With the recent launch of the GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores, Nvidia managed to give those looking for a great price/performance graphics card another option for turning to its GPUs, but not to be outdone by its competitor AMD is reportedly also thinking about releasing an Radeon HD 6930 GPU in order to counter this recent threat coming from the green camp.
Just like Nvidia has done with the GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores, AMD also plans to use a cut back version of its most powerful GPU in existence, the Cayman graphics core, for this new card.
However, unlike its older brothers that are based on the Cayman architecture, the Radeon HD 6930 will use what according to Hardware Luxx is called the Cayman CE GPU supposed to include 1280 stream processors.
The reduction is quite significant when compared with the 1536 stream processors found in the HD 6970, but it should allow AMD to reuse a part of its Cayman GPUs that failed to pass the tests required for them to be installed in HD 6970 or HD 6950 graphics cards.
The new stream processor count should be paired together with 80 texture units, 32 ROP units , and the same 256-bit wide memory interface, which can be connected to either 1GB or 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
Together with the rest of the specs, the clock frequencies of the Radeon HD 6930 will also be reduced compared to those of its older brothers.
This means that the GPU will work at 750MHz, while the memory is supposed to run at 1.2GHz (4800MHz data rate).
Just like Nvidia’s recently launched solution, the Radeon HD 6930 also won’t come with a reference design from AMD, so graphics card makers are expected to use the cooling solutions and PCB’s they developed for the HD 6950.
As far as pricing is concerned, all we know at this point in time is that in Europe the card should sell for somewhere between 170€ and 200€, while availability seems to be expected for mid-December.
