AMD, Nvidia Prepare Competing Graphics Cards

Rival chip makers Nvidia and AMD are rumored to be preparing competing GPUs for upcoming release.

According to a report last week from Fudzilla, Nvidia's new GTX 580 will compete with AMD's Radeon HD 6900 series, code-named Cayman.

Nvidia's new offering is rumored to be set for release in December and will replace the company's GF 100 GPU according to Fudzilla. Like its predecessor, the GTX 580 will reportedly be 40nm in size but will have 512 CUDA cores and 128 texture units for increased performance. Nvidia's CUDA platform for parallel computing, code-named Fermi, provides the reference architecture for the company's efforts to expand GPU computing.

According to Fudzilla, the GTX 580 comes with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and a 512-bit memory interface. Nvidia declined to comment on any of the details for their upcoming product.

AMD's Radeon HD 6900 cards will represent the high-end of the 6000 series following on the heels of the widely acclaimed Radeon HD 5000 series released last year. If the rumors are accurate, Radeon HD 6900 will appear before Nvidia's GTX 580 and in time for the holiday sales season.

Next: The Bigger Picture For Both Companies

While AMD has had the edge in graphics cards technology for notebooks, during the company's third quarter earnings call last week CEO Dirk Meyer confirmed AMD's difficulty in translating their advantages into market share, which was reflected by disappointing earnings in the notebook graphics space. The company declined to comment on its upcoming products ahead of its expected announcement regarding the Radeon 6800 series on Friday, Oct. 22.

Nvidia, meanwhile, has focused its energy on high-end systems for parallel processing while its lower-end offerings have been less competitive within their segment of the market. The company has recently re-entered the midmarket of cards priced about $200, but its more expensive, powerful Fermi-based cards remain its strongest area of growth.