Looks like codename of ATI's DirectX 11 GPU (RV870) now has an official code name.
- evergreen_hotel.jpg (115.82 KiB) Viewed 1941 times
The setting is Computex Taiwan. 2007. It is late at night after the closure of yet another day, with a bunch of westerners sitting in a hotel belonging to the Evergreen airline. These westerners weren't ordinary people - they were engineers from AMD and ATI, working for the first time together as a single company on a Far Eastern tradeshow. As the table got filled with numerous empty green bottles of "Taiwan Beer", wild ideas started to roam around.
One of ideas was why not to change the regular naming convention of the upcoming graphics parts and pull something out of the ordinary. Believe it or not, but since Evergreen hotel give free transfers from Taipei Tayouan Airport to the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Taipei, an idea was spun - why not name RV870 - Evergreen?
The idea was enthusiastically accepted as this was the time when Red color of ATI was being mixed in the Green and Black of corporate AMD, hence the acceptance. This was the first time that the GPU did not received its numerical name - usually, ATI named GPUs with both numbers and names, such as R520 "Fudo" or R580 "Rodin", with the third name being the name of the board itself.
Given the rumored specifications, there is a lot of reasons to be certain that Evergreen will be a success - first of all, it should be easy to manufacture given the experience AMD/ATI had on the RV770 [4800] and RV740 [4700]. Now you know how "the trully affordable DirectX 11 GPU" [as our source called it] got its name.
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