Radeon HD 6970 2GB Specifications

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Click to enlarge

While the Barts GPU of the HD 6800-series was a bit same-old, same-old, the new Cayman GPU of the HD 6900 is a big change. For a start, there’s two entire Front-End Engines, so the Cayman GPU has two triangle setup units, two tessellators, two rasterisers and can send twice as much work per clock to the stream processors as previous Radeon GPUs.

Those stream processors have been upgraded, so they’re all capable of the high-precision work that only a fifth of the stream processors of previous generations were able to calculate. They’re organised in groups of four, with 16 of these groups per SIMD Engine (or stream processors cluster).

While this means that the HD 6970 2GB has fewer stream processors than the HD 5870 1GB, they’re more capable. ATI says the new layout, called VLIW4, is 10 per cent faster per mm2.

The ROPs have seen upgrades too, and both HD 6900-series cards will have 2GB of GDDR5 memory running at comparably high frequencies to give the large amount of memory bandwidth from the 256-bit memory interface.

 Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 1.5GBATI Radeon HD 6970 2GBNvidia GeForce GTX 480 1.5GBATI Radeon HD 6950 2GBATI Radeon HD 5870 1GBATI Radeon HD 6870 1GB
GPU
CodenameGF110Cayman XTGF100Cayman ProCypress XTBarts XT
Frequency772MHz880MHz700MHz800MHz850MHz900MHz
Stream Processors512 (1,544MHz)1,536 (880MHz)480 (1,4GHz)1,408 (800MHz)1,600 (850MHz)1,120 (900MHz)
Layout16 SMs, 4 GPCs24 SIMD Engines15 SMs, 4GPCs22 SIMD Engines20 SIMD Engines14 SIMD Engines
Rasterisers424222
Tesselation Units16215211
Texture Units649660888056
ROPs483248323232
Transistors3bn2.6bn3bn2.6bn2.15bn1.7bn
SizeXXXmm2Unknown530mm2Unknown334mm2255mm2
Process40nm40nm40nm40nm40nm40nm
Memory
Amount1.5GB GDDR52GB GDDR51.5GB GDDR52GB GDDR51GB GDDR51GB GDDR5
Frequency1.02GHz (4.08GHz effective)1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective)924MHz (3.7GHz effective)1.25GHz (5GHz effective)1,050MHz (4.2GHz effective)1,050MHz (4.2GHz effective)
Interface384-bit256-bit384-bit256-bit256-bit256-bit
Bandwidth192.4GB/sec176GB/sec177GB/sec160GB/sec134.4GB/sec134.4GB/sec
Card Specifications
Power Connectors1 x 6-pin, 1 x 8-pin1 x 6-pin, 1 x 8-pin1 x 6-pin, 1 x 8-pin2 x 6-pin PCI-E2 x 6-pin PCI-E2 x 6-pin PCI-E
Maximum Power Draw244W250W250W225W188W151W
Idle Power DrawUnknownUnknownUnknownUnknown27W19W
Recommended PSU600WUnknown600WUnknown500WUnknown
Typical Street Price£399£310£330£235£320£220

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