Today ATI announces Mobility Radeon 9700, their latest product designed for laptop and mobile solutions. Although the "9700" moniker suggests something similar to the desktop Radeon 9700, this is in-fact the mobile equivalent of Radeon 9600 XT – Mobility Radeon 9700’s M11 chip is the same chip as Radeon 9600 XT’s RV360 meaning that it has 4 pixel pipelines and a 128-bit memory bus, and with the DirectX9 capabilities of 9600.
Being based on the RV360, M11 utilises TSMC’s 130nm low-k process, which allows notebook vendors to supply graphics with the same power requirements as Mobility Radeon 9600 but at a higher performance or at the same performance with lower power requirements. The maximum suggested core speed of Mobility Radeon 9700 is 450MHz, and has been demonstrated at such speed in a "white box" mobile gaming machine yielding a 3DMark03 score in the mid 3000’s. While ATI can have control over the process used for the core they don’t have any say on the RAM available on the time, hence the memory range is expected to be similar to Mobility Radeon 9600’s with DDR speeds of 200MHz (400MHz effective) to 260MHz (520MHZ) dependant on the design and its heat and power requirements.
As with the desktop XT parts and the Mobility 9600’s, Mobility Radeon 9700 will also have the capability of Overdrive, thanks to its on chip thermal diode, however this will be up to the notebook vendor to qualify and implement hence it still take time to make it to market, if at all. Mobility Radeon 9700 has the same driver functionality established from ATI’s Catalyst 3.8 drivers with features such as SmartShader and VPU recover. As with the ATI’s other recent products Mobility Radeon 9700 also features full HDTV support with YPrPb connector available from ATI for full resolution playback on
ATI expects Mobility Radeon 9700 powered solutions to be shipping soon, and indeed a few configurations have already been spotted.
b3d
Feb 3, 2004, 07:21 AM
