WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST bit of noise, AMD has – well, we can’t really call it launch, but you get the picture – released its Radeon HD 6300M and 6500M series of mobile GPUs. Now these GPU families aren’t new to us, as we discovered that Acer is getting ready to support both in its TimelineX series of notebooks a little while back.
What today’s non-announcement brings are some performance figures and they’re a small step up from the previous generation. Well, it depends on how you look at it, since as far as we can tell, the Radeon HD 6300M replaces the Mobility Radeon HD 5400 and the Radeon HD 6500M replaces the Mobility Radeon HD 5600/5700 series and with no individual parts listed, there’s quite a stretch in terms of clock speeds.
The HD 6300M for example has the same amount of shaders, texture units and ROPs as the HD 5400 series. It also tops out at the same clock speeds as the HD 5470, i.e. 750MHz for the core and 900MHz for the memory. The only changes we could notice in terms of the spec list is support for Blu-ray 3D, HDMI 1.4a (required for Blu-ray 3D), OpenGL 4.1, OpenCL 1.1 and AMD’s new morphological anti-aliasing. In fact, we’re fairly certain AMD hasn’t done much in terms of engineering here and we’re simply looking at a rebranding of the HD 5400 series.
As for the HD 6500M, it appears to replace the HD 5600/5700 series and again it seems to be very much an identical solution with a top core clock speed of 650MHz and the memory topping out at 900MHz. As for other changes, we’re looking at the exact same modifications to the spec sheet as those for the HD 6300M and we’d again draw the conclusion that AMD has barely made any changes to the HD 5600/5700 series.
Now this wouldn’t be the first time AMD or any other company for that matter has done this and in this case it’s somewhat less of an issue as it’s at the entry level and mid-range of the mobile GPU market, but it can still be seen as a dodgy thing to do. Considering that AMD’s mobile 5000-series isn’t that old, we can sort of understand why AMD has gone down this path, especially as Nvidia only recently launched its mobile GeForce 400-series parts. For what it’s worth, it seems like both sides are playing the same game, not a game we like, but apparently something we’re going to have to live with from now on.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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