Radeon HD 6000 series

AMD Radeon HD 6000 series

Release date	October 22, 2010; 13 years ago (October 22, 2010)
Codename	Northern Islands Vancouver
Architecture	TeraScale 2 TeraScale 3
Transistors	292M 40 nm (Cedar) 370M 40 nm (Caicos) 716M 40 nm (Turks) 1.040M 40 nm (Juniper) 1.700M 40 nm (Barts) 2.640M 40 nm (Cayman) 2x 2.640M 40 nm (Antilles)
Cards
Entry-level	64xx - 66xx
Mid-range	67xx
High-end	68xx - 6970
Enthusiast	6990
API support
DirectX	Direct3D 11 (feature level 11_0) [3] Shader Model 5.0
OpenCL	OpenCL 1.2[1]
OpenGL	OpenGL 4.5[2]
History
Predecessor	Radeon HD 5000 series
Successor	Radeon HD 7000 series
Support status
Unsupported

The Northern Islands series is a family of GPUs developed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) forming part of its Radeon-brand, based on the 40 nm process. Some models are based on TeraScale 2 (VLIW5), some on the new TeraScale 3 (VLIW4) introduced with them.

Starting with this family, the former ATI brand was officially discontinued in favor of making a correlation between the graphics products and the AMD branding for computing platforms (the CPUs and chipsets). Therefore, the AMD brand was used as the replacement. The logo for graphics products and technologies also received a minor makeover (using design elements of the 2010 "AMD Vision" logo). This also marks the end of the "Mobility Radeon" name in their laptop GPUs, keeping only the "M" suffix in the GPU model number to signify a Mobile variant.

Its direct competitor was Nvidia's GeForce 500 series; they were launched approximately a month apart.