14 DAY TRIAL // AMD’s Turks, Caicos and Cedar graphics cores used initially for some HD 6000 and HD 5000 series graphics cards will soon make a return as Radeon HD 7000 models despite these lacking the company’s new GCN architecture.
As SweClockers reports, instead of making any changes to these GPUs, AMD has decided to release them apparently without any modifications whatsoever in the OEM space under the HD 7000 designation.
The new lineup will include five new graphics cards, the fastest of these models being the Radeon HD 7670 and HD 7570, which are both based on the Turks core built using the 40nm fabrication process.
As many of you know, the Turks GPU packs 480 stream processors, 24 texture units and 8 ROP units as well as a 128-bit wide memory bus that can be connected to either DDR3 or GDDR5 memory.
Moving to the Radeon HD 7470 and HD 7450 here we find once more the Caicos core that was introduced with the HD 6470 and the HD 6450, featuring the exact same specs as before (160 stream processors, 8 texture units, 4 ROPs, 64-bit memory bus).
The true surprise however is the fifth, and also the slowest, of the video cards to be released, the Radeon HD 7350, since this is actually based on the AMD Cedar graphics core.
If this name doesn’t ring any bells that’s because Cedar was actually introduced almost two years ago, in February 2010 to be more precise, and was initially used for the Radeon HD 5450.
Reviving a two year old GPU is a surprising move for AMD and makes us wonder how will it fare against the next generation of CPU integrated graphics.
Naturally, AMD says that it will limit the availability of these graphics cards to the OEM space, but experience has thought us that sooner or later such GPUs always make their way into the retail space thanks to greedy AIB partners that try to profit from the name change.
