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’s 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" — the world’s first fully compliant DirectX 11 GPU.
The flagship chip was codenamed . The Launch: December 2009 – The Bombshell On December 15, 2009, AMD unveiled the Radeon HD 5870 . amd radeon hd 5000
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’s GTX 580 launched a full year later. But behind closed doors in Markham, Ontario, a