Introduction

These are exciting times for computer enthusiasts and hobbyists. Despite the ailing world economy, cut-throat competition between computer hardware industry heavyweights couldn't have come at a better time, ensuring highly competitive prices, and the competition itself accelerating development of technology at a never before seen pace. AMD, which was until 18 months ago the weakest heavyweight compared to Intel and NVIDIA in terms of product lineup, replenished its competitiveness with a much better offering of processors (CPUs), and most interestingly, a full-fledged lineup of graphics processors that can compete with rival NVIDIA in any given market segment.

September 23 marks an important date for AMD, as that is when the company rolls out its brand new set of DirectX 11 compliant graphics processors, making opting for ATI Radeon graphics truly Windows 7 Ready. Not only is DirectX 11 compliance and its future-proofing an incentive, but also the sheer graphics processing horsepower that runs existing games blazing fast at any resolution. The company also took high-resolution gaming to a whole new level with the introduction of the AMD Eyefinity technology that lets users span one display-head over several physical displays, to achieve effective resolutions higher that the highest-resolution consumer displays.

In the run-up for September 23, enthusiasts eagerly looking forward to as much information as possible, spend time lurking in several community forums, websites, and even using translators to try and make sense of information in different languages. We thought we'll condense the web of relevant news and weave this collage, so you know where to go. This article is not a review of the products, which will be out only on the 23rd.



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Specifications

Development in the field of graphics processors relies on technologies that increase realism in 3D graphics applications, and to ensure that the technologies are effectively implemented on the consumers' side, hardware manufacturers develop graphics processors. With each technological milestone, comes a newer more complex graphics processor, and to maintain the complexity while respecting the consumer's implementation budget, companies opt for miniaturization of the graphics processor (GPU). AMD was the first company to come out with a production-grade GPU built on the 40 nm silicon fabrication technology with the RV740 Radeon HD 4700 series. While the GPU itself was flawless, the foundries making it were hit by some snags that reduced the manufacturing output of 40 nm GPUs. As a quick reaction to this, leading GPU manufacturers postured conservative when opting for the new process to build more complex GPUs (since complexity increases size of the GPU, and reduces yields), however, the foundry companies did a good job in overcoming their issues, and 40 nm GPUs, particularly the ATI Radeon HD 4770 have healthy inventories again. Displaying optimism and confidence in its foundry partners, AMD went ahead with developing Cypress, codename for the company's newest, high-performance GPU. Based on this, AMD will be releasing two main GPU SKUs: ATI Radeon HD 5870, and ATI Radeon HD 5850. The two will further be used in variants based on memory size, and special Eyefinity Editions with the necessary connectors for six displays.

The numbers in the specifications sheets are mind-boggling. Cypress keeps up with the trend RV770 set, and more than doubles on several of its resources to up the computational power of the GPU.







Building a consensus, here's what a Cypress holds in its specs sheet:

• Built on 40 nm fab. process
• Holds 2.15 billion transistors
• Substantially large GPU die going by the standards of 40 nm: 338 mm²
• 1600 stream processors available, all 1600 enabled on Radeon HD 5870, 1440 enabled on Radeon HD 5850
• Shader compute power more than doubled from the previous generation, with Radeon HD 5870 boasting of 2.72 TFLOPs, while Radeon HD 5850 2.08 TFLOPs
• 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface that uses new high-speed, low-latency memory chips. With a memory frequency of 1200 MHz (4.8 GHz effective), Radeon HD 5870 has a memory bandwidth of 153 GB/s, while the memory running at 1000 MHz (4.0 GHz effective) on Radeon HD 5850 churns out 128 GB/s of memory bandwidth
• 80 Texture Memory Units (TMUs), and 32 Raster Opteration (ROP) Units, with Radeon HD 5850 making use of 72 TMUs.
• Full DirectX 11 Shader Model 5.0, and OpenGL 3.2 support
• Support for DirectCompute 11 GPGPU model, and OpenCL

Architecture

AMD sticks to its simplified GPU design model it calls TeraScale 2 architecture. Schematics show its SIMD engines to nucleate the GPU, surrounded by command and dispatch processors on one side (that intercept inputs from the host), raster operation engines on the other, and a hub that connects to the various I/O components such as the PCI-Express 2.0 interface, six-link display controllers, CrossFire Bridge Interconnect (CFBI), and UVD 2 video processors.





What is interesting to see is that to accommodate 1600 stream processors in 20 blocks of 80 each, the engineers branched out two groups of 10 blocks each, to make them best fit in the space. Both these "super-blocks" have their own interpolators, setup engines, and are connected to crossbars on both the dispatch and export fronts. Instructions per clock-cycle have also been improved over the previous generation. It's over to the slides for the rest.




AMD has also reworked their Anisotropic Filtering algorithm to provide near-perfect results at any angle.