AMD planned to retake the notebook video lead Tuesday with the release of the Radeon HD 6990M. The chipset is in many ways equivalent to the desktop 6870 and has a full 1,120 stream processors (visual effects cores) at 715MHz along with 900MHz actual (3.6GHz effective) GDDR5 memory. The performance is enough to make it about 17 percent faster than the 6970M and 25 percent faster than NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580M, AMD estiamtes.
The new design still has full DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4 visual effects along with hooks for stereoscopic 3D and general-purpose computing through either DirectCompute or OpenCL. A slight boost in the number of texture units from 48 to 56 helps it support more complex graphics, though the overall effect of the chip can be magnified with two chips in CrossFire mode.
Availability will vary by the notebook manufacturer. Alienware as is often the case has gone first and is offering the M18x with a Radeon HD 6990M CrossFire layout as a $500 replacement for the stock, single-core GTX 480M.
