Renaming GPUs between generations just doesn't come as a surprise anymore. Even though NVIDIA is usually associated with such shenanigans - a reputation that it's slowly starting to shake - AMD has been just as guilty of switching names in the past.
Now, the company is back to confound ordinary consumers by rebranding the 'Juniper' based Radeon HD 5700-series cards to become members of the HD 6700 family.
Although the entire HD 6000-series of cards are based on the older Evergreen parts, the other GPUs so far have received some serious tweaks to the underlying architecture. That doesn't seem to be the case here, though. Based on the spec sheets, the HD 6770 will feature 800 stream processors, while the HD 6750 will have 720 - the same as their 5000-series counterparts.
Although clock speeds aren't listed, the fact that the compute performance and memory bandwidth are the same as the older parts suggests that they're probably the same.
The only differences on paper are support for AMD's HD3D technology and OpenGL 4.1. However, the latter has already been enabled on 5000-series cards through a driver update, and the former is rumoured to be patched in at some point in the future. The new cards will support HDMI 1.4a, although this is hardly enough to justify the jump up to the 6000-series.
This isn't something that most consumers will have to worry about, though. According to the manufacturer's web page, the rebranded boards are for OEMs only. Although retail versions might show up at some point in the future we won't be holding our breath waiting for them.
