AMD to Modify its Radeon HD 6000 Naming Scheme?

Earlier this week, we linked to a site that acquired leaked specs for AMD’s upcoming Radeon HD 6770 and 6750 graphics cards, and from what we saw, it became clear that things could get very, very interesting when they hit the street. Based on the specs alone, both of the cards are set to blow their predecessor out of the water – which leads us to wonder what the high-end HD 6000 series cards could be like.

If you’re one to buy into rumors, then NordicHardware has helped stir things up with a leak of their own, and this time, there’s a major change worth noting. According to the site, AMD will be changing its naming scheme a little bit for the upcoming launch, and if true, then our knowledge of current and recent Radeon naming schemes could be deemed useless going forward.

According to this leak, the HD 6770 and HD 6750 are not the cards coming out next month, but rather the HD 6870 and HD 6850. Of course, the obvious inclination is to think, “But high-end cards aren’t supposed to come out first!”. Well, that’s where things get confusing. In simplest terms, it looks like AMD could be adding the number 100 to each of its cards in a given segment. For example, the HD 6870 looks to replace the HD 5770, and the HD 6850 could replace the HD 5750.

I’m not quite willing to buy into this rumor yet, given that such a move would be very strange on AMD’s part, but I’m also open to the possibility given that stranger things have happened (did you hear that AMD bought ATI?!). Plus, as it is, there have been numerous leaks, and each one seems to have slightly different info, especially where clocks and core counts are concerned.

Perhaps of most interest is that NordicHardware also claims the launch date for the initial HD 6000 cards will be October 18. This contradicts with DigiTimes’ recent news that the launch has been pushed back into November.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for these cards to finally see the light of day so that this speculation can finally end! Then we’ll be able to get right on speculating the next major launch…

AMD Radeon HD 6850 (Barts Pro) and HD 6870 (Barts XT) will launch on October 18th (19th in some countries, if nothing gets changed in the last minute) and the new Northern Islands architecture is tuned and optimized for better performance per watt. We should not expect any revolutionary improvements over current models, but more on that soon.