Radeon HD 5870 Conquers The Market

RV870 - 2 billion transistors in just 334mm2

The Evergreen family is a completely new architecture for AMD which was also revealed by the naming scheme, as it now moves from the Radeon HD 4000 series to the new Radeon HD 5000 series. Though that doesn’t mean that AMD has turned everything upside down, RV870/Cypress is still very much a highly evolved version of RV770.

RV770 GPU

RV870 GPU

The Radeon HD 4000 series use AMD’s TeraScale architecture and the new HD 5000 series house AMD’s TeraScale 2 architecture. The focus is the same as before with a lot of performance from relatively small circuits and if you want more than that you use multiple GPUs, sometimes on the same card, or multiple cards.

The biggest difference between the two architectures comes with the new manufacturing technology. By moving from 55nm to the considerably more efficient and less spacious 40nm technology AMD has been able to use a lot more transistors with its latest architecture. The number of transistors have doubled since RV770. The RV870 cores measures 334mm2 and house no less than 2.15 billion transistors.

Even though RV870 has 750 million transistors more than NVIDIA’s GT200b GPU the latter is still a lot bigger, which comes down to how AMD has used the transistors and a more efficient manufacturing process.

RV870 expands and reorganize

The first step into AMD’s new graphics architecture shows that the graphics engine has been enriched with an extra extra rasterizer unit to help the GPU pushing out all those pixels. While at the same time the new Tessellation unit is programmable through DirectX 11. If we look closer we also see that AMD has revised the design of the architecture by changing the placement of the SIMD cores and expanded with new instructions and functionality for full DirectX 11 support.

One extra rasterizer and the new Tessellation unit in the center of the graphics engine

It’s time to dive into the RV870 GPU to see what has changed since the last generation.