Supposed AMD Barts specifications leak

Looking very promising if the price is right

WHAT APPEARS TO be a slide from an AMD presentation about its upcoming GPUs has made its way onto the web once again via Chiphell and it gives away just about everything except the price of AMD’s upcoming Barts GPUs. AMD is putting these two parts up against Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 460 models and it will be interesting to see how they compare both in terms of performance and pricing.

The Barts Pro, which is the lesser of the two GPUs, will go up against the 768MB GTX 460 while the Barts XT is pitched against the 1GB GTX 460. This suggests that we’re looking at a pair of cards that should end up somewhere near the performance of the current Radeon HD 5830 and HD 5850, with the potential of even faster factory overclocked cards. That said, the performance will very much benchmark dependant unless AMD has come up with some way to boost its performance in the benchmarks where the company has traditionally been weak.

The Barts Pro should get an engine clock of 700-725MHz and 1GB of 256-bit GDDR5 memory with an effective clock speed of 4GHz. It will have 10 SIMDs, 40 texture units, 800 shaders, 32 ROPs and 128 Z/Stencils. The presentation also suggests the Barts Pro will draw sub 150W. The Barts XT on the other hand is clocked at 850MHz with the same amount of memory, but at a slightly faster effective clock speed of 4.2GHz. AMD has also boosted some of the other features with 12 SIMDs, 48 texture units and 960 shaders. The Barts XT will draw over 150W of power.

This all looks very good in theory and we’re fairly confident that AMD won’t have a huge problem getting the Barts to do its intended job which is beating Nvidia’s GTX 460’s in terms of performance. The question is how much these cards will retail for, but hopefully AMD won’t go crazy here and we end up with a $150-160 starting price for the Barts Pro with the XT coming in under $200. This would make the Barts based cards incredibly popular, but judging by Nvidia’s current pricing, this might be a little bit too much to hope for as AMD should be bringing out faster cards that Nvidia’s offerings and as such will be able to charge a price premium.S|A

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