The story behind the RV870 - a.k.a the Evergreen line

AnandTech has an insightful and interesting article about the release of the RV870 chipset (a.k.a. Evergreen line, a.k.a. Radeon 5XXX) and how AMD’s graphics division has really begun to shine. Think VH1’s “Behind the Music” but for the tech world.

Actually the story of the risks ATI took to keep the GPU size down and keep power requirements low without sacrificing performance is pretty interesting. Then there is the whole Eyefinity project and how it came into being!

Intrique from the article: “Other than the obvious, there was one real problem with Carrell’s secrecy. In order for Eyefinity to work, it needed support from external companies.... For a feature like SunSpot (later to be named Eyefinity) to go completely unnoticed during the development of a GPU is unheard of. Carrell even developed a rating system. The gold standard is launch; if SunSpot could remain a secret until the launch, that’s gold. Silver is if they can keep it a secret until they get chips back. And the effort would get a bronze if they could keep it a secret up to tape out, at that point NVIDIA would be at least one full product cycle behind ATI.”

And in closing: “Carrell Killebrew helped turn ATI from a traditional GPU company with a poor track record, to one that could be known for its execution. The past three product generations have been executed extremely well. Regardless of whether you’re an AMD, Intel or NVIDIA fan, you must give credit where it’s due. The past couple of years have shown us a dramatic turn around from the graphics group at AMD. To go from the shakiness of the R500 and R600 GPUs to solidly executing on the RV670, 770 and 870 year after year is praiseworthy. I almost wonder if AMD’s CPU team could learn from the graphics group’s execution. I do hope that along with the ATI acquisition came the open mindedness to learn from one another.”

A great read - highly recommended.