Secrecy is always a big part of any launch with the manufacturer doing its utmost to prevent information being leaked; this is the case with ATI and allegedly Rick Bergman is the man behind keeping the media from finding out about all the details.
Despite this some details have been leaked: Evergreen is the codename for the series of GPUs; the new R800 dual chip was codenamed Hemlock and the top single chip, Cypress, a replacement for the 4850 codenamed Juniper. As you can see a lot of effort has gone into making all the new technology very hard to find out about.
However more and more aspects are now coming to light such as the slowest DX11 card is codenamed Cedar and the whole series will share basic spec including DirectX 11, a new 3D engine, PCI-Express 3.0 and of course they are all 40nm processes.
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I am thrilled that manufacturers are now lowering the die size instead of just beefing up processing power. A smaller die = less energy = less heat = higher overclock = happier me.