- Nov 22, 2009
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http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/item/22257-amd-preparing-barts-based-hd-6790
AMD's answer to GTX 550 Ti
According to reports from Nordic Hardware and various rumours that are floating around, AMD is preparing yet another mid-range card that will be based on the well known 40nm Barts GPU, the Radeon HD 6790. According to this naming scheme, the new HD 6790 should end up faster than the Juniper based HD 5700 cards but it will be based on the same design as the Barts flavored HD 6800 series.
The upcoming Radeon HD 6790 should end up with 800 Stream Processors organized in 10 streaming multiprocessor units. This simply means that there will be two blocks of 400 SPs with a dispatch processor for each block.
Bear in mind that the Juniper series HD 5770 also have 800 SPs but they are arranged differently. The Barts LE, as some decided to name it, will feature 32 ROPs, 40 TMUs and a 256-bit memory interface although the amount of memory it will pack is still unknown. The first rumors put this card at 840MHz GPU and 1050MHz (4.2GHz effective) memory clocks, although nothing is carved in stone and clocks can be easily changed. The card should have a 150W TDP and will need two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors.
According to our info, the new Radeon HD 6790 card should have the same price as the Geforce GTX 550 Ti. Performance wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should end up a bit faster than the GTX 550 Ti, at least in some games. The card is scheduled for an official release on April 5th.
Nordichardware.com managed to score a picture of the chip design so you can check it out here.
http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/item/22258-sapphires-hd-6790-pixellized
Looks ready to us
Although the official launch of the Radeon HD 6790 card is scheduled for April 5th, we managed to score some pictures of the Sapphire's own HD 6970 card and it looks like Sapphire is ready for the release.
In case you missed the previous news post, the upcoming Radeon HD 6790 is based on the rather well known 40nm Barts GPU and should end up with 800 stream processors and 840MHz GPU and 4.2GHz memory clock. The card has a 256-bit memory interface and Sapphire's card will carry 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The cooler on the upcoming Sapphire Radeon HD 6790 is identical to the one that Sapphire used on its HD 6870 1GB card and we sure that it will do a pretty good job in keeping GPU temps at acceptable levels.
The card has two DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort output. As we allready wrote before, the card should end up priced close to Nvidia's GTX 550 Ti and should end up a bit faster, at least in some games.
http://www.nordichardware.com/news/...n-hd-6790-based-on-barts-le-with-800-sps.html
AMD will on March 31st launch the new mid-range card Radeon HD 6790. After we recently revealed the launch date we now have the specifications that turned out to be similar to those of the Radeon HD 6800 family, since the card is based on a GPU from the Barts series. UPDATE:
We just learned that AMD has postponed the launch to the 5th of April, probably to give AIB's more time to get their cards ready for the market. We will have more information on this and the power usage issue later today.
AMD Radeon HD 6790 will use a graphics circuit called Barts LE and as we implied in our initial article on the new card the similarities with the more powerful Radeon HD 6800 series are quite striking.
Barts LE uses AMD's classic VLIW5 architecture and will get 10 SM units (Streaming Multiprocessor) with access to a total of 800 stream processors. This can be compared to 12 SM units and 960 stream processors in Radeon HD 6850 that is based on Barts Pro.
Radeon HD 6790 has beside fewer processing units the same bus width at 256-bit and relatively powerful clock frequencies. The GPU operates at 840 MHz while the memory shuffles data at 1050 MHz (4200 MHz effectively). All to put NVIDIA's newcomer GeForce GTX 550 Ti in its place and offer a more powerful alternative to Radeon HD 5770, at a lower price than Radeon HD 6850.
NVIDIA chose to launch a relatively crippled card in a higher product series, GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which runs the risk of confusing the consumers. AMD has done the opposite. Radeon HD 6790 is with the Barts LE GPU a toned down version of Radeon HD 6850 and could very well have been named Radeon HD 6830. Instead AMD chooses to lift the card into the Radeon HD 6700 series.
Radeon HD 6790 - Worse performance at higher power consumption?
The last piece of the specification is a bit confusing. Radeon HD 6790 is expected to perform worse than Radeon HD 6850, but still consume more power. AMD has specified the power consumption to maximal 150 watt, which can be compared to 129 watt for Radeon HD 6850 or 151 watt for Radeon HD 6870. With relatively high GPU and memory frequencies this sounds a lot like the launch of Radeon HD 5830 where AMD managed to launch a card that despite worse performance consumed more power than the faster brother.
Considering GeForce GTX 550 Ti is rated at 116 watt we can't really find a way to justify how Radeon HD 6790 can consume 150 watt, but this is what our sources are telling us. On March 31st we will know exactly what the number will be, but AMD has not developed a new GPU for Radeon HD 6000 but instead uses the well established Barts architecture.
.............................HD 6790............... HD 6850........... HD 6870
GPU...................... Barts LE............... Barts Pro........... Barts XT
Node......................40nm.................. 40nm................ 40nm
Die size................. 255 mm2............. 255 mm2........... 255 mm2
Transistors..............1.7 Billion............ 1.7 Billion........... 1.7 Billion
SM units.................10........................ 12..................... 14
Stream procs...........800...................... 960................... 1120
GPU frequency........ 840 MHz............... 775 MHz............. 900 MHz
Performance............1.34 TFLOPs......... 1.5 TFLOPs......... 2.0 TFLOPs
Texture units............40........................ 48..................... 56
Texture fillrate..........33.6 Gtexel/s....... 37.2 Gtexel/s...... 50.4 Gtexel/s
ROPs.......................32........................ 32...................... 32
Memory type............GDDR5................. GDDR5............... GDDR5
Memory buffer..........1GB..................... 1GB................... 1GB
Memory frequency.....4200MHz............. 4000MHz............ 4200MHz
Bus width.................256-bit................ 256-bit............... 256-bit
Bandwidth................134.4 GB/s...........128 GB/s........... 134.4 GB/s
Power connectors.......2 x 6-pin............. 1 x 6-pin............ 2 x 6-pin
Power consumption....19/150W............. 19/129W........... 19/151W
AMD's answer to GTX 550 Ti
According to reports from Nordic Hardware and various rumours that are floating around, AMD is preparing yet another mid-range card that will be based on the well known 40nm Barts GPU, the Radeon HD 6790. According to this naming scheme, the new HD 6790 should end up faster than the Juniper based HD 5700 cards but it will be based on the same design as the Barts flavored HD 6800 series.
The upcoming Radeon HD 6790 should end up with 800 Stream Processors organized in 10 streaming multiprocessor units. This simply means that there will be two blocks of 400 SPs with a dispatch processor for each block.
Bear in mind that the Juniper series HD 5770 also have 800 SPs but they are arranged differently. The Barts LE, as some decided to name it, will feature 32 ROPs, 40 TMUs and a 256-bit memory interface although the amount of memory it will pack is still unknown. The first rumors put this card at 840MHz GPU and 1050MHz (4.2GHz effective) memory clocks, although nothing is carved in stone and clocks can be easily changed. The card should have a 150W TDP and will need two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors.
According to our info, the new Radeon HD 6790 card should have the same price as the Geforce GTX 550 Ti. Performance wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should end up a bit faster than the GTX 550 Ti, at least in some games. The card is scheduled for an official release on April 5th.
Nordichardware.com managed to score a picture of the chip design so you can check it out here.
http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/item/22258-sapphires-hd-6790-pixellized
Looks ready to us
Although the official launch of the Radeon HD 6790 card is scheduled for April 5th, we managed to score some pictures of the Sapphire's own HD 6970 card and it looks like Sapphire is ready for the release.
In case you missed the previous news post, the upcoming Radeon HD 6790 is based on the rather well known 40nm Barts GPU and should end up with 800 stream processors and 840MHz GPU and 4.2GHz memory clock. The card has a 256-bit memory interface and Sapphire's card will carry 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The cooler on the upcoming Sapphire Radeon HD 6790 is identical to the one that Sapphire used on its HD 6870 1GB card and we sure that it will do a pretty good job in keeping GPU temps at acceptable levels.
The card has two DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort output. As we allready wrote before, the card should end up priced close to Nvidia's GTX 550 Ti and should end up a bit faster, at least in some games.
http://www.nordichardware.com/news/...n-hd-6790-based-on-barts-le-with-800-sps.html
AMD will on March 31st launch the new mid-range card Radeon HD 6790. After we recently revealed the launch date we now have the specifications that turned out to be similar to those of the Radeon HD 6800 family, since the card is based on a GPU from the Barts series. UPDATE:
We just learned that AMD has postponed the launch to the 5th of April, probably to give AIB's more time to get their cards ready for the market. We will have more information on this and the power usage issue later today.
AMD Radeon HD 6790 will use a graphics circuit called Barts LE and as we implied in our initial article on the new card the similarities with the more powerful Radeon HD 6800 series are quite striking.
Barts LE uses AMD's classic VLIW5 architecture and will get 10 SM units (Streaming Multiprocessor) with access to a total of 800 stream processors. This can be compared to 12 SM units and 960 stream processors in Radeon HD 6850 that is based on Barts Pro.
Radeon HD 6790 has beside fewer processing units the same bus width at 256-bit and relatively powerful clock frequencies. The GPU operates at 840 MHz while the memory shuffles data at 1050 MHz (4200 MHz effectively). All to put NVIDIA's newcomer GeForce GTX 550 Ti in its place and offer a more powerful alternative to Radeon HD 5770, at a lower price than Radeon HD 6850.
NVIDIA chose to launch a relatively crippled card in a higher product series, GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which runs the risk of confusing the consumers. AMD has done the opposite. Radeon HD 6790 is with the Barts LE GPU a toned down version of Radeon HD 6850 and could very well have been named Radeon HD 6830. Instead AMD chooses to lift the card into the Radeon HD 6700 series.
Radeon HD 6790 - Worse performance at higher power consumption?
The last piece of the specification is a bit confusing. Radeon HD 6790 is expected to perform worse than Radeon HD 6850, but still consume more power. AMD has specified the power consumption to maximal 150 watt, which can be compared to 129 watt for Radeon HD 6850 or 151 watt for Radeon HD 6870. With relatively high GPU and memory frequencies this sounds a lot like the launch of Radeon HD 5830 where AMD managed to launch a card that despite worse performance consumed more power than the faster brother.
Considering GeForce GTX 550 Ti is rated at 116 watt we can't really find a way to justify how Radeon HD 6790 can consume 150 watt, but this is what our sources are telling us. On March 31st we will know exactly what the number will be, but AMD has not developed a new GPU for Radeon HD 6000 but instead uses the well established Barts architecture.
.............................HD 6790............... HD 6850........... HD 6870
GPU...................... Barts LE............... Barts Pro........... Barts XT
Node......................40nm.................. 40nm................ 40nm
Die size................. 255 mm2............. 255 mm2........... 255 mm2
Transistors..............1.7 Billion............ 1.7 Billion........... 1.7 Billion
SM units.................10........................ 12..................... 14
Stream procs...........800...................... 960................... 1120
GPU frequency........ 840 MHz............... 775 MHz............. 900 MHz
Performance............1.34 TFLOPs......... 1.5 TFLOPs......... 2.0 TFLOPs
Texture units............40........................ 48..................... 56
Texture fillrate..........33.6 Gtexel/s....... 37.2 Gtexel/s...... 50.4 Gtexel/s
ROPs.......................32........................ 32...................... 32
Memory type............GDDR5................. GDDR5............... GDDR5
Memory buffer..........1GB..................... 1GB................... 1GB
Memory frequency.....4200MHz............. 4000MHz............ 4200MHz
Bus width.................256-bit................ 256-bit............... 256-bit
Bandwidth................134.4 GB/s...........128 GB/s........... 134.4 GB/s
Power connectors.......2 x 6-pin............. 1 x 6-pin............ 2 x 6-pin
Power consumption....19/150W............. 19/129W........... 19/151W
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