AMD Delays HD 6990 ‘Antilles’ till Q1 2011

AMD quietly announced that it would be delaying its upcoming flagship 6000 series graphics card till the first quarter of 2011. The Antilles GPU would have been the most powerful offering from AMD’s current GPU lineup. A dual GPU based graphics card utilizing two Cayman based chips that will be found in the upcoming 6970. The GPU was originally thought to be released this December, but no fixed date was set.

Existing GPUs in the 6000 series cards, the 6850 and 6870 use ‘Barts’ based chips. The upcoming 6950 and 6970 which use the new Cayman based chips have not been delayed and are due for release at the end of the month. The 6990 would have used two chips found in the 6970, although details are still scarce.

Looking further at the released slide also shows some kind of transition for the 5770, although this has been previously down-played by AMD, it is still possible we may see a replacement for the 5770 sometime late in the first quarter 2011.

The delay could be seen as a problem for AMD as NVIDIA just released its own flagship model, the GTX 580, which as we found under a number of more modern games, outperforms AMD’s current highest offering, the 5970. The release of the 6970 in the coming weeks may still prove to be a worthy competitor to the GTX580, so we’ll find out if the delay will be of any consequence.

ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, on Tuesday quietly announced that it would delay the roll-out of the company’s next-generation flagship graphics product powered by two code-named Cayman chips. From the fourth quarter of this year, the new graphics board known as the Radeon HD 6990 or under code-name Antilles will be delayed to the first quarter of 2011.