Sunnyvale, California-based AMD has unleashed a new product as part of the company's range of ATI Mobility Radeon graphics solutions. Designed to boost the performance for portable computer systems, the chip maker has unveiled, at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, its latest Mobility Radeon HD 4000-series graphics chips, its next-generation series of notebook graphics processors. According to the company, the new solutions are capable of providing up to twice the performance capabilities of their predecessors, the HD 3000 series of mobile GPUs.

 

"We’re proud to highlight ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4870 as the first notebook GPU to support specially designed, ultra-high bandwidth GDDR5 graphics memory to unleash the full-throttle gaming experience normally reserved for the high-end desktop gaming rigs," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD, Graphics Products Group. "Now, notebooks equipped with one or a pair of these speedy graphics processors can take on just about any PC game and run them smoothly at their maximum option settings."

 

The new Mobility Radeon HD 4800-series graphics processors are the industry's first solutions that boast the GDDR5 memory technology, enabling twice as much memory bandwidth as the GDDR3 and GDDR4 standards. This significantly increases the performance capabilities of all the upcoming gaming laptops designed by leading PC makers. Meant for gaming, these new 55nm notebook GPUs are capable of providing up to 800 stream processors, compared to the 320 stream processors available for the HD 3800 series of graphics chips.

 

In addition, the new Mobility Radeon HD 4000-series GPUs have been designed with energy efficiency in mind, providing a balance between optimal performance and reduced power consumption. According to AMD, its high-performance Mobility Radeon 4870 GPU is capable of providing a 60-percent increase in performance-per-watt, coming with technologies such as the ATI PowerPlay, ATI PowerXpress and ATI Switchable Graphics.

 

Systems running on the HD 4000-series graphics processors have already been designed by leading system makers, such as ASUS, MSI and others, with availability expected to begin as early as Q1 2009.