AMD 6670 Bitcoin

Two weeks ago we saw the paper launch of the Radeon HD 6450,the low-end member of AMD’s Northern Islands family of GPUs. It was a solid product for HTPC use and a very notable improvement over the 5450 it replaced,but it was an uncharacteristically delayed launch for AMD. At the same time we noted that the Northern Islands family had one more GPU we had not seen: Turks.

As it turns out,Turks-based video cards will be launching alongside the 6450 today,delivering all of the remaining Northern Islands products in a single push. Turks will be powering the Radeon HD 6670 and Radeon HD 6570,replacing the Redwood-based Radeon HD 5670 and Radeon HD 5570 respectively. Considering that we saw AMD deliver a solid update for their low-end lineup with the 6450,will we see the same with Turks and the 6670/6570? Let’s find out.

Turks is the 4th and final member of the Northern Islands family,or to be more practical the 3rd and final member of the revised Evergreen family. Based on Redwood before it,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. With the 6450 dragging up the low-end of the market and competitive pressure from NVIDIA,AMD needed a product above the 5670 but still smaller/cheaper than the 5750,and that is what Turks will provide.

Architecturally,Turks is very close to Redwood. Compared to Redwood it has 6 SIMDs instead of 5 SIMDs,giving it 480 SPs and 24 texture units versus 400 SPs and 20 texture units on Redwood. The ROP count remains unchanged at 8 ROPs,while the memory bus is still 128 bits wide. Of course being a Northern Islands GPU,Turks implements all of the common improvements we see with NI: UVD3,improved texture filtering,HDMI 1.4a (e.g. Blu-Ray 3D),a revised tessellation unit,and DisplayPort 1.2 support.