AMD Launches Radeon HD 6990M, Most Powerful Mobile GPU Yet

Firing the latest salvo in the GPU arms race, AMD today announced the Radeon HD 6990M GPU, which, it claims, will blow past all other graphics chips on the market. The chip, which packs in 1.7 billion transistors, will have a clock speed of 715 MHz, can crunch up to 1.6 TFLOP/s, and will support up to 2GB of DDR5 memory. Other features of the GPU include support for DirectX 11, 3D displays, app acceleration, and Eyefinity (the ability to drive up to three displays simultaneously). It will also support Crossfire, so you can pack two of these GPUs into a single system, if you dare.

On several benchmark test results released by AMD, the 6990M outperformed the Nvidia GeFOrce GTX 580M by about 20 percent on 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark11, and about 15 percent in Left 4 Dead 2.

At the time of the announcement, AMD said that the 6990M will be available in the Alienware M18x, Clevo P150HM, P170HM, X7200, and select Eurocomm systems. Stay tuned for our hands-on tests of this fire-breather.