Radeon HD 6870

Written by Boldson on 26 October 2010. Posted in Radeon HD6xxx series

AMD launched a decisive attack on Nvidia's position in the segment of mid-priced discrete video cards, announcing the delivery of the Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 models. Recall that, starting with the Northern Islands family, Advanced Micro Devices is abolishing the logos of ATI, a Canadian video accelerator developer that has ceased to exist. in 2006 after the merger with AMD.

6870_2

The new products are based on the 40-nm Barts chip and are in fact more economical and cheaper to manufacture analogues of Cypress (Radeon HD 5870/50). The overall performance level of the Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 reflects the following slide quite accurately:

6870-6850-1

The "immodest" numerical indexes (6870 and 6850) partly compensate for the reduced power consumption - 151 W for the older solution and 127 W for the younger one. The rest of the Barts Pro/XT specs are listed below:

6870-6850-2

The recommended prices ended up being slightly higher than those announced yesterday. The reference Radeon HD 6870 is $239 and the Radeon HD 6850 is $179. Nvidia has officially reduced the price of the GeForce GTX 470 to $259, the GeForce GTX 460 1 GB to $199.

6870-6850-3

The Radeon HD 6870, in addition to higher frequencies, differs from its "younger brother" in an exceptionally rich set of video outputs - 2 x DVI (Single-Link + Dual-Link), 2 x mini-DisplayPort 1.2, 1 x HDMI and the need to power two 6-pin additional power connectors. The layout of printed circuit boards and cooling systems is also different.

Specifications ATI Radeon HD 6870

Name	Radeon HD 6870
Core	Barts XT
Process technology (µm)	0.04
Transistors (million)	1700
Core frequency	900
Memory frequency (DDR)	1050 (4200)
Bus and memory type	GDDR5 256-bit
Bandwidth (Gb/s)	134.4
Unified shader blocks	1120
Frequency of unified shader units	900
TMU per conveyor	56
ROP	32
Shader Model	5.0
DirectX	eleven
Memory	1024
Interface	PCI-E 2.1

So, let's briefly go over the main differences between the Barts cores (Radeon HD 6870/50) and the previous Cypress cores (Radeon HD 5870/50).

6870-6850-5

The area of the video chip has decreased from 334 to 255 mm2, the number of transistors - from 2.15 to 1.7 billion. Cypress has a larger number of SIMD cores (20/18 vs. 14/12), but higher frequencies, faster processing of geometry and effect Mosaic (tessellation) allows the Barts Pro/XT tandem to overtake the Radeon HD 5850. The single-chip flagship of the Evergreen generation, the Radeon HD 5870, is torn to pieces by Cayman solutions (HD 6970/60), which will debut very soon.

6870-6850-6

AMD also promises exceptional image quality through new anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering algorithms, a new Video Processing Hardware Acceleration (UVD3) block, and the ability to play Blu-ray 3D clips. The AMD APP (Accelerated Parallel Processing) acronym hides the familiar development direction of ATI Stream, and AMD's HD3D "3D gaming" technology should be appreciated by gamers.