AMD to launch Radeon HD 6000 Series, “Southern Islands” on October 14, 2010

While nVidia was closing down the GPU Technology Conference, we learned that the company invited a ton of journalists to the event taking place in old Los Angeles Stock Exchange, known today as “The Exchange” in Los Angeles, CA. The event is none other than the launch of Radeon HD 6000 Series, more known to the world under the codename “Southern Islands”.

AMD Southern Islands Barts Pro and XT Specifications. Photo courtesy of EXpreview

The event will take place on October 14th, 2010 and AMD is using Hollywood to introduce the continuation of their “Cinema 2.0” story, which got introduced with the Radeon HD 4000 Series.

You can read more about the codenames for the products on the Electronista story here. Unlike the regular launch sequence, AMD plans to introduce the mainstream series first, meaning headaches for nVidia’s Sales team and if you’re a consumer like us – welcome Holiday Season 2010 with the two graphics giants slaughtering each other. As you saw in the image above, leaked specifications cite that the Barts PRO features 800 cores, while the XT version will come with 960 GPU cores. From our understanding, AMD did a good job on the refreshing the architecture, increasing the memory controller from 128-bit to 256-bit, meaning that nVidia’s 256-bit equipped GTX 460 has an potential issue, given the higher bandwidth rates AMD is known to achieve. Or, who knows… the picture below is courtesy of ChipHell.com:

AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series, the high-end part. Is this the HD 6870? We’ll know on October 12, 2010.

Expect interesting price drops to take place across the board. Regardless of who are you rooting for, you just have to admit one thing – competition is great.

Original Author: Theo Valich

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