Thursday, October 14th 2010
AMD HD 6000 Northern Islands Feature Slides Leaked
AMD is close to unveiling its next-generation "Northern Islands" GPU family, which will be branded under the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series. These include two new performance-thru-extreme GPUs, namely Barts and Cayman. There's also a dual-Cayman implementation codenamed Antilles. While specifications are anyone's guess besides the little details we know about Barts and Cayman, the feature-set of the Northern Island family was communicated to AIB parts in a presentation which was leaked by the Chinese press.
To begin with, the key feature additions in Northern Islands includes a much more evolved display logic that can drive five displays simultaneously over physical outputs that include two dual-link DVI-I, one HDMI 1.4 (full-size), and two mini DisplayPort 1.2 connectors. The logic also provides you to install up to six monitors over the two DisplayPort connectors by daisy-chaining them, making use of the MultiStream feature of DP 1.2, which supports two times the data-rate of DP 1.1, and can provide very high-resolution display, or HD display with stereoscopic 3D (120 Hz). HDMI 1.4 lets you make use of Blu-ray 3D. A new video processing engine, UVD 3.0, provides GPU acceleration for MPEG-2, DivX, MVC (multi video coding), for Blu-ray 3D.
As far as performance incentives are concerned, Northern Islands does seek to add significant performance incentives over previous generations, its also comes up with a new naming scheme. Radeon HD 6800 series will be a gamer's sweet-spot performance SKU (competitive with the lower models of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 400 series, such as GTX 460), while Radeon HD 6900 series is purely for the entusiast, competitive with the higher-end models of the GeForce GTX 400 series, such as GTX 470 and GTX 480. A new king-of-the-hill SKU that succeeds the Radeon HD 5970 is also planned.
Some micro-technical details of the Barts-based and Cayman-based SKUs were also revealed. Barts XT and Barts Pro are slated for later this month, Cayman XT and Cayman Pro for late November, just in time for the winter shopping season. New relevant details include:
Source:
ChipHell
To begin with, the key feature additions in Northern Islands includes a much more evolved display logic that can drive five displays simultaneously over physical outputs that include two dual-link DVI-I, one HDMI 1.4 (full-size), and two mini DisplayPort 1.2 connectors. The logic also provides you to install up to six monitors over the two DisplayPort connectors by daisy-chaining them, making use of the MultiStream feature of DP 1.2, which supports two times the data-rate of DP 1.1, and can provide very high-resolution display, or HD display with stereoscopic 3D (120 Hz). HDMI 1.4 lets you make use of Blu-ray 3D. A new video processing engine, UVD 3.0, provides GPU acceleration for MPEG-2, DivX, MVC (multi video coding), for Blu-ray 3D.
- Cayman XT and Pro SKUs will feature 1 GB of GDDR5 memory
- Cayman XT will make use of new 6 Gb/s GDDR5 chips, likely to increase memory bandwidth by 20%; Cayman Pro will also see a 20% increase in memory bandwidth, over previous generation
50 Comments on AMD HD 6000 Northern Islands Feature Slides Leaked
Going up to the 6 Gb/s GDDR5 chips i would assume means higher cost per chip and AMD will want to keep the cost of the reference card down.
If the cayman chips are good enough i will definatly be holding out untill the 2gb cards are out as if i go with AMD i will proberley be going for a 5760x1200 eyefinity setup.
It makes them lots of money.
Neither of them go out of business.
It's like having a friend who owns a shop opposite yours selling the same things, so you alternate the days you have sales. So you both get a nice share of the pie.
a gtx 450.........
GTX 450 :wtf:
Cayman XT will make use of new 6 Gb/s GDDR5 chips, likely to increase memory bandwidth by 20%; Cayman Pro will also see a 20% increase in memory bandwidth, over previous generation
look these are new 20% increase memory chips that is why the 1gig so go nvidia and change the kotex......
It seems very odd that the 'enthusiast' level products (69xx) will only have 1GB of memory as standard. Whilst price is a factor it is still odd not to see 2GB as a standard for a card that will no doubt cost more than £350 (I don't know the USD prices).
I would assume many games would find 1gb a limitation at 2560x1600 upto 7860x1600.