Norwegian hardware enthusiast website, Nordichardware, has reportedly managed to “dig up” the details regarding AMD’s upcoming graphics card family, the HD 6000 series.
The company has not put a foot wrong since the launch of the HD 4000 series, which quickly established AMD as the price/performance champion. The follow up HD 5000 series was also a homerun, and the HD 5850 and HD 5870 are both particularly well priced high-end performance solutions.
This time, however, the consumer champion is launching with its mid-range solutions, as opposed to its high-end cards. To make matters even more confusing, it has changed its branding, and the numbers which previously were used to label high-end cards (HDx870 andHDx850) will be used on the mid-range solutions.
On paper, the high-end HD 6700 struggles to compete with the HD 5850, with the most worrying feature being the reduced stream processor count. The HD 5870 has 1600 stream processors, while the HD 6870 only has 960. The table states that the HD 6870 will fit in somewhere between the current HD 5850 and HD 5870, which means that the selling point will have to be price.
Oddly, the HD 6850 will be intended to replace the current HD 5770, while the HD 6770 will not even reach the same performance heights achieved with AMD’s last generation of GPUs. This is all fine and well, and we are all for well-priced consumer products, but the decision to brand these clearly mid-range cards with the high-end number associations is confusing.
AMD is expected to reveal its true high-end cards next year, and the HD 6900 (Caymen) series is thought to be the true successor to the HD 5800 series, while the HD 6990 (Antilles) will replace the dual-core HD 5970.
| Specifications | Radeon HD 5770 | Radeon HD 5850 | Radeon HD 6850 | Radeon HD 6870 |
| GPU | Juniper XT | Cypress Pro | Barts Pro | Barts XT |
| Manufact. tech. | 40nm | 40 nm | 40 nm | 40 nm |
| GPU frequency | 850 MHz | 725 MHz | 725 MHz | 850 MHz |
| Stream processors | 800 | 1440. | 800. | 960 |
| Memory frequency | 4 800 MHz | 4 000 MHz | 4 000 MHz | 4 200 MHz |
| Memory bus |
128-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory buffer |
1 GB GDDR5 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 1 GB GDDR5 |
| Power consumption |
108 watt | 151 watt | ~ 120 watt | >150 watt |
| Rel. Performance |
– | – | Better than 5830 | Better than 5850 |
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