Bitcoin 6990M

Introducing the Radeon HD 6990M

The battle for graphics supremacy has been going for well over a decade now, with several casualties of war along the way (RIP 3dfx, Trident, S3, etc.). The primary competitors continue to be NVIDIA and AMD, and with NVIDIA having recently reclaimed the single GPU performance crown on both desktops and laptops with their GTX 580/580M, it’s time for AMD to respond. We’re not presenting any details for next generation desktop parts at present, and in fact the HD 6990M isn’t much of a surprise, but either way AMD is ready to release the details of their next mobile GPU.

We recently covered the mobile GPU landscape, with a discussion of the various performance levels and price segments. The price/performance ratio is actually pretty similar between AMD and NVIDIA mobile GPUs (at least until we hit the top-tier models), and both have a decent number of design wins with notebook ODMs. long with the performance crown comes a hefty price and performance bill that needs to be paid. AMD’s top mobile part prior to today’s announcement is the 6970M, which is basically a lower clocked version of the desktop Barts core with some of the Stream processors disabled (essentially a mobile HD 6850). Our testing has shown the 6970M to offer just slightly less performance on average compared to the GTX 485M, but interestingly enough NVIDIA managed to use less power in low/idle loads than AMD. Of course, even the HD 6970M is a trimmed Barts core, and there’s still the desktop 6950/6970 Cayman core that has yet to see a mobile variant, which brings us to today’s announcement.