Radeon HD 6790 based on Barts LE with 800 SPs

Database prepared :)

AMD will on March 31st launch the new mid-range card Radeon HD 6790. After we recently revealed the launch date we now have the specifications that turned out to be similar to those of the Radeon HD 6800 family, since the card is based on a GPU from the Barts series.

UPDATE: We just learned that AMD has postponed the launch to the 5th of April, probably to give AIB's more time to get their cards ready for the market. We will have more information on this and the power usage issue later today.

AMD Radeon HD 6790 will use a graphics circuit called Barts LE and as we implied in our initial article on the new card the similarities with the more powerful Radeon HD 6800 series are quite striking.

Barts LE uses AMD's classic VLIW5 architecture and will get 10 SM units (Streaming Multiprocessor) with access to a total of 800 stream processors. This can be compared to 12 SM units and 960 stream processors in Radeon HD 6850 that is based on Barts Pro.

Radeon HD 6790 has beside fewer processing units the same bus width at 256-bit and relatively powerful clock frequencies. The GPU operates at 840 MHz while the memory shuffles data at 1050 MHz (4200 MHz effectively). All to put NVIDIA's newcomer GeForce GTX 550 Ti in its place and offer a more powerful alternative to Radeon HD 5770, at a lower price than Radeon HD 6850.