While NVIDIA is expected to launch GeForce GT 520 and GT 530 in the low-end AMD has released is latest card Radeon HD 6450, based on Caicos, which has only been available to OEM earlier. Together with UVD3 it could be a perfect HTPC candidate.
AMD’s refurbished Caicos circuit comes with 160 stream processors, 8 texture units, 4 ROPs and 64-bit memory bus. It took Cedar from HD 5450 and doubled the stream processors and added the media processor UVD3.
Clock frequencies and other specificatinos vary depending the price AMD partners are looking for. The GPU ticks at 625-750 MHz and HD 6450 comes with GDDR3 533 MHz to 800 MHz (1066 MHz to 1600 MHz effectively) or GDDR5 800 MHz to 900 MHz(3200 MHz to 3600 MHz effectively).
Radeon HD 6450 is in no way a card for the gamer since it only lies on average ~60% over HD 5450 according Anandtech, but when you at the HTPC potential it looks like there is everything you would look for including support for encoding and playing 3D material.
The card isn’t listed yet, but AMD has confirmed that there will be passive solutions.
