14 DAY TRIAL // It would seem that the two biggest players in the field of GPUs, AMD and NVIDIA, has heated up the ongoing rivalry in this segment once again, the release of the latest Fermi graphics card and “fastest DX11 GPU on the planet”, the GTX 580, prompting the read team to attempt some damage control measures of its own (as you've been able to see yesterday, plenty of leaks and hints regarding future AMD products were released more or less “by accident”).
However, it would seem that AMD, in its race to counter NVIDIA's offerings and come up with some new products of its own (the 6900 series is still rather far away, and rumor has it that we won't be seeing its pretty, super-powerful face until Q1, 2011), has resorted to a slightly...unorthodox practice, namely that of rebranding an existing product and releasing it under a different name.
So, as Geeks3D reports, quoting Fudzilla, it seems that Russian PC maker K-Systems is set to offer, starting with November, a series of graphics cards called HD 6250, HD 6390 and HD 6510 (which are really a surprise, since none of them were detailed within AMD's slides we've had the chance of checking out back when the Radeon HD 6800 series was introduced).
Anyway, the aforementioned report also provides some photo evidence of the “deed”, namely the fact that the GPU Caps Viewer 1.9.4. application identifies a Radeon HD 5550 as a Radeon HD 6390.
The reason is that both products share the same ID number, 0x68da, and practically deliver the same set of features and performance, provided by the 320 scalar processors.
For the time being, it would seem that this GPU re-branding activity is restricted to the Russian market, but we'll certainly keep an eye out in order to see whether AMD is going to push this renamed Radeons to shelves in other parts of the world as well.