AMD has already sent Cayman XT sample cards to its partners. The most likely to be called Radeon HD 6970 cards are reported to be dual-slot and quite hot, which comes at no surprise.

Cayman is not simply an improved Radeon HD 5000 architecture. It looks like AMD has invested some time and effort to tweak up the architecture and gain some more performance. They got us all here, as they were always saying that 6800 is an upgrade to 5800 architecutre, not telling us that there is 5900 series with much more power, just around the corner.

This chip looks like AMD’s Fermi but at the same time, we hope that it won’t go trough the same destiny and that it can stay on time for November 20ish launch.

The card is naturally faster than Radeon HD 5870, still the fastest single core part that AMD sells, and it should end up to a similar performance like current single GPU king GT100 based Geforce GTX 480. We expect that Cayman can end up slightly faster at least.

But can it beat soon to come Geforce GTX 580? That will be the real question as it looks like GTX 580 comes this year.