Architecture Overview
TeraScale 2 is AMD's VLIW5 architecture on 40nm, covering the Evergreen (Radeon HD 5000) and early Northern Islands (Radeon HD 6000) series from 2009 to 2012. Evergreen introduced DirectX 11 to AMD GPUs — ahead of NVIDIA's Fermi launch — and featured the first AMD hardware tessellator and OpenCL 1.1 compute support. The Cypress die (HD 5870 / 5850) launched to strong reviews and gave AMD a complete DirectX 11 lineup while NVIDIA was still shipping DirectX 10 products.
Quick Facts
- Architecture name
- TeraScale 2
- Launch era / years active
- 2009 to 2012
- Predecessor
- TeraScale (VLIW5 / 55nm)
- Successor
- TeraScale 3 (VLIW4) / GCN 1.0
- Process nodes
- 40nm (TSMC)
- Important chips
- Cypress (HD 5870 / 5850), Hemlock (HD 5970 dual-GPU), Juniper (HD 5770 / 5750), Cedar (HD 5450), Barts (HD 6870 / 6850), Turks (HD 6670 / 6570), Caicos (HD 6450)
- Memory technologies
- GDDR5, GDDR3 (lower-end models)
- CUDA / RT / Tensor generation
- VLIW5 Stream Processors; DirectX 11 (FL 11_0); OpenCL 1.1; hardware tessellation unit; Eyefinity multi-display support
- Consumer series
- Radeon HD 5870, 5850, 5770, 5750, 5670, 5570, 5450; HD 6870, 6850, 6790, 6770, 6750, 6670, 6570, 6450
- Workstation / professional series
- ATI FirePro V8800 (Cypress), V7800, V5800 (Juniper)
- Data center series
- ATI FireStream 9350, 9370 (Cypress compute)
- Source review status
- Source review complete for primary consumer product line.
What this architecture changed
First AMD DirectX 11 GPU family: hardware tessellator, compute shaders, and DirectCompute 11.
Eyefinity: support for up to 6 simultaneous display outputs from a single GPU on high-end Cypress SKUs.
OpenCL 1.1 compliance across the Evergreen lineup.
40nm process: density improvement over TeraScale 1's 55nm node, enabling the Cypress die with 2.15 billion transistors.
HD 5870 and HD 5970 held performance leadership for several months before NVIDIA shipped Fermi products.
Why it mattered
TeraScale 2 (Evergreen) gave AMD a decisive time-to-market advantage on DirectX 11: AMD had a complete DX11 lineup from the HD 5450 to the HD 5870 before NVIDIA shipped any Fermi product. This period strengthened AMD's market share in both the consumer and professional segments. The Evergreen architecture is also notable as the last ATI-branded generation — the Radeon HD 5000 launch in 2009 was the final major product announcement to carry the ATI name before AMD completed the rebrand.
Related GPUs
Popular GPU entries
| GPU | Architecture | Launch Date | Shader Processors | Memory | Bus Width | TDP/TBP | Segment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radeon HD 5670 | TeraScale 2 | 2010-01-14 | 400 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 128-bit | 64 W | Gaming |
| FirePro M2000 | TeraScale 2 | 2012-07-01 | 480 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 64-bit | 33 W | Mobile |
| FirePro M5950 | TeraScale 2 | 2011-01-04 | 480 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 128-bit | 35 W | Mobile |
| FirePro M7820 | TeraScale 2 | 2010-05-01 | 800 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 128-bit | 50 W | Mobile |
| FirePro 2460 Multi-View | TeraScale 2 | 2010-04-01 | 80 | 512 MB DDR3 | 256-bit | 17 W | Workstation |
| FirePro M5800 | TeraScale 2 | 2010-03-01 | 400 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 128-bit | 26 W | Mobile |
| Radeon HD 5970 | TeraScale 2 | 2009-11-18 | 1,600 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 256-bit | 294 W | Gaming |
| Radeon HD 6570M Mac Edition | TeraScale 2 | 2009-10-28 | 400 | 1 GB GDDR3 | 128-bit | 30 W | Gaming |
| Radeon HD 5750 | TeraScale 2 | 2009-10-13 | 720 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 128-bit | 86 W | Gaming |
| Radeon HD 5770 | TeraScale 2 | 2009-10-13 | 800 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 128-bit | 108 W | Gaming |