AMD 6-series GPU information leaking like water through a sieve

It's another wave of graphics cards from AMD, and already we've got board shots, specifications and more leaking through the internets.

Confidentiality appears to mean very little on the world stage, especially with the hardware industry - leaks are infamous for releasing information before many regional PR were even aware of the information existing.

Such is the nature of this effect that leaks of incorrect - or vague - information can pass as news for quite some time leading up to a full launch: but the pictures we've seen of AMD's upcoming 6-series cards appear to be legit (or very well emulated).

We've seen chinese website Chiphell leak information on the entire high-end AMD 6-series family; from the "Cayman XT", roughly equivalent to a HD6870, the "Barts XT", a HD6770, and the "Caicos", a HD6300.

These models are all intended to replace the existing 5-series ATI cards, and compete with the slight dominance of NVIDIA's GTX480 and GTX460 in performance and value for money, respectively.

The 6870 "Cayman XT" card, similar to the current 5870 design externally.	The 6870's rear, showing one 6- and one 8-pin PCIe power connector.
The 6770 "Barts XT", with a new circular heatsink. Strangely the power delivery appears to be on the left of the core, unlike traditionally on the right.	Behind the 6770, showing dual 6-pin PCIe power connectors.
The low-end 6300 "Caicos" card, a low-profile passive design.	It's got two outputs, HDMI and DVI, which is more than adequate for a card of this performance.

Until now we've only seen the pictures as posted above - but an entire slide leaked by Chiphell has revealed supposed specifications for the 6770 card, and its data appears in line with the rumoured series performance upgrade.

The leaked "Barts XT" 6770 slide.

Looking at the information in the slide supports the images we've seen of the 6770 above, with the greater-than 150W power draw necessitating dual 6-pin PCIe power connectors.

Interestingly the Z/Stencil and ROP units remain the same, though shader count is boosted by 160 compared to the 5770, and it gains an additional 8 Texture units that should help with graphical loads.This is a gain of exactly 20 per cent for both units.

On top of this is a core clock increase to 850MHz, representing an additional 150MHz that adds an extra 21 per cent clockspeed. Memory clocks aren't mentioned explicitly, but the increased 4.2Gbps appears to suggest a higher clock too.

Though performance does not increase proportionally to clockspeed or shader count, we can hazard a guess that the 6770 will be at least 20 per cent, and anywhere up to and above 30 per cent.

All these details will be confirmed by AMD eventually; but for now, we're considering these images and specs as accurate.