AMD Radeon HD 6970 & 6950 on December 8?

Specifications for the HD 6970, plus my own speculation.

We already knew that the GeForce GTX 570 was supposed to be released on December 7, but now it appears that AMD's upcoming high-end graphics cards, the HD 6970 and 6950, should be launched the following day, at least according to ZDNet. Those two are powered by the GPU known as Cayman, which I've already talked about here.

I don't recall hearing that date before, so perhaps ZDNet knows something most other rumor sites don't. Other people have mentioned December 13, or the following week, so who knows?

On a related note, Charlie Demerjian from SemiAccurate says AMD has just reduced allocation for the HD 6950, mostly in favor of the 6970. That's a good sign for yields, though there could be marketing/business reasons for this move too.

In any case, the wait should be over soon.

Furthermore, I think that AMD and NVIDIA's renaming practices are dishonest and harmful to consumers, and that they need to stop.