AMD have already released five different graphics cards based on the Evergreen architecture and with prices from $120 up to $600 it has covered all but the budget segment. It intends to change that in January 2010 when the two budget GPUs Redwood and Cedar will arrive. Rumors suggests that AMD will launch no less than 12 new graphics cards, spread across the three series Radeon HD 5400/5500 and Radeon HD 5600. A user claims to have the flagship Radeon HD 5670 in his possession.
The card that will be priced in sub-$100 segment with all of the neat features of the bigger brothers, including energy efficient 40nm technology and DirectX 11 support. Eyefinity may not be standard with these budget models, but there should some Eyefinity models among these 12 flavors.
According to unconfirmed sources this is AMD’s coming Radeon HD 4670 card
The differences between the cards will be the amount of memory, 512MB and 1GB, which means there will not really be 12 substantially different graphics cards, but still a whole bunch of cards to keep track of.
What AMD will make of its current budget cards is hard to say since there will hardly be room for older cards, or for that matter NVIDIA’s aging architectures. You can count on the green team to be working on its new Fermi architecture, even if the budget segment is anything but a priority now.
The performance of AMD’s new budget series won’t break any performance records but with an energy efficient GPU and good multimedia functions we have a real nice option for HTPCs and less demanding 3D applications.
