Probably one of the most eagerly awaited AMD GPUs, codenamed Cayman, will launch this morning as the NDA expires on December 15th at 6:01 CET, at least in Europe. In case you somehow missed the previous articles, AMD will launch two graphics cards based on the Cayman GPU, the HD 6950 and the HD 6970. Since we're not running a bakery here, we plan to be sound asleep at launch hour, so here's the lowdown.

As noted the Cayman will be available in two versions, the HD 6970 and the HD 6950. Both GPUs are made in 40nm process and have a 389mm2 die size and 2.64 billion transistors.

The HD 6970 will feature 1536 Stream Processors and will work at 880MHz for the GPU and 1375MHz (5.5Gbps effective) for 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface. These specs are enough for 2.7TFLOPs of compute performance. The rest of the specs include 96 texture units and 32ROPs. The TDP for the HD 6970 is set at 250W for PowerTune maximum TDP, 190W for typical gaming and 20W in idle.

The HD 6950 is similar but packs 1408 Stream Processors, 88 texture units, 32 ROPs and gives 2.25TFLOPs of compute performance. It ended up clocked at 800MHz for the GPU and 1250MHz (5.0Gbps effective) for 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with the same 256-bit memory interface. The TDP on this one is set at 200W for the PowerTune maximum power, 140W for typical gaming load and the same 20W for idle.

The pricing ended up to be quite impressive and you can read about it here. The cards should start to appear in retail/e-tail once the NDA is lifted at 6:01 CET.

Also read

Radeon HD 6970 to cost 275 euro

Cayman goes full monty

Reference HD 6970 has dual-BIOS

First Radeon HD 6970 gets pixellized

Radeon HD 6970 slower than GTX 580 in 3Dmark 2011

Radeon HD 6950 is in a class of its own

AMD HD 6950 works at 800MHz

Radeon HD 6970 has 250W PowerTune Maximum Power

Cayman is a 2.64 billion transistor chip

Cayman 6970 has less than 300W TDP

Radeon HD 6970 runs at 880MHz