After the official release of the Radeon HD 6450 a coule of weeks ago, AMD today released the sub-$100 Radeon HD 6670 and Radeon HD 6570 graphics cards, which will eventually replace the Radeon HD 5670 and Radeon HD 5570 respectively.
Both cards are based on AMD's "Turks" GPU, which is part of the company's Northern Islands family of chips. Turks implements the Northern Islands series? architectural improvements while also implementing a larger number of SIMDs in order to give AMD a mid-cycle performance boost on the same TSMC 40nm process.
Turks has 6 SIMDs, giving it 480 SPs and 24 texture units. The ROP count remains unchanged to 8 ROPs compared to the company's Redwood GPU (Radeon HD 5670 and Radeon HD 5570), while the memory bus is still 128 bits wide. Turks also implements UVD3, improved texture filtering, HDMI 1.4a, a revised tessellation unit, and DisplayPort 1.2 support.
At 800MHz the Radeon HD 6670 has a 25MHz core clock advantage over the HD 5670, while the 1GHz memory clock is identical to the 5670. However, the 6670 has a 20% shading and texturing improvement over the 5670. The 6670 has a 66W TDP and 12W idle TDP.
AMD Radeon HD 6670
The 6570 is taking advantage of the GDDR5 and offers significant performance advantage over the HD 5570, based on its increased memory bandwidth. Other than taht, the 6570 has 480 stream processors, 24 texture units,its GPU is clocked at 650MHz and it will be available by AMD's partners in 1GB and 512MB memory configurations. TDP ratings for the 6570 include 65W and 11W (idle.)
AMD Radeon HD 6570
The low-profile HD 6670 and HD 6570 cards feature a single DVI-DL port and a DP 1.2 port, while on the bracket is a VGA port attached with a ribbon cable. Of course, cards with an HDMI 1.4 port instead of a DP 1.2 will be also available.
AMD will be launching the 6670 at $99 and the 6570 at $79, putting both cards right in the middle of the competitive sub-$100 market. Competing cards include the Radeon HD 5670, the $99 Radeon HD 5770, the GeForce GTS 450, and the GeForce GT 440.
