A flurry of new press releases this morning have announced that AMD's partners are now retailing Radeon HD 6750 and HD 6770 cards.
New launches are usually accompanied by a comprehensive, in-depth review at HEXUS, but we've heard nary a word from AMD on these 'new' cards. The reason for this silence appears to centre on AMD wanting to slip these mid-range GPUs in with the minimum of fuss. Why? Because, in the main, they're rebranded HD 5770 and HD 5750 GPUs.
Let's spell it out with ye old table.
| HD 6790 (1,024MB) |
HD 6770 (1,024MB) |
HD 5770 (1,024MB) |
HD 6750 (1,024MB) |
HD 5750 (1,024MB) |
|
| Transistors | 1.75bn | 1.04bn | 1.04bn | 1.04bn | 1.04bn |
| Die size | 255mm² | 170mm² | 170mm² | 170mm² | 170mm² |
| General clock | 840MHz | 850MHz | 850MHz | 700MHz | 700MHz |
| Shader clock | 840MHz | 850MHz | 850MHz | 700MHz | 700MHz |
| Memory clock | 4,200MHz | 4,800MHz | 4,800MHz | 4,600MHz | 4,600MHz |
| Memory size | 1,024MB GDDR5 | 1,024MB GDDR5 | 1,024MB GDDR5 | 1,024MB GDDR5 | 1,024MB GDDR5 |
| Memory interface | 256-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 134.4GB/s | 76.8GB/s | 76.8GB/s | 73.6GB/s | 73.6GB/s |
| Shaders | 800 | 800 | 800 | 720 | 720 |
| GFLOPS | 1,340 | 1,360 | 1,360 | 1,008 | 1,008 |
| Texturing | 40ppc bilinear 20ppc FP16 |
40ppc bilinear 20ppc FP16 |
40ppc bilinear 20ppc FP16 |
36ppc bilinear 18ppc FP16 |
36ppc bilinear 18ppc FP16 |
| ROPs | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| ROP rate | 13.4 | 13.6 | 13.6 | 11.2 | 11.2 |
| GTexel/s bilinear | 33.6 | 34 | 34 | 28 | 28 |
| FP16 rate | 16.8 | 17 | 17 | 14 | 14 |
| Board power (TDP) | 150W | 108W | 108W | 86W | 86W |
| Retail price | £105 | ? | £95 | ? | £85 |
The table shows that there is no obvious difference between the specifications of the two sets of cards - HD 6770 vs. HD 5770 and HD 6750 vs. HD 5750. What's more, they're both based on the Juniper core, rather than the Barts LE of the HD 6790.
So how can AMD get away with simply increasing the generation number without any meaningful change in specifications, you may be asking? Well, the HD 6770/50 are slightly different, insofar as they have the very last Unified Video Decoder (UVD) block present in the silicon. Version 3 enables DisplayPort v1.2, HDMI 1.4a, and hardware-based acceleration for Multi-View (MVC, Blu-ray 3D) DivX and Xvid codecs.
But that's your lot, folks, so don't be expecting a brand-new architecture in these mainstream offerings. Indeed, researching further, AMD snuck these under the radar back in January, in OEM form, to large system builders such as Dell.
While increasing the model number is nothing new, for AMD and NVIDIA are both past-masters at rebranding older GPUs as newer iterations, are you miffed at AMD's rebrand this time around, or do you consider it, well, par for the course these days? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the forums.
