The good news is that when it comes to enabling OpenGL/3D support for this new 'Northern Islands' hardware in the open-source stack, it should be Gallium3D-only rather than first dealing with any classic Mesa Radeon driver that will end up being deprecated anyways. AMD's few employees focused on their open-source strategy have already been focusing upon the said support for a few weeks now, but the DRM/KMS support won't be out for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel. With some luck it also won't take as long as it took for the Radeon HD 5000 series milestones with kernel mode-setting and then 2D/3D acceleration coming much later on. The AMD Radeon HD 6870 deploys the 'Barts XT' GPU and it has 1120 Stream processors, 56 texture units, 32 ROPs, a 900MHz core clock, 1GB of 1.05GHz GDDR5 memory with 256-bit interface, and a 151W TDP.Īs we reported this morning, there is no open-source Radeon HD 6000 series support ready. While those in our forums have been talking about Radeon HD 6000 specifications for weeks now with dozens of comments, the official specs for the AMD Radeon HD 6850 with its 'Barts Pro' GPU include 960 Stream processors, 48 texture units, 32 ROPs, a 775MHz core clock, 1GHz memory clock with 256-bit memory bus, 1GB frame-buffer, and a 127W TDP.

How though does the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series play with Linux? These are just two of several next-generation graphics cards to be launched over the coming weeks and months for consumers while next year the FirePro derivatives for professional/workstation customers should come around too based upon this architecture. This evening AMD has officially launched their Radeon HD 6800 series, which currently includes the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards.

Amd radeon hd 6800 specs