New products may occasionally turn out to be no better than older ones as is the case with the VLIW4 and VLIW5 graphics architectures developed by AMD. The Radeon HD 6870 graphics card with its outdated architecture is actually quite competitive to the new Radeon HD 6950 if clocked at a GPU frequency of about 1 GHz. We can only imagine what a VLIW5 graphics core with more subunits and with third-generation tessellators would be capable of but the fact is that AMD’s top-end solutions are now represented by the Cayman architecture with VLIW4 design. At the current moment, we’ve got the following situation in the performance-mainstream sector: