Well they kept that one quiet, didn’t they?

The 6990 was yet ANOTHER launch from AMD that had no publicity whatsoever. Cast your mind back to the 6800 and 6950/6970 launches and i bet even then you can’t remember much about them. There’s a very good reason why, and it’s all down to AMD themselves who don’t believe in fancy, extravagant launches but yet prefer to just release a product with no big bang or anything. We're still unsure as to why they do this, but i'm sure they have their reasons behind it.
The 5970 has been in the limelight for a long time as it was classed as AMD's flagship graphics card when it comes to Dual GPU, and with plenty of single based GPU cards being released from both AMD and Nvidia, it was only a matter of time until the new bad boy stepped onto the market, ready to take over.
Link: eTeknix