AMD To Launch Radeon 6790 Graphics Card Next Week: Report
Nordic Hardware on Monday reported that AMD’s Radeon HD 6790 GPU will launch Thursday, before updating the report on Tuesday to reflect AMD’s decision push back the launch to April 5. In addition, the Web site, which claimed that AMD postponed the release to give its add-in board manufacturing partners time to prepare their own versions of the card, offered additional specifications for AMD’s Radeon HD 6790 GPU.
The Radeon HD 6790 will reportedly be based on AMD’s 40-nm Radeon 6800 series architecture, code-named Barts, which features AMD’s Eyefinity multi-display technology and support for Microsoft’s Direct X11, as well as a design aimed at energy efficiency. Despite featuring less performance, however, Radeon HD 6790 will reportedly consume more power at 150 Watt TDP than AMD’s most recent Radeon HD 6850 card, which has a TDP of 129 Watts.
AMD could not be reached for comment.
AMD’s Radeon HD 6790 reportedly leverages AMD’s VLIW5 architecture along with 800 stream processors in 10 streaming multiprocessor units, compared to 12 streaming units and 960 stream processors in the Radeon HD 6850. It also includes 40 texture units, a 256-bit memory interface, and a core clock speed of 840 MHz. AMD’s Radeon HD 6790 card includes two 6-pin power controllers and 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
Although AMD’s Radeon HD 6790 card is listed under AMD’s 6700 series products, several of its specifications are comparable to those of its 6800 series Radeon GPUs. AMD in October released the 6850 and 6870 Radeon cards. However, according to virtually every benchmark for performance, AMD's new 6000 series is actually slower than the company's highly successful 5900 series released last year due to AMD’s emphasis on energy efficiency in branding its Radeon products.
Earlier this month, AMD launched its Radeon HD 6990 graphics card, its current highest-end GPU. Code-named Antilles, AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 is up against Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 590 graphics card in the graphics enthusiast segment.