14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has recently sent out a press release to the European press to inform journalists about the company's decision to lower the reference pricing for Radeon HD 6850 based graphics cards, which now have an MSRP of 129€.
The company hasn't announced the reasons that stand behind this decision, but, most probably, is seeking to increase its sales in the upcoming back to school season.
Another possible reason for this price cut could be that AMD is preparing to launch a new mainstream GPU, designed to come as a pipe cleaner for its other solutions built using the 28nm fabrication process.
Right now, the cheapest Radeon HD 6850 graphics cards retail for 119€ in Europe, a full 10€ bellow AMD's new MSRP, so this price reduction could get them under the 110€ mark. The prices of the Radeon HD 6970 wasn't lowered.
AMD has introduced the Radeon HD 6850 in the second half of October 2010 and it was the first card, together with the HD 6870, from the 6000-series to be launched.
At the heart of this solution stands the Barts Pro core, which uses the VLIW5 architecture with a series of improvements meant to make it more powerful than the company's previous mainstream graphics cards.
This new core includes 960 stream processors, 48 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit wide memory interface that is usually connected to 1GB of GDDR5 video buffer. The stock clock speeds of the card are set at 775MHz for the GPU and 1GHz (4GHz effective) for the memory.
AMD hasn't mentioned if this price change will affect retail prices in other parts of the world. At this time, the cheapest Radeon HD 6850 available on Newegg is listed at $154.99 ($139.99 after rebate). (via HardwareLuxx)