AMD Unveils 40nm Mobility Radeon HD 4800 Series

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, March 03, 2009, 03:01 AM EDT

Back during the Consumer Electronics Show this past January, AMD announced a host of new Mobility Radeon GPUs in the ATI Radeon HD 4600 and HD 4800 families. And today, from the CeBIT trade show in Germany, AMD is announcing a few more additions to their mobile GPU line-up, the Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and HD 4830.

The Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and HD 4830 are not based on a brand new architecture, but one aspect that makes them standout from all of AMD's other mobile GPUs is that they are manufactured using a more advanced 40nm process.

Making the transition to a 40nm manufacturing process, allowed AMD to engineer a chip comprised of nearly the same number of transistors as the previous generation 55nm parts, but at a measurably smaller die size. The new 40nm ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and HD 4830 GPUs also consume less power than their 55nm counterparts, while offering similar or better performance than the previous generation.

The specifications and features of AMD's current ATI Mobility Radeon GPU line-up are listed in the table above. As you can see, the new 40nm variants are comprised of roughly 826M transistors and are equipped with 640 stream processors. DDR3, GDDR3, or GDDR5 memory types can be used with the new chips, and they utilize a 128-bit wide memory interface. The new Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and HD 4830 also feature multiple DisplayPort interfaces (with audio support), and like their desktop counterparts, they support ATI's multi-GPU CrossFireX technology as well.

No design wins have been announced just yet, but the chips are pin compatible with the previous generation 55nm parts, so implementing the Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and HD 4830 into existing designs should require minimal effort on the part of notebook manufacturers.

Update: AMD sent this information in earlier today, "For your readers who are interested in the product and want to see it in action, the AMD team has created a video to give a hint of the performance benefits of the new mobile graphics chip. Because no notebooks are currently shipping with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860, these tests were run on desktop systems using the MXM modules."

Here is the link to the video:
http://links.amd.com/ATIVideo

Additionally, AMD’s Rick Bergman has written a blog that references this new mobile graphics chip. His blog can be found here:
http://links.amd.com/Blog/

And to top that off, the AMD team has released a number of images to enhance today’s announcement. They can be found here:
http://links.amd.com/RadeonImages/

Tags: AMD, Notebook, ATI, Radeon, graphics, Mobility, GPY

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com