Following Nvidia's recent introduction of the Geforce GTX 580M, AMD moved the performance notch a bit higher by releasing its own new enthusiast GPU - the Radeon HD 6990M.

With 1120 stream processors, 56 texture units and 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface, it is no wonder that AMD claims it is up to 25 percent faster than "any other announced notebook enthusiast GPU". The Radeon HD 6990M has reference clocks of 715MHz for the GPU and 3600MHz for memory.

Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of the GPU division at AMD noted that the company managed to "demolish" the myth that mobile computing is about perfomance compromises. He added that in addition to unprecedented specs, the Radeon HD 6990M also features full Microsoft DirectX 11 and Stereo 3D support.

AMD's Radeon HD 6990M supports CrossfireX so we guess that we'll see at least some beastly notebooks with two of these chips, most probably from the likes of Alienware. System integrators like Alienware, Clevo, Eurocom and others should start to roll out their own gaming notebooks with Radeon HD 6990M pretty soon.