Jan 21, 2011 08:00 GMT  ·  By

Without making any fuss about it, AMD launched yesterday two new GPUs in the HD 6700 series, some astute computer enthusiasts being quick to point out these are nothing more than re-brands of the popular HD 5700 graphics cards, and now, the Sunnyvale-based company, comes in to clarify this situation as it informed the press these new models will only be available to OEMs.

In addition, this naming scheme has been used in order to cater to their special needs, as OEMs require a unified naming scheme for all of the products they carry.

To better reflect this, AMD updated its product pages for the HD 6770 and for the HD 6750, both cards being now marked as “for OEM only.”

Starting with the more powerful HD 6770, the card is based on the Juniper XT core and features 800 stream processors, 40 TMUs and a memory bandwidth of 76.8GB/s, which translates into 1GB of GDDR5 operating at 4.8GHz on a 128-bit interface.

Moving over to the HD 6750, the card packs 720 stream processors, 36 TMUs and a memory bandwidth of 73.6GB/s.

These are the exact specifications of the HD 5770 and of the HD 5750, the only change that can be spotted between the HD 5700 and the HD 6700 series being the updated HDMI 1.4a video output that allows for 3D content playback.

However, since the HD 6700 series carries the older UVD 2.0 media engine, stereoscopic 3D content, including games, will be decoded using software emulation running on the CPU, according to an AMD official cited by HardwareCanucks.

The cards shouldn't be available in the channel market, although I doubt that hardware manufacturers will be able to restrain themselves from launching HD 6700 GPUs in retail.

The cards should be replaced by Turks architecture once it becomes available.