We've seen quite a few pictures of the AMD Radeon HD 6970 from its exterior, including some finer details observable. For the first time, we're getting to take a peek inside, thanks to a Chinese website that looks to be auctioning off an HD 6970 ahead of launch for a quick buck, if we're not terribly mistaken. The PCB shot reveals many details about the GPU and its board design:
To begin with, the GPU indeed has a 256-bit wide memory interface, counting the memory chips on the obverse side, and looking at the size of the GPU package.
The size of the die, and taken that Cayman is a 40 nm GPU, indicate that Cayman is not much bigger than Cypress, it should be about 400~500 million transistors higher compared to Cypress.
Given the roughly 2500 million transistor count, the stream core count of 1536 seems more realistic. AMD is said to be using an architecturally superior VLIW4 stream processor design that increases performance per mm² die area.
The board uses a high-grade 6+2+1+1 phase digital PWM voltage regulation design, draws power from 8+6 pin power connectors.
The reverse side of the PCB has no memory chips, so AMD might be using 2 Gbit memory chips to get 2 GB of total memory
