The Evergreen series is a family of
GPUs developed by
Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufa ...
for its
Radeon
Radeon () is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Tec ...
line under the
ATI brand name. It was employed in Radeon HD 5000
graphics card
A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer mo ...
series and competed directly with
Nvidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
's
GeForce 400 Series.
Release
The existence was spotted on a presentation slide from AMD Technology Analyst Day July 2007 as "R8xx". AMD held a press event in the
USS Hornet Museum on September 10, 2009
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
[ATI Radeon HD 5970 Press Release](_blank)
/ref> 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 AMD'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.
Architecture
This article is about all products under the Radeon HD 5000 Series brand
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create a ...
. TeraScale 2 was introduced with this.
*Radeon HD 5830 and above products,have the capability to calculate double-precision floating-point format
Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point.
F ...
.
*Radeon HD 5770 and below products,have the capability to calculate only single-precision floating-point format
Single-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP32 or float32) is a computer number format, usually occupying 32 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point.
A floatin ...
.
*OpenGL 4.x compliance requires supporting FP64 shaders. These are implemented by emulation on some TeraScale (microarchitecture)
TeraScale is the codename for a family of graphics processing unit microarchitectures developed by ATI Technologies/AMD and their second microarchitecture implementing the unified shader model following '' Xenos''. TeraScale replaced the old fix ...
GPUs.
Multi-monitor support
The on- die display controllers with the new brand name ATI Eyefinity were introduced with the Radeon HD 5000 Series. 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.
Display pipeline supports xvYCC gamut and 12-bit per component output via HDMI
High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device, such as a display controll ...
. HDMI 1.3a output. The previous generation Radeon R700 GPUs in the Radeon HD 4000 Series only support up to LPCM
Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the a ...
7.1 audio and no bitstream output support for Dolby TrueHD
Dolby TrueHD is a lossless, multi-channel audio codec developed by Dolby Laboratories for home video, used principally in Blu-ray Disc and compatible hardware. Dolby TrueHD, along with Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3) and Dolby AC-4, is one of th ...
and DTS-HD Master Audio
DTS-HD Master Audio (DTS-HD MA; known as DTS++ before 2004) is a multi-channel, lossless audio codec developed by DTS as an extension of the lossy DTS Coherent Acoustics codec (DTS CA; usually itself referred to as just DTS). Rather than be ...
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,[DirectX 11 in the Open: ATI Radeon HD 5870 Review](_blank)
and HDMI
High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device, such as a display controll ...
output is capable of 12-bit per component output.
Video acceleration
Unified Video Decoder
Unified Video Decoder (UVD, previously called Universal Video Decoder) is the name given to AMD's dedicated video decoding ASIC. There are multiple versions implementing a multitude of video codecs, such as H.264 and VC-1.
UVD was introduced w ...
(UVD2.2) is present on the dies Dies may refer to:
* Dies (deity), the Roman counterpart of the Greek goddess Hemera, the personification of day, daughter of Nox (Night) and Erebus (Darkness).
* Albert Christoph Dies (1755–1822), German painter, composer, and biographer
* Jos ...
of all products and supported by AMD Catalyst
AMD Radeon Software is a device driver and utility software package for AMD's graphics cards and APUs. Its graphical user interface is built with Electron and is compatible with 64-bit Windows and Linux distributions.
Software bundle
Fu ...
9.11 and later through DXVA 2.0 on Microsoft Windows and VDPAU on Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
and FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...
. The free and open-source graphics device driver#ATI/AMD also support UVD.
OpenCL (API)
OpenCL accelerates many scientific software packages up to a factor 10 or 100 and more, compared to contemporary CPUs.
OpenCL 1.0 to 1.2 are supported for all TeraScale 2 and 3 chips.
Radeon Feature Table
Desktop products
Radeon HD 5900
Codenamed ''Hemlock'', the Radeon HD 5900 series was announced on October 12, 2009, starting with the HD 5970.[Dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 5970 released](_blank)
/ref> 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, and one of these has to support DisplayPort
DisplayPort (DP) is a digital display interface developed by a consortium of PC and chip manufacturers and standardized by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA). It is primarily used to connect a video source to a display device su ...
. 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 480 than the GTX 470. An Eyefinity 6 edition of Radeon HD 5870 was released, with 2 GiB GDDR5 memory, supporting six simultaneous displays, all to be connected to one of the mini DisplayPort outputs and all supporting this connection natively to not require additional hardware. The Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 usable shader processors, 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 900 MHz.
Radeon HD 5700
The codename for the 5700 GPU was ''Juniper'' and it was exactly half of ''Cypress''. Half the shader engines, half the memory controllers, half the ROPs, half the TMUs, half everything. The 5750 had one shader engine disabled (of 10), so had 720 stream processors, while the 5770 had all ten enabled. Additionally, the 5750 ran at 700 MHz and a lower voltage, while the 5770 used more power, but ran at 850 MHz. Both cards were normally found with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, but 512 MB variants did exist, performance suffering somewhat.
Radeon HD 5600
Codenamed ''Redwood XT'', the 5600 series has all five of Redwood's shader engines enabled. As each of them has 80 VLIW-5 units, this gave it 400 stream processors. Reference clocks were 775 MHz for all 5600s, while memory clocks varied between OEMs, as did the use of DDR3 and GDDR5 memory, the latter being twice as fast.
Radeon HD 5500
The Radeon HD 5570 was released on February 9, 2010, using the Redwood XT GPU as seen in the 5600 series. 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. 5570s and 5550s were available with GDDR5, GDDR3 and DDR2 memory. The 5550 variant disabled one shader engine, so had only 320 stream processors (4 engines, 80 VLIW-5 units each).
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'', 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.
Mobile products
Graphics device drivers
AMD's proprietary graphics device driver "Catalyst"
AMD Catalyst is being developed for Microsoft Windows and Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
. As of July 2014, other operating systems are not officially supported. This may be different for the AMD FirePro brand, which is based on identical hardware but features OpenGL-certified graphics device drivers.
AMD Catalyst supports of course all features advertised for the Radeon brand.
Free and open-source graphics device driver "Radeon"
The free and open-source drivers are primarily developed on Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
and for Linux, but have been ported to other operating systems as well. On HD5000, the driver using following six parts:
# Linux kernel component DRM
# Linux kernel component KMS driver
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations ...
: basically the device driver for the display controller in kernel, called "radeon".
# user-space component libDRM: basically one of 3d drivers. The HD5000 series are using the "r600g" driver.
# user-space component in Mesa 3D;
# a special and distinct 2D graphics device driver for X.Org Server; with this card, EXA is used instead of Glamor
The free and open-source "Radeon" graphics driver supports most of the features implemented into the Radeon line of GPUs.
The free and open-source "Radeon" graphics device drivers are ''not'' reverse engineered, but based on documentation released by AMD.
See also
* AMD FirePro
* AMD FireMV
* AMD FireStream
* List of AMD graphics processing units
References
External links
ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series graphics
techPowerUp! GPU Database
Laptop products
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5700 & HD 5600 Series
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series
AMD Radeon HD 6300M Series Graphics
AMD Radeon HD 6500M Series Graphics
AMD Radeon HD 6800M Series Graphics
{{AMD graphics
AMD graphics cards under ATI brand
Computer-related introductions in 2009
Graphics cards