14 DAY TRIAL // After what can only be described as a disappointing HD 6700-series launch, the very first details about AMD's upcoming HD 6000 entry-level GPUs made their way into the web and these cards seem to pack quite a bit more power than their Redwood-based predecessors.
Unlike the HD 6700 series that was just a rebrand of the old HD 5700 solution, designed to satisfy OEM requirements, the HD 6570 and HD 6670 are based on a new graphics core.
This is dubbed Turks and is built on the same TSMC 40nm manufacturing process as the rest of AMD's GPU family, but packs 480 stream processors and 16 ROPs compared to the 400 SPs and 8 ROPs available in the Redwood core.
In addition, Turks should also get AMD's new UVD 3.0 media decoding engine that offers 3D video hardware acceleration as well as other new features.
The rest of the specs list has remained pretty much unchanged when compared to Redwood, the Radeon HD 6570 and HD 6670 packing the same 128-bit memory interface.
Clock speeds have also been left unaltered, except for the Radeon HD 6670 that now has its core clocked 25MHz higher than the Radeon HD 5670, since it runs at 800MHz.
As for the new members of the HD 6000 family, the main difference between the two is the type of memory supported as the HD 6570 can be configured with as much as 2GB of DDR3 memory running at 900MHz while its older brother accepts as much as 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 2,000MHz.
This means the HD 6670 has more than twice the memory bandwidth of the Radeon HD 6570.
No details about the release dates of the cards were made available with the two screenshots provided, but Turks together with Caicos are expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2011. (via HardwareBase)
