AMD today released the Radeon HD 6450, a replacement of the Radeon HD 5450 in the low-end market. Based on the "Caicos" GPU, a member of AMD's "Northern Island" family of GPUs, the Radeon HD 6450 features two SIMD, 160 SPs (double from the 5450) and 8 texture units. It's core clock is 750MHz and the memory clock is 900MHz (3.6GHz data rate).

The 6450 has 370M transistors at a die size of 67mm2, while TDP has gone up from 6.4W at idle and 19W (of the Radeon HD 5450) at load to 9W at idle and 27W at load. 27W is not much to handle even under passive cooling configurations.

	AMD Radeon HD 5670	AMD Radeon HD 5570	AMD Radeon HD 6450	AMD Radeon HD 5450
Stream Processors	400	400	160	80
Texture Units	20	20	8	8
ROPs	8	8	4	4
Core Clock	775MHz	650	750MHz	650MHz
Memory Clock	1000MHz (4000MHz data rate) GDDR5	900MHz (1800MHz data rate) DDR3	900MHz (3.6GHz data rate) GDDR5	800MHz (1600MHz data rate) DDR3
Memory Bus Width	128-bit	128-bit	64-bit	64-bit
Frame Buffer	1GB / 512MB	1GB	512MB	1GB / 512MB
Transistor Count	627M	627M	370M	292M
TDP	61W	42.7W	27W	19.1W
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm
Price Point	$70-$85	$50-$70	$55	$25-$50

Display connectivity include a DL-DVI port, VGA port and a full size DisplayPort on the card but AMD's partners may implement an HDMI port instead of the DisplayPort, especially for cards sold for HTPC use.

The 6450 also supports decoding of Blu-ray 3D by taking advantage of the UVD3, which decodes MVC (frame-packed H.264) streams, along with full MPEG-2 decoding and MPEG-4 ASP (DivX/XviD) decoding.

AMD is primarily marketing the Radeon HD 6450 as an upgrade for Intel Sandy Bridge users, highlighting the card's DX11 capabilities - although don't expect to play DX11 games in high detail or tessellation with this card.

The MSRP of the HD 6450 is $55, facing the competition from AMD's own 5450, the 5550/5570, Nvidia' s GT 220 and GT 430 cards.