Today AMD officially raises the curtain on the next newest member of their Radeon HD 6000 series family, named the AMD Radeon HD 6450 and codenamed Caicos. The HD 6450 replaces the AMD ATI Radeon HD 5450 as the low end discrete GPU offering, and features significant updates compared to the outgoing Cedar card. If this product seems familiar to you, likely you saw our coverage of the OEM only Radeon HD 6600, 6500 and 6400 series earlier this year.

AMD Radeon HD 6450

Caicos is a brand new chip using the same improvements to the Terascale 2 architecture that Barts received and will be available in several versions. This offers flexibility for add-in board (AIB) partners to customize models for their target markets and price points. In this respect Caicos is a very important card as it will not only be marketed globally, it will be in the most competitive areas for inclusion - replacing iGPU offerings such as Intel HD graphics and AMD's own iGP chipset based graphics.

We said the changes from the Cedar GPU core were significant, so here's the run down on the AMD Radeon HD 6450 specifications:

AMD Radeon HD 6450 Specifications

AMD Radeon HD 6450

 Our test sample is loaded out with full 750MHz engine clock and 512MB of 900MHz GDDR5 (3.6Gbps QDR). We're testing it against the ATI Radeon HD 5450 and the integrated GPU from the 890GX chipset, the ATI Radeon HD 4290.