14 DAY TRIAL // With the approach of the AMD HF 6000 series of video cards, it was expected that leaks would eventually reveal actual specifications, and it seems that the performance numbers of the so-called “Barts” GPU have now surfaced.
The HD 6000 Series will be based on the same manufacturing process technology as the HD 5000 line, the 40nm technology to be exact.
This means that part of the feature set will remain unchanged, but the leak from ChipHell shows that there are several differences between the Barts and the Juniper.
Compared to its predecessor, Barts has twice as many ROP units (Raster Operations Unit), 32 to be exact, and a simpler design methodology.
For one, the 1GB of GDDR5 memory is placed on a 256-bit interface, and this drastically increases the bandwidth, an asset complemented by a 20% boost in shader compute power.
In other words, there are only 20% more stream processors, while the number of SIMD blocks is of 10 for the Pro and 12 for the XT variants.
There is a major modification, however, in the way that said SIMD units are spread across two blocks, as is implied by the “Cypress Dual Engine Architecture”.
Basically, there will be Pro and XT versions of Barts-based cards, a HD 6x50 and a HD 6x70, respectively, and they will have the memory running at 1,000 MHz and 1,200 MHz, respectively.
All in all, the memory bandwidth should be about twice as high compared to the one on existing cards.
Finally, in terms of power consumption, the upcoming Pro variant of the video controller will draw under 150W, while the XT will consumer “over” 150W.
All in all, the board will not exactly be a major leap in GPU computing, but it should allow its maker to strengthen its position in its ever ongoing competition with NVIDIA.
Thus, the boards will battle the GeForce GTX 460 768 MB and GTX 460 1GB, the prices likely to be more or less similar. The official launch should occur sometime during the next three months.