looks to be conservative with the benefits of the new SIMD architecture. It claims that VLIW4 gives similar computational power as VLIW5, with 10% reduction in die area. It also simplifies scheduling.

At last, specifications of AMD's elusive Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6990 graphics accelerators made it to the internet, with slides exposing details such as stream processor count. The Radeon HD 6970 is based on a new 40 nm GPU by AMD, codenamed "Cayman". The dual-GPU accelerator being designed using two Cayman GPUs is codenamed "Antilles", and carries the product name Radeon HD 6990.

Cayman packs 1920 stream processors, spread across 30 SIMD engines, indicating the 4D stream processor architecture, generating single-precision computational power of 3 TFLOPs. It packs 96 TMUs, 128 Z/Stencil ROPs, and 32 color ROPs. Its memory bandwidth of 160 GB/s indicates that it uses a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. The memory amount, however, seems to have been doubled to 2 GB on the Radeon HD 6970. Antilles uses two of these Cayman GPUs, combined computational power of 6 TFLOPs, a total of 3840 stream processors, total memory bandwidth of 307.2 GB/s, a total of 4 GB of memory, load and idle board power ratings at 300W and 30W, respectively.

Originally poised for a November 22 launch, and plagued by reported delays, the Radeon HD 6900 series from AMD is indeed staring down at a three-week delay. According to a new release by AMD circulated to press sites, AMD is pinning the new launch date to be "in the week of" December 13, 2010. AMD tried to explain that the Radeon HD 5800 series is still in strong demand, and the Radeon HD 5970 is still maintaining performance leadership, perhaps blaming congestion in inventories for the delay, and not anything to do with manufacturing.

The first part of the explanation is unconvincing. If AMD did not want to disturb Radeon HD 5800 series sales, there wouldn't be Radeon HD 6800 series, which was launched with the idea of giving HD 5800-like performance at more affordable prices. The second part, however, is hard to dispute. AMD signed off its release saying that enthusiasts will find the products worth the wait. December 13, however, could disturb some gifting (or self-gifting) plans for Xmas. Given the swamped courier and logistics services at that time, it will be tough to get a Radeon HD 6900 series product in time for the celebrations.

Originally slated for 22 November, AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 6900 series featuring the company's new enthusiast-grade "Cayman" GPU core reportedly ran into delays. A more recent report by VR-Zone suggests that these delays are not because of any yield-issue related to the GPU, but shortage of a new high-grade driver-MOSFET (DrMOS) chip used on the reference board, sourced from Texas Instruments. The said component looks to feature a more compact package compared to the ones commonly made by Renesas and the likes, which is why AMD seems to have chosen it. The TI-made component is in short supply, and is a very recent introduction by its makers. AMD has a knack of using exotic and high-grade components on PCBs of its high-end graphics cards. A driver-MOSFET is a component that combines the driver IC, and MOSFETs into a single package.

Here are the first pictures of what is touted to be the GeForce GTX 580 reference design graphics card by NVIDIA, by sections of the Chinese media. There are some interesting inferences that can be drawn just by the looks of the card. To begin with the cooler bears an uncanny resemblance to one of the earliest design iterations of the GeForce GTX 480 (pictured here and here). In its final iteration, NVIDIA gave the GTX 480 a more massive cooler, perhaps to keep up with its finalized clock speeds. If the design of the GTX 580 cooler is anything to go by, it means that either NVIDIA refined the GF100 architecture in the GF110 (on which GTX 580 is based) a great deal, increasing performance per Watt; or that since GTX 580 is in its development stage, its final version could look different. GeForce GTX 580 is being designed as a counter to AMD's Radeon HD 6900 series single-GPU graphics cards that are based on the new Cayman graphics core, which is slated for release in late November. It is expected to be 20% faster than the GTX 480.

AMD is undertaking its product development cycle at a breakneck pace, NVIDIA trailed it in the DirectX 11 and performance leadership race by months. This November, AMD will release the "Cayman" GPU, its newest high end GPU, the expectations are that it will outperform the NVIDIA GF100, that is a serious cause for concern, for the green team. It's back to its old tactics of talking about GPUs that haven't even taken shape, to try and water down AMD's launch. Enter, the GF110, NVIDIA's new high-end GPU under design, on which is based the GeForce GTX 580.

The new GPU is speculated to have 512 CUDA cores, 128 TMUs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface holding 2 GB of memory, with a TDP of close to that of the GeForce GTX 480. In the immediate future, there are prospects of a more realistic-sounding GF100b, which is basically GF100 with all its 512 CUDA cores enabled, while retaining its 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface, 64 TMUs, and slightly higher TDP than that of the GTX 480.

AMD is close to unveiling its next-generation "Northern Islands" GPU family, which will be branded under the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series. These include two new performance-thru-extreme GPUs, namely Barts and Cayman. There's also a dual-Cayman implementation codenamed Antilles. While specifications are anyone's guess besides the little details we know about Barts and Cayman, the feature-set of the Northern Island family was communicated to AIB parts in a presentation which was leaked by the Chinese press.

To begin with, the key feature additions in Northern Islands includes a much more evolved display logic that can drive five displays simultaneously over physical outputs that include two dual-link DVI-I, one HDMI 1.4 (full-size), and two mini DisplayPort 1.2 connectors. The logic also provides you to install up to six monitors over the two DisplayPort connectors by daisy-chaining them, making use of the MultiStream feature of DP 1.2, which supports two times the data-rate of DP 1.1, and can provide very high-resolution display, or HD display with stereoscopic 3D (120 Hz). HDMI 1.4 lets you make use of Blu-ray 3D. A new video processing engine, UVD 3.0, provides GPU acceleration for MPEG-2, DivX, MVC (multi video coding), for Blu-ray 3D.

Earlier today, we were treated to the first picture of the Radeon HD 6870, a new and upcoming performance graphics card from AMD. It was also learned that the HD 6870 is based on a new GPU codenamed "Barts", which is intended to be a successor to the previous-generation "Juniper" GPU, which was at the center of the Radeon HD 5700 desktop and Mobility HD 5800 series. That left some uncertainty as to what GPU was going to drive the sub-$199 HD 6700 series. AMD may have found an answer, rebranding.

AMD seems to have been on the crossroads of which naming scheme to adopt. The first scheme based on conventional logic tells users that Barts-based SKUs should sit in the HD 6700 series, and Cayman-based single-GPU SKUs in the HD 6800; while the second scheme promotes Barts to the HD 6800 series, and Cayman to the HD 6900 series, pushing the low-volume, high-end Antilles (dual-Cayman) graphics card to the HD 6990 SKU. Evidently, AMD chose the newer, second scheme. The only rationale that makes sense is that the x800 series seems to be very popular, and if Barts, with its radically redesigned SIMD components can perform on par or better than the HD 5800 series SKUs, that's enough to justify its upwards push.

Here is the first picture of a working prototype of the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series "Cayman" graphics card. This particular card is reportedly the "XT" variant, or what will go on to be the HD 6x70, which is the top single-GPU SKU based on AMD's next-generation "Cayman" performance GPU. The picture reveals a card that appears to be roughly the size of a Radeon HD 5870, with a slightly more complex-looking cooler. The PCB is red in color, and the display output is slightly different compared to the Radeon HD 5800 series: there are two DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors. The specifications of the GPU remain largely unknown, except it's being reported that the GPU is built on the TSMC 40 nm process. The refreshed Radeon HD 6000 series GPU lineup, coupled with next-generation Bulldozer architecture CPUs and Fusion APUs are sure to make AMD's lineup for 2011 quite an interesting one.Update (9/9): A new picture of the reverse side of the PCB reveals 8 memory chips (256-bit wide memory bus), 6+2 phase VRM, and 6-pin + 8-pin power inputs.

Even as NVIDIA is taking its own sweet time to complete building its lineup of DirectX 11 compliant GPUs to target all market segments, AMD, which got a 6 months' headstart into releasing its lineup, which ended up targeting all market segments in a span of 5 months, is readying the Radeon HD 6000 series for launch well within this year. Just as the Radeon HD 5000 series GPU family was codenamed Evergreen with its members codenamed after evergreen trees (such as Cypress, Juniper, Redwood, Cedar), the Radeon HD 6000 is codenamed "Southern Islands", with its members codenamed after islands in the Caribbean (not islands in the Mediterranean).

"Bart" (after Saint Barthélemy island) is the codename for the performance/upper-mid segment GPU, a successor to the "Juniper" Radeon HD 5700 series. "Cayman" (after Cayman Islands) is the enthusiast GPU, successor to Cypress, and will go into making SKUs that succeed the Radeon HD 5800 series. Finally, the king of the hill is codenamed "Antilles" (after Antilles Islands), it is the dual-GPU SKU that makes use of two Cayman GPUs, successor to the Radeon HD 5970 "Hemlock". AMD partners will be in a position to sell graphics cards based on these by November 2010. The Radeon HD 6970 "Antilles" should be out by December 2010. The lower-half of the family will likely release next year.