We all know that AMD will be launching their new GPUs soon, and we’ve heard that it’ll probably land this year with one or two strong models, as the mid-range and low-end ones would probably follow suite next year. But the question here is: When? Everyone’s been anticipating it, and now there’s a rumour from Nordic Hardware with strong source saying that it’s going to hit on October 18 (or October 19 pending on time zone).

The Radeon HD 6870 will supposedly be a complete reference product that vendors will simply brand themselves with flashy stickers and fierce sounding names.  On the other hand, the Radeon HD 6850 will be open for OEMs to customize their designs with layout changes and fancy cooling solutions.

Referring to the chart given, we’ll see the HD6k as having the same 40nm fab process as the HD5k. Moreover, the HD6k is known to only provide a minor performance boost. But what’s interesting is that the Barts Pro which is supposed to succeed the HD5850 has only 800 stream processor compared to the HD5850’s 1440 stream processors. Similar performance, yet having less stream processor which will reduce the heat produced during operations and lowering overall power needed. That’s quite impressive. But AMD has yet to comment on this rumour, and so we’ll have to wait until the real deal comes out.

SOURCE : Nordic Hardware