ATI’s CTO (Chief Technology Officer) for graphics, Eric Demers has confirmed that the chip that they call Evergreen, DX11 is the biggest conceptual chance since the time ATI has introduced rather unsuccessful R600. R600 is the last core change in ATI's GPU design.  

The RV770 can be seen as R600 done right, with lower power consumption, smaller transistors and a brand new GDDR5 memory controller, but it was not built from the ground up. At the same time, RV870 should be a huge leap forward in ATI’s chip design compared to R600, RV770, Eric confirms.

This is why ATI has high hopes for its Evergreen DirectX 11, something that we keep calling RV870 and naturally from outside, the card will look like advanced version of RV770 with DirectX 11 support. As U.S. President USA Obama is all about change, we've decided to link the RV870 and the presidential "change" promises. We expect a lot from both.

As we still don’t know many details about the final spec of the chip, we might be surprised about internal architecture. All in all, if it performs well, we should be happy about it.