Having added rebadged Radeon HD 5700-series GPUs to the 6000-series line-up a few weeks ago, it should come as little surprise that AMD is getting ready to flesh out the rest of the HD 6000 family.
The latest additions are the Radeon HD 6450, HD 6570 and the HD 6670, but this time the GPUs aren't straight rebrands of the older cards. Instead, they're based on the Turks and Caicos GPUs, and should outperform their predecessors courtesy of an extra block of shaders and a few more texture units.
At the top of the heap, the HD 6670 will ship with a 480 shader core and 24 texture units, up from 400 and 20 on the old HD 5670. The core clock is up 25MHz to 800MHz, while the 1GB GDDR5 will still run at 1GHz.
It looks like the HD 6570 will share the exact same Turks GPU as the HD 6670, meaning that it will also be equipped with 480 stream processors and 24 texture units. However, the frequency will be dropped to 650MHz and partners will have the choice of shipping it with GDDR5 or slower DDR3 if they choose.
The upshot of the lower clock speeds is that the reference design manages to cram everything into a half-height, single-slot package, making this a viable option for small form-factor or HTPCs.
At the entry level is the new HD 6450, based on the Caicos GPU. Relatively speaking, this is the biggest upgrade from the previous generation, since the number of shaders has doubled from 80 to 160, while texture units have been doubled to eight. The clock speed isn't strictly defined, but the core should run at between 625MHz and 750MHz, compared to its predecessors 650MHz. Again, partners will get the choice of using either 512MB or 1GB DDR3 or GDDR5.
Despite having twice the number of shaders, the card still comes in a half-height package with a single-slot passive heatsink. Unfortunately, AMD hasn't indicated what impact the extra silicon will have on the old GPU's meagre 19W power draw.
Obviously, all of the cards also get HD3D, OpenGL 4.1 and UVD 3 support, just like the other Northern Islands GPUs.
Like the HD 6750 and HD 6770, these cards are listed as OEM-only parts for the time being, but don't be surprised if they filter through to the retail channel in the coming weeks.
