Confusion Abounds over new AMD Radeon HD 6500M Mobility Graphics

AMD's has published details of their new mobility 6000 series part, the HD 6500M. The part is available in shipping products today... except we're not sure what it is. The specifications read like the Redwood based Mobility HD5650, apart from some key differentiators.

• TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
  • 400 Stream Processing Units
  • 20 Texture Units
  • 32 Z/Stencil ROP Units
  • 8 Color ROP Units
• Engine clock speed: 500-650 MHz
• GDDR5/DDR3 memory interface
• Memory clock speed: 900 MHz GDDR5 or DDR3
• Memory data rate: 3.6 Gbps (GDDR5) or 1.8 Gbps (DDR3)
• Memory bandwidth: 57.6 GB/sec (GDDR5) or 28.8 GB/sec (DDR3)

Here's the interesting part:

• UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator
  • Support for H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, Multi-View Codec (MVC)6, and Adobe Flash7

The problem is the UVD 2.2 found in the HD 5000 series doesn't have MVC hardware accelerated - required for BluRay 3D if your CPU isn't up to it. So that's UVD 3, as found in the Radeon HD 6800 codenamed Barts, right? Well, no - the UVD 3 has some extra special sauce for DiVX and MPEG hardware acelleration. So lets call this UVD 2.3

Next up is the DisplayPort support - this part features DP 1.2 and native Eyefinity 6 display support, with the requisite connectors. That's improved over HD 5000 series, and just like the HD 6800 cards.

HDMI 1.4a is driver level, so it, and 3D Stereoscopic support, is the same across the HD 5000 and HD 6000 series.

There are another couple of interesting tid-bits in the specifications to ponder:

• AMD CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology
  • Dual GPU scaling
• Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations