AMD added two new mobile GPUs to its website over the holiday weekend, marking a quiet launch for the Radeon HD 6000M generation. Thus far, the company has listed two product series in its latest mobile graphics line: the Radeon HD 6300M and 6500M. We're not sure if the 6xxx chips are rebranded or what, but both 'new' products have very similar specifications to previous 5xxx series laptop graphics processors.
The 6300M features the same number of shaders, texture units and ROPs as the 5400 series. It also peaks at the same core and memory clocks (750MHz and 900MHz) as the HD 5470, while the 6500M draws similar parallels with the 5600/5700. We only see a few differences between spec sheets: the 6000M products gain support for OpenGL 4.1, OpenCL 1.1, morphological anti-aliasing, Blu-ray 3D and HDMI 1.4a.
Although the specifications haven't changed much, we have to wonder if there are tweaks that improve performance like we saw with the recently launched Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 desktop cards. Either way, the new chips don't appear to bring a significant overhaul, so don't let buyer's remorse spoil your fun if you just bought a new notebook with 'previous-generation' Radeon HD Mobility 5000 graphics.