NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 may have dislodged AMD's Radeon HD 4870 X2 as the world's fastest single-card desktop graphics solution, but the red team has other fish to fry - namely notebooks.
At CES '09, the California-based semiconductor giant today announced the arrival of its impressive RV770 architecture in notebook form. Its new generation of notebook-orientated graphics processors - dubbed the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series - bring some of the current high-end desktop features to mobile users and are already being adopted by the likes of ASUS and MSI.
Breaking down into the Radeon HD 4800, 4600, 4500 and 4300-series, AMD's new Mobility range boasts the following specifications:
| Graphics Processor | ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4800 series |
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4600 series |
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 and 4300 series |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stream processors | 800 |
320 |
80 |
| Memory support | GDDR3, GDDR5 |
DDR2, DDR3, GDDR3 |
DDR2, DDR3, GDDR3 |
| Memory interface | 256-bit |
128-bit |
64-bit |
| Manufacturing process | 55nm |
55nm |
55nm |
| Transistor count | 956M |
514M |
242M |
| DirectX / Shader Model | DX10.1, 4.1 |
DX10.1, 4.1 |
DX10.1, 4.1 |
| Peak GFLOPS | 880 |
432 |
108 |
| Hardware-assisted video-decoding engine | AMD UVD 2 - full H.264 and VC-1 decode, plus dual-stream decode |
||
| CrossFireX support | Yes
|
Yes |
No |
880 GFLOPS of computer power and the option to double up with CrossFireX in a notebook? We figure the likes of Alienware will be lapping that up for their monster-gaming notebooks.
There's no detailed mention yet of power draw, but AMD states it "remains committed to designing energy efficient technology with optimal performance". For the battery-conscious, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series will feature ATI PowerPlay - a power management feature that'll automatically adjust between low and high energy states depending on usage.
Similarly, ATI's Switchable Graphics technology will allow desktops with both integrated and discrete graphics processors to switch between the two in real-time without having to reboot.
Official press release: AMD Launches ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4000 Series Graphics for Notebooks, Delivering Up to Twice the Gaming Performance of Previous Generation
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