Charlie D., formerly of The Inq, has a new site and he wants you to know that all the codenames you heard for the upcoming 40nm DX11 parts from AMD are wrong.  We first showed you the wafer shot and details of the 40nm DX11 parts last week during Computex – definitely check that out if you haven’t already. 

While we might have previously called these upcoming parts R870 or Evergreen, the two working designs are actually being given names of Evergreen trees.  The high end part will be dubbed “Cyprus” and the mid-range GPU will be called “Juniper”.  Obviously AMD is putting trees in preferential order now. 
Why is this interesting?  Because we are trying to figure out how powerful the 40nm DX11 GPU from AMD will actually be, and if the wafer we saw was Cyprus or Juniper, if could be bad or worse for NVIDIA going on the rest of 2009.
So, what are those code names? They are Cypress and Juniper. Cypress is the big chip, and Juniper is the mid-range part. ATI strongly hinted at the conference that the wafer was a Cypress, but I don’t recall if a chip code name was explicitly stated. It it was Cypress, die size estimates in the 180mm^2 range should make Nvidia very nervous. If the wafer was a Juniper, Nvidia should be far more nervous.

In the end, if you see people calling any specific part Evergreen, they don’t have a clue and are making things up. This was a very clever move on ATI’s part, it likely will gain them at least 3 levels of cunning when they level up.