The HD 5800 series last month, the HD 5700 series last week, and the HD 5900 series… on the way.

Reports around the web have picked up on a very small little piece if code in the latest OpenCL 1.1 drivers released with the ATI Steam SDK 2.0 beta yesterday.  Amidst strings of instruction code, along with the HD 5700 & 5800 series, is listed support for the “ATI Radeon HD 5900 Series”.

“ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68B8
“ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68B9
“ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68BE
“ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_6898
“ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_6899
“ATI Radeon HD 5900 Series” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_689C
“ATI Radeon HD 5900 Series ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_689D
“EG CEDAR” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68E8
“EG CEDAR ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68E9
“EG CEDAR ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68F8
“EG CEDAR ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68F9
“EG CEDAR ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68FE
“EG REDWOOD” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68C8
“EG REDWOOD ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68C9
“EG REDWOOD ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68D8
“EG REDWOOD ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68D9
“EG REDWOOD ” = ati2mtag_Evergreen, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_68DE

This “5900 Series” is likely to be the name for what has commonly been referred to as “Hemlock” , the dual Cypress cards seemingly mislabelled as 5870X2 and 5850X2 pictured here. The cards are rumoured to receive the labels of HD 5970 and HD 5950. The script also alludes to the Juniper chip offshoots, Redwood and Cedar, which clearly are not yet progressed enough to be titled.

We have shown that the cards are in fact real and in the final stages of development, but ATI appears to be holding back in order to see what NVIDIA has in store, and counter Fermi closer to its release. If you looked at the benchmarks and thought the 5870 was powerful, well “you ain’t seen nothing yet”.