Anandtech has posted a fascinating article on the development of the codenamed Cyprus family of GPUs from AMD. If you are not familiar with what GPU goes with the codename, then the answer is the 5800 series of chips. This includes the 5870 with 1600 shaders, the 5850 with 1440 shaders, and the 5830 with 1280 shaders – even though it has yet to be released. The article talks about all the considerations that went into designing and manufacturing the chip. My favorite part of the article is when they designed Eyefinity, which was internally called SunSpot. They were so paranoid that only a few, select people knew about SunSpot until the last minute. From the article:
When in his own cube Carrell always spoke about SunSpot in code. He called it feature A. Carrell was paranoid, and for good reason. The person who sat on the other side of Carrell’s cube wall left to work for NVIDIA a couple months into the SunSpot project. In all, ATI had three people leave and work for NVIDIA while SunSpot was going on. Carrell was confident that NVIDIA never knew what was coming.
Of course, I am still waiting for the Eyefinity6, which is the 6 DisplayPort version. I suspect, though I do not know, that it will be launched around the time of the GF400 series of cards from rival NVidia.
