AMD's PR has come up with a new PR statement in which they try to explain why they have delayed the Cayman card. Back at Los Angeles, at the Barts HD 6870 and 6850 presentation, they said that Cayman should launch in late November and now the new date is the week of December 13th aka week 50th.

Here is the official note and then we will translate it to real non-PR language. We only wish George Carlin was around to lend us a hand.

“Demand for the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series continues to be very strong, the ATI Radeon HD 5970 remains the fastest graphics card in the world and the newest members of the AMD graphics family, the AMD Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870, have set new standards for performance at their respective price points, and are available in volume.

With that in mind, we are going to take a bit more time before shipping the AMD Radeon HD 6900 series. As of today, the NDA lift for information relating to the AMD Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6970 will be week 50. We will be providing additional information on these products, including the exact date and time of the NDA lift, in the weeks prior to launch." said Chris Hook and his crack spinner team.

This is how you should read it. Our dual-chip is still the fastest but we dropped it to below €400 to put more pressure on Nvidia, simply as Cayman might not be fast enough to beat the GTX 580, at least not the original spec.

We (AMD) now have three more weeks to try to get more performance and do some additional testing and hope that Cayman HD 6970 and 6950 will be enough to beat the GTX 580.

The card will barely make for Christmas but for most of people mid-December is too late for Xmas shopping. Let’s hope for AMD’s sake that the tweaked Cayman Radeon HD 6970 can beat the GTX 580, but considering the delays, this is becoming increasingly unlikely. We are giving Nvidia a three week advantage because we have to, not because we like to.

One more thing, component shortage is not the reason for the delay, we got that cleared out as Barts had the same issue, and still launched / shipped on time.

Antilles, Radeon HD 6990 dual card now slip into 2011 and it looks that Nvidia's dual-card comes in 2011 as well. We we're hoping to see both of them before the end of the year, but it appears that both the red and the green team had to change their plans.