But behind closed doors in Markham, Ontario, a small, scrappy engineering team was about to pull off one of the greatest upsets in tech history. By early 2009, AMD鈥檚 graphics division knew they couldn't win by simply making a bigger, hotter, faster version of the existing architecture. They needed a revolution. The result was a new architecture codenamed "Evergreen" 鈥� the world鈥檚 first fully compliant DirectX 11 GPU.
But AMD had a secret weapon: the (codenamed Hemlock). They simply glued two Cypress chips onto one board via a PLX bridge chip. The HD 5970 was a dual-GPU monster that became the fastest graphics card on the planet for over a year. It was so fast that it held the performance crown until NVIDIA鈥檚 GTX 580 launched a full year later. amd radeon hd 5000
The HD 5000 series was more than a product. It was a statement: Never count AMD out. And for one glorious year鈥攆rom December 2009 to late 2010鈥攖hey were the undisputed kings of the graphics card world. The dragon had been slain, and the legend of Evergreen was written. But behind closed doors in Markham, Ontario, a
The flagship chip was codenamed . The Launch: December 2009 鈥� The Bombshell On December 15, 2009, AMD unveiled the Radeon HD 5870 . The result was a new architecture codenamed "Evergreen"
In the late 2000s, the graphics card world had a clear pecking order. NVIDIA was the king. Their GeForce GTX 200 series, particularly the monstrous GTX 280 and later the refined GTX 285, were the undisputed performance champions. AMD (then ATI, before the 2006 acquisition) had been playing catch-up with their Radeon HD 4000 series. While the HD 4870 and 4890 offered great value, they couldn't quite topple NVIDIA鈥檚 single-GPU crown.
The engineering challenge was brutal. To be first, they had to tape out (finalize the design) on a brand-new, unproven 40nm manufacturing process from TSMC. The previous 55nm process was stable, but 40nm was plagued with high leakage and low yields. They also had to pack nearly 2.15 billion transistors onto a die not much larger than a postage stamp.
DirectX 11 was a massive deal. It introduced (smoother surfaces), Compute Shaders (using the GPU for non-graphics tasks), and better multi-threading. NVIDIA鈥檚 current cards only supported DirectX 10. AMD realized that if they could launch a full DX11 lineup before NVIDIA, they would own the future.
