Next generation 40nm in 2010
We've just learned that ATI's next generation, let's call it Radeon 6000 series, is going to get a new high-end card. We are talking about a dual-chip card based on new 40nm chips that are expected to get slightly faster than the current generation. The best part is that it comes in 2010.

We see the new performance chips as a tweaked version of the highly succesful Cypress core, but this time they will introduce support for the new HDMI interface as well as new UVD – Eyefinity. Eyefinity will become more functional and cheaper to implement on multiple monitor setups.

Of course the core itself will be slightly improved, but we don’t expect a spectacular performance increase. It will be faster than the current generation, that much is clear, but we still don't know much about Nvidia's answer to this card.

A new set of leaked slides that have showed up over at Chiphell have revealed some details regarding the feature set of the upcoming Radeon HD 6000 series cards. As it was rumoured a while back, it is now pretty much confirmed that both Barts and Cayman boards will have support for up to six displays, thanks to DisplayPort 1.2 outputs.

The secret behind it is the MultiStream feature of DisplayPort 1.2, that has double the data-rate of DisplayPort 1.1. In addition to the higher data-rate, DP 1.2 also brings support for higher resolution support and support for stereoscopic 3D. The new HD 6000 will be able to support up to six DisplayPort displays by "daisy chaining" them to two Displayport outputs. The best part for AMD is that they can use Evergreen (Eyefinity 6) reference boards for this one since Barts and Cypress are pin compatible.

The rest of the outputs include HDMI 1.4 output for 3D video (Blu-ray 3D) support, and two dual-link DVI-I outputs. The slides also reveal that we can expect increased performance in every segment and AMD's UVD 3.0 video processing engine for GPU acceleration.