The word is finally out. AMD will launch it’s much anticipated next generation graphics processors code name “Evergreen†on September 10th; ahead of Windows 7’s launch in late October.. Evergreen is the codename for AMD’s 40nm DX11 based product. With AMD’s codename shift this time around, it is still a little ambiguous as to whether Evergreen is a GPU class or a specific configuration. While it is exciting that they’re sharing what they are, AMD are still holding quite a few cards close to their chest. We know almost nothing about the details of the configuration, except that is is built on a 40nm process, is fully DX11 compliant, and that AMD put forth a slide titled “DirectX 11: sooner than you think.â€
We can ascertain from the wafer shot AMD provided us that there are about 19.5 dies vertically and 25.5 dies horizontally. As this is a 300mm wafer, we can sort of “guess†the dimensions of the chip at roughly 15.38mm x 11.76mm resulting in a die area of a little over 180mm^2. This is much smaller than the 55nm RV770 which is a 260mm^2 part, so if we expect a similar price target for the first Evergreen die that we saw with RV770, we could see a significant cost savings (and hopefully this tiny die will deliver a good general performance improvement as well).
Compare this die size to RV740 that weighs in at 137mm^2 and 826 million transistors, and we can estimate very loosely that Evergreen could come in at something over 1 billion transistors. Certainly the process has been tweaked since RV740 and Evergreen is a different architecture and layout, so scaling isn’t exact or direct, but proportionally AMD should be able to fit that many transistors into only 180mm^2 on the 40nm process.
