Today sees the release of the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and the Radeon HD 6850. If you remember, AMD beat their rival NVIDIA to the marker with new DirectX11 cards by some 6 months with the Radeon HD 5000 series. Meanwhile, NVIDIA worked on getting out their Fermi series of graphics cards, which arrived earlier this year. This finally brought some competition back into the marketplace, which is always welcome.
Meanwhile, AMD’s engineers have not been idle. Originally they planned to launch the Radeon HD 6870 and the Radeon HD 6850 on TSMC’s 32nm process. However, TSMC decided to skip the 32 nm process, and went with the 28nm process instead. AMD then had to redo their designs for the 40nm process instead.
What this means is that this is a derivative chip series. The Radeon HD 5000 series was based on the Cypress chip family. This series is based on the Northern Island chip series, which is a derivative of the Cypress family. The specific GPU that is being used in the Radeon HD 5000 series is called the Bart GPU.
With this GPU, AMD is focusing on a lower level of price and performance. Designing, manufacturing, and selling the fastest graphics card is great, but not many people buy the high end cards. More people buy the mid level to lower end cards, and that is where the money is. The Radeon HD 6800 series has a lower performance than the previous Radeon HD 5800 series. However, it is also significantly less expensive.
AMD will continue manufacturing and selling the Radeon HD 5700 series. However, AMD will stop manufacturing the AMD HD 5800 series. The available stock of these cards is expected to last through the end of the year. Instead, AMD will focus on the Radeon 6800 series.
The Radeon HD 6870 has 1120 stream processors running at 900 MHz, 56 texture units, 32 ROPs, and a memory clock running at 1.05 GHz. The memory bus is 256 bits wide. The graphics card comes with 1 GB of memory. At full load the card consumes about 151 watts. At idle it consumes about 19 watts, which is just fantastic. The price for the card is $239.
At this price point, the Radeon HD 6870 is competing against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 with 1 GB of memory. Depending on the game and settings, the Radeon HD 6870 either slightly beats or slightly lags the GTX 470.
The Radeon HD 6850 has 960 stream processors running at 775 MHz, 48 texture units, 32 ROPs, and a memory clock running at 1.0 GHz. The memory bus is 256 bits wide. The graphics card comes with 1 GB of memory. At full load the card consumes about 127 watts. At idle it consumes about 19 watts. The price for the card is $179.
At this price point, the Radeon HD 6850 is competing against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB of memory. Depending on the game and settings, and whether or not an overclocked 460 is the competition, the Radeon HD 6850 either slightly beats or slightly lags the GTX 460.
Below we have collected some links for you with reviews of the new AMD Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 graphics cards.
