Radeon HD 2600

Radeon HD 2600 is the mid-range family of Radeon HD 2000 series and has two models, Pro and XT, with the only difference between the two being the clock rates used. It will reach the market only in late June. This huge delay is due to the new chip manufacturing process (65 nm).

On Figure 8 you can see the architecture used on Radeon HD 2600.

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Figure 8: Radeon HD 2600 architecture.

Radeon HD 2600 main features are:

• 120 streaming processors divided into three SIMD arrays with eight units per array and five processors per unit.
• Six dispatch ports
• Two texture units (16 texture address processors, 40 texture samples and eight texture filter units)
• L2 texture cache of 128 KB
• One rendering unit
• 128-bit memory interface
• Manufactured in 65 nm process

On Figures 9 and 10 you can see Radeon HD 2600 Pro and XT.

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Figure 9: Radeon HD 2600 Pro.

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Figure 10: Radeon HD 2600 XT.

According to AMD Radeon HD 2600 will have a typical power consumption of 45 W (they didn’t say which model they were talking about, Pro or XT).

AMD released two Radeon HD 2600 XT versions, one with 256 MB GDDR4 running at 2.2 GHz (1.1 GHz x 2) and another one with 256 MB GDDR3 running at 1.6 GHz (800 MHz x 2). At the time of its launch, Radeon HD 2600 XT with GDDR4 memory competes directly with GeForce 8600 GT, leaving Radeon HD 2600 XT with GDDR3 with no direct competitor. Radeon HD 2600 Pro competes directly with GeForce 8500 GT.

Model	Clock	Memory Clock	Memory Interface	Memory Configuration	Memory Transfer Rate	Streaming Processors	Suggested Price
Radeon HD 2600 Pro	600 MHz	800 MHz (400 MHz x 2)	128-bit	256 MB DDR2	12.8 GB/s	120	USD 99
Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR3	800 MHz	1.6 GHz (800 MHz x 2)	128-bit	256 MB GDDR3	25.6 GB/s	120	USD 120
Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4	800 MHz	2.2 GHz (1.1 GHz x 2)	128-bit	256 MB GDDR4	35.2 GB/s	120	USD 149

It is very important to notice that manufacturers can use a memory clock different from what is published above on their models. So you must pay close attention on this spec when comparing video cards based on these new chips, as cards from one manufacturer can be faster than cards from another manufacturer due to the difference on the memory clock used.