Pictures and specifications of the eagerly awaited Radeon HD 6970 have surfaced. On Friday, Chinese site Zol.com posted snapshots of AMD's upcoming graphics card, and while images of the reference product didn't reveal too much, Fudzilla published some hard numbers on Sunday courtesy of an anonymous insider.
According to Fudzilla's sources, the card packs 1536 stream processors, which is slightly less than the recently launched Radeon HD 6870's 1600 SPUs. ROPs are matched at 32, while the 6970 supposedly increases the number of texture address units from 80 to 96. It also doubles the 6870's memory to 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
Power and display connectors appear to be the same as the Radeon HD 6870: 6-pin and 8-pin PSU connectors, two DVI ports, two Mini DisplayPort connectors, and one HDMI output. Meanwhile, the Radeon HD 6970 TDP is said to be lower than Nvidia's forthcoming GTX 580, but Fudzilla didn't list any precise numbers.
Early benchmarks of the Cayman-based 6970 were leaked last month, suggesting the card to be 10% faster than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480 and 20% faster than the Radeon HD 5870. The Radeon HD 6970 was expected to arrive later this month, but new rumors say fabrication issues at TSMC could push the card to Q1 2011.