It looks like the battle of the dual-GPU graphics cards is really starting to heat up. A poster on the 3DCenter forums has a photo of what appears to be a slide describing AMD's upcoming HD 6990 graphics card - codenamed Antilles - giving us the first hints of what it might be capable of.
According to the slide, the card will have 3,840 stream processors, 4GB GDDR5 and be capable of providing a simply breathtaking amount of raw compute-power. At the very least, this should deliver a pretty significant performance boost over the 3,200-core HD 5970. All this will fit within a 300W TDP with idle power dropping as low as 30W, while outputs will purportedly include a pair of DVI ports and three Mini DisplayPort connectors for five-monitor Eyefinity gaming.
We obviously can't draw too many more conclusions about the HD 6990 from these specs, but it does give some clues as to what the single-GPU Cayman-powered cards might be. Assuming that these specs are correct, a single HD 6970 could have as many as 1,920 stream processors - up from the 1,536 that we'd previously heard - and a 2GB frame buffer.
Obviously there's no way to tell if these specs are accurate, but the slides look fairly convincing. The fact that Thinq is reporting on another photo of the same slide from a slightly different angle also doesn't hurt its legitimacy. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until early next month when AMD finally takes the wraps of the Cayman GPUs to get a better idea of what the red-team has in store. As for the the HD 6990 itself, the manufacturer's roadmap points to a release in the first quarter of next year.
