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ATI is
actually unveiling three new products today - the
high-end Mobility RADEON 9600 Pro, a mainstream Mobility
RADEON 9200 family and new core logic, the IGP 7000M.
First, let's focus on the 9600 series that derives from
the desktop part bearing a similar name. At its
core, the Mobility RADEON 9600, codenamed M10, sports
four pixel pipelines, each equipped with a single
texture unit. Like its desktop counterpart, the
Mobility RADEON 9600 core is comprised of 60 million
transistors. That's right, for the first time
we're seeing the same processor make its way into
desktop and mobile products at the same time with the
same capabilities and very similar performance. The
DirectX 9 specification calls for 16 texture inputs per
pass - an ability that all of ATI's DX9 desktop
products boast. Mobility RADEON 9600 can also
apply 16 textures per pixel, as well as execute 12 pixel shader operations per clock (three per pixel pipeline).
Like the desktop 9600 chips, the Mobility RADEON 9600
features a pair of vertex processing engines.
Another requirement for DX9 is a fully floating-point
pixel pipeline, and the Mobility RADEON 9600 offers that
as well - the same 128-bit floating point color
precision that we were treated to when the RADEON 9700
Pro debuted last year. Additionally, the 9600 Pro
supports the same 6x gamma-corrected anti-aliasing and
16x anisotropic filtering modes that we've grown used
to.
ATI claims
that the 9600 family will ship to notebook manufacturers
in April, emerging in retail products a month later.
When it does become available, there will be two
versions of the 9600 to choose from. The most
aggressive version, the 9600 Pro, is expected to feature
a 350MHz core made possible by transitioning to a
.13-micron manufacturing process. It will be fed by
GDDR2-M memory, a new graphics memory technology that
has been specially optimized for low-power operation and
higher performance. Most importantly, it
incorporates on-die termination, which eliminates the
need for termination resistor packs and consequently
removes a lot of power circuitry currently found on the
desktop boards. Moving forward, GDDR2-M should be
good for speeds up to around 450MHz, but the Mobility
RADEON 9600 Pro will likely ship with a 300MHz DDR
memory clock. At that speed, the M10 core will
have access to 9.6GB per second of memory bandwidth, as
the chip is connected via two 64-bit memory controllers.
It is also interesting to note that the Mobility
benefits from higher Z-compression than even the RADEON
9800 Pro (8:1 lossless). The 'Pro' version also comes
with an extra goodie, beyond simply sporting higher
clock frequencies. ATI has integrated a sensor
into the chip capable of automatically adjusting
operating frequencies based on thermal load.
Enabled, this OVERDRIVE technology effectively overclocks the graphics processor beyond the default
350MHz. Of course, this technology is primarily
useful for gaming enthusiasts that will take advantage
of the additional performance in the appropriate
environment. Expect to see Mobility RADEON 9600
Pro solutions offered this summer. The non-Pro
9600 is only slightly different from ATI's flagship
mobile graphics chip. It is expected to sport core
speeds closer to 300MHz and similar memory frequencies
using standard DDR memory instead of GDDR2-M.
Mobility RADEON 9600
add-on
Notebook with modular add-on
When it
comes to mobile computing, 3D processing power is only
part of a bigger picture. Batteries are a scarce
resource on the road, so a notebook has to be designed
with power conservation in mind. Part of what
makes the Mobility RADEON 9600 so significant is the
inroads ATI has made in power savings. The smaller
transistors used in the .13-micron manufacturing process
mean the chip operates under a lower voltage - 1V
compared to 1.5V for the previous generation mobile
part. Power consumption is roughly the same, but
that is an accomplishment by itself considering how much
faster the chip operates. The graphics processor
can detect whether the system is running from battery
power, or if it is plugged in, and adjusts the power scheme
accordingly. Clock speeds and voltages are
adjustable to best suit the conditions of use.
Finally,
Mobility RADEON 9600 carries over all of the multimedia
features first introduced on the desktop part.
MPEG encode and decode are supported, as are wide-aspect
LCD displays (which we've already seen in action) and
HDTV output through a component-out dongle.
Video-in and TV-out are also available. The only
caveat to all of this is that many of these features
depend on the manufacturer to implement. Thin and
light systems will probably not feature wide-aspect
displays and we'd only hope to find HD output on a very
multimedia-centric portable. Most others won't
expose these features in the interest of cutting costs.
Mobility RADEON 9200 and IGP 7000M
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