Radeon HD 5000 series
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (May 2009) |
| Release date | 2009 |
|---|---|
| Codename | Evergreen Cedar, Redwood, Juniper, Cypress, Hemlock |
| Cards | |
| Entry-level | HD 5400 HD 5500 series |
| Mid-range | HD 5600 HD 5700 series |
| High-end | HD 5800 series |
| Enthusiast | HD 5900 series |
| API support | |
| DirectX | Direct3D 11 |
| OpenCL | 1.1 |
| OpenGL | 4.1 |
| History | |
| Predecessor | Radeon HD 4000 series |
| Successor | Radeon HD 6000 series |
The Evergreen series is a family of GPUs developed by ATI Technologies
Release
The existence was spotted on a presentation slide from AMD Technology Analyst Day July 2007 as "R8xx". ATi held a press event in the USS Hornet museum on September 10, 2009[1] and announced ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology and specifications of the Radeon HD 5800 series' variants. The first variants of the Radeon HD 5800 series were launched September 23, 2009, with the HD 5700 series launching October 12 and HD 5970 launching on November 18[2] The HD 5670, was launched on January 14, 2010, and the HD 5500 and 5400 series were launched in February 2010, completing what has appeared to be most of ATi's Evergreen GPU lineup.
Demand so greatly outweighed supply that more than two months after launch, many online retailers were still having trouble keeping the 5800 and 5900 series in stock.[3]
Architecture
Terascale 2 Architecture
With the release of Cypress, the Terascale graphics engine architecture has been upgraded with twice the number of stream cores, texture units and ROP units compared to the RV770. The architecture of stream cores is largely unchanged, but adds support for DirectX 11/DirectCompute 11 capabilities with new instructions.[4] Also similar to RV770, four texture units are tied to 16 stream cores (each have five processing elements, making a total of 80 processing elements). This combination of is referred to as a SIMD core.
Unlike the predecessor, as DirectX 11 mandates full developer control over interpolation so dedicated interpolators were removed, relying instead on the SIMD cores. The stream cores can handle the higher rounding precision fused multiply-add (FMA) instruction in both single and double precision which increases precision over multiply-add (MAD) and is compliant to IEEE 754-2008 standard.[5] The instruction sum of absolute differences (SAD) has been natively added to the processors. This instruction can be used to greatly improve the performance of some processes, such as video encoding and transcoding. Each SIMD core is equipped with 32 kiB local data share and 8 kiB of L1 cache,[4] while all SIMD cores share 64 kiB global data share.
Memory controller
Each memory controller ties to two quad ROP units, one per 32-bit channel, and dedicated 128 kiB L2 cache.[4] Redwood has one quad ROP per 64-bit channel.
Multi-display technologies
AMD also introduced AMD Eyefinity Technology (previously ATI Eyefinity) in this GPU family - the ability to connect three to six displays to one graphics card. It also supports grouping of multiple monitors into a single large surface (SLS), treated by the OS as a single monitor with very high resolutions. It is promoted as an inexpensive alternative for ultra-high resolution displays.
The entire HD 5000 series products have Eyefinity capabilities supporting three outputs. The Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity Edition, however, supports six mini DisplayPort outputs, all of which can be simultaneously active.[6]
The display unit on Evergreen family of GPUs was completely replaced with one that has two DACs which are used to drive the DVI ports in analog mode (for example, when a DVI to VGA converter attached to a DVI port), a maximum of six digital transmitters that can output either a DisplayPort signal or a TMDS signal which is used for either DVI or HDMI, and two clock signal generators needed to drive the digital outputs in TMDS mode. Dual-link DVI displays use two of the two TMDS/DisplayPort transmitters and one clock signal each. Single-link DVI displays and HDMI displays use one TMDS/DisplayPort transmitter and one clock signal each. DisplayPort displays use one TMDS/DisplayPort transmitter and no clock signal.
A DisplayPort adapter or dongle can be used to convert a DisplayPort signal to another type of signal like VGA, single or dual link DVI, or HDMI if more than two non-DisplayPort displays need to be connected to a Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card.[6] The table below shows the maximum possible configurations on a normal Radeon HD 5800/5700 series add-in card.
| DVI-I/VGA | DVI-I/VGA | HDMI | DisplayPort | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Option 1 | Active | Active | Inactive | Active |
| Option 2 | Active | Inactive | Active | Active |
However, other configurations are possible while not being explicitly detailed or verified by AMD (e.g., DVI, HDMI, and VGA).[7]
Multimedia capabilities
On video capabilities, the AVIVO HD plus UVD combination is still responsible for hardware decoding for the video codecs for Blu-ray movies playback on the Evergreen family, with a few enhancements on AVIVO HD such as blue stretch for brighter white. With Catalyst 9.11 and beyond and Flash 10.1 UVD can be used to accelerate H.264 based flash videos, such as YouTube and Hulu. Display pipeline supports xvYCC gamut and 12-bit per component output via HDMI. AVIVO HD also supports DXVA 2.0 API for Windows Vista and Windows 7.
One major milestone is that the Evergreen GPU family supports HDMI 1.3a output. The previous generation R700 family GPUs only support up to LPCM 7.1 audio and no bitstream output support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio audio formats to external decoders. This feature is now supported on Evergreen family GPUs.
On Evergreen family GPUs, DisplayPort outputs on board are capable of 10-bit per component output,[4] and HDMI output is capable of 12-bit per component output.
Products
Radeon HD 5900
Codenamed Hemlock, the Radeon HD 5900 series was announced on October 12, 2009, starting with the HD 5970.[8] The Radeon HD 5900 series utilizes two Cypress graphics processors and a third-party PCI-E bridge, similar to Radeon HD 4800 X2 series graphics cards; however, AMD has abandoned the use of X2 moniker for dual-GPU variants starting with Radeon HD 5900 series, making it the only series within the Evergreen GPU family to have two GPUs on one PCB.
Radeon HD 5800
Codenamed Cypress, the Radeon HD 5800 series was announced on September 23, 2009. Products included Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5870. The launching model of Radeon HD 5870 can support three display outputs at most. In terms of overall performance, the 5870 comes in between the GTX 470 and GTX 480 from rival company Nvidia, being closer to the GTX 470 than the GTX 480.[9] An Eyefinity 6 edition of Radeon HD 5870 was released, with 2 GB GDDR5 memory, supporting six simultaneous displays to be connected to the mini DisplayPort outputs. The Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 usable stream cores, while the Radeon HD 5850 has 1,440 usable stream cores, as 160 out of the 1,600 total cores are disabled during product binning which detects potentially defective areas of the chip. A Radeon HD 5830 was released on February 25, 2010. The Radeon HD 5830 has 1,120 usable stream cores and a standard core clock of 800 MHz.
Radeon HD 5700
Codenamed Juniper, the Radeon HD 5700 series was announced on October 13, 2009. Products included Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 5770. All Radeon HD 5700 series can support up to 3 display outputs (using a special display adapter using the DisplayPort), [10] although most ship with fewer ports. The Radeon HD 5770 has 800 stream cores, while the Radeon HD 5750 has 720 stream cores, as a result of product binning. The 5770 series has a 128-bit bus width, as opposed to the 5800 series, which has a 256-bit bus width. Performance-wise, the 5770 is comparable to last-generation's Radeon 4870.[11]
Radeon HD 5600
Codenamed Redwood XT, the Radeon HD 5670 was released on January 14, 2010. The Radeon HD 5670 has 400 stream cores and a core clock of 775 MHz with 1,000 MHz (4.0 Gbit/s) GDDR5 memory.
ATi had announced that an updated version of the HD 5670 would launch in the fall of 2010. Instead of being based on the lower-end Redwood GPU architecture, it is expected to be a trimmed-down version of the HD 5700 series cards and to be based on the Juniper core.
Radeon HD 5500
Codenamed Redwood PRO and Redwood LE, the Radeon HD 5570 was released on February 9, 2010. It uses the same GPU as the Radeon HD 5670 but has a lower core frequency, at first release was limited to DDR3 memory, but later, ATI added support for GDDR5 memory. One more variant, with only 320 stream cores, is available and Radeon HD 5550 was suggested as the product name. Some Radeon HD 5550 cards have GDDR5 memory too.
All reference board designs of the Radeon HD 5500 series are half-height, making them suitable for a low profile form factor chassis.
Radeon HD 5400
Codenamed Cedar,[12] the Radeon HD 5400 series was announced on February 4, 2010, starting with the HD 5450. The Radeon HD 5450 has 80 stream cores, a core clock of 650 MHz, and 800 MHz DDR2 or DDR3 memory. The 5400 series is designed to assume a low-profile card size.
Chipset table
See also
References
- ^ "AMD is driving graphics to the edge with Eyefinity powering the SimCraft APEX sc830". SimCraft insider. 2009-09-11.
- ^ ATI Radeon HD 5970 Press Release
- ^ "O 5800, 5800, Wherefor Art Thou 5800?". [H]ArdOCP. 2009-11-10.
- ^ a b c d DirectX 11 in the Open: ATI Radeon HD 5870 Review
- ^ Report: AMD Radeon HD 5870 and 5850
- ^ a b Angelini, Chris; Abi-Chahla, Fedy (2009-09-23). "ATI Radeon HD 5870: DirectX 11, Eyefinity, And Serious Speed". Tom's Hardware. Bestofmedia Network. p. 8. Retrieved 2009-10-09.
- ^ HardOCP report
- ^ Dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 5970 released
- ^ http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-480,2585.html GTX 480 and GTX 470 Review
- ^ http://techreport.com/articles.x/17747
- ^ http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-5770-overclocking,2473-3.html
- ^ "AMD Financial Analyst Day 2009 Codename Decoder". AMD. 2009-10-11.