Evergreen - A tree with many branches
The code names of new chips and architectures are often the first to leak from companies and manufacturers. When AMD started working on its new graphics circuit architecture it decided to name the family Evergreen, which fits well with the current PC climate. Environmental issues have finally become a factor among electronics over the last couple of years we have seen more and more “green initiatives”. Computers but also home electronics consume less power than ever before and contains less toxic metal while packaging and other manufacturing processes have been refined to spare the environment.
Cypress tress (Picture courtesy of mbstours.com)
Evergreen is an botanic expression for plants that remain green all year around and something AMD has repeated with its presentations of its new graphics card family is that it will have a long life span with its future-secured architecture.
The Evergreen family contains four separate circuits where we have already mentioned RV870, which AMD prefers to call Cypress and has been launched today as the Radeon HD 5800 series Cypress is a green conifer that is most frequently found in Mediterranean countries and used when processing perfumes, when it’s not busy spitting out pixels at fantastic rates with the latest PC games.
On top of that we will see Juniper for the mid-range segment in the fourth quarter 2009.
Fittingly, Juniper is a conifer that usually doesn’t grow taller than 6m, which could explain why this name was chosen for the slower mid-range chip.
Redwood and Cedar will cover the budget market at the start of next year and just like the older siblings they are coniferous trees.
If we leave the forest and once again dive into AMD’s graphics circuit plans we also see the name Hemlock on the roadmap. The reason we haven’t discussed this conifer yet is because it’s not a new graphics circuit. Instead it’s AMD’s first Evergreen-based graphics card with dual graphics circuits. Exact specifications haven’t been revealed by AMD yet, but two Cypress circuits will be found on the PCB and will most likely be named Radeon HD 5870 X2.
AMD’s roadmap for the Evergreen family
That AMD has chosen to reveal the (near?) complete roadmap for the Evergreen family shows confidence, while it of course wants to hand out a few more kicks at NVIDIA as it hasn’t presented any official data on its first DirectX 11 capable architecture.
Even if it is hard and perhaps even ignorant to try and read too much into AMD’s code names it feels like we should expect at least some green initiatives based on the new graphics circuit architecture. This brings us to the new GPU that AMD has presented, Cypress, or RV870 which we will call it from now to simplify.
