IT SEEMS LIKE AMD decided to call its Barts GPUs Radeon HD 6800 after all, at least according to the latest leak. Barts XT will be the Radeon HD 6870 while the Barts Pro will be the Radeon HD 6850, neither of which is a big surprise once you’ve established which series the two GPUs fall into.
The leak comes courtesy of Chinese website IT.com.cn who has since pulled the story, although not before it spread like a wildfire over the internets. The leak consist of a PDF file in simplified Chinese and it seems to list most of the specs of the new cards, with the exception of anything related to the GPU features and clock speeds. A picture of the Radeon HD 6870 accompanied the leak and it looks like a rather large card with a blower fan, just as the Radeon HD 5800 series.
The 6800 will use GDDR5 memory and this doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, but interestingly AMD has added PCI Express 2.1 support to the new cards. This doesn’t add any extra bandwidth, but it’s meant to incorporate some new management, support and troubleshooting features that will be part of the PCI Express 3.0 spec. The only new features we spotted are something AMD calls EyeSpeed which we’re not quite certain what it is and HD3D which suggests support for 3D movies and games.
To be able to support 3D movies and games, the HDMI port supports the latest HDMI 1.4a standard. The card also has two DVI ports and two mini DisplayPort 1.2 ports and it does of course supports AMD’s Eyefinity technology although it’s not clear as to how many screens can be used simultaneously with the new cards. AMD has also upgraded its video decoder and the new cards sports UVD3, although again, we don’t know what AMD has added in terms of features here.
CrossFireX is of course also supported, but again, it’s unclear as to how many cards are supported. However, a picture that leaked back in September suggests that these cards only supports two-way CrossFireX as they only have a single connector on the top of the PCB. The leak doesn’t contain very much else of any interest, but it mentions support for OpenCL and DirectCompute 11 which again were expected to be part of the feature set.
This still leaves us to ponder how much AMD is going to charge for these new cards and if they’ll end up in the same price range as the current Radeon HD 5800 series, or if they’ll in fact be replacing the Radeon HD 5700 which is now seeming more and more unlikely. We’re supposedly not very far from the launch which some are suggesting will take place on the 18th of this month, so it seems like we won’t have to wait too long to find out what will happen.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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