14 DAY TRIAL // The graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, ATI, demonstrated at the CEATEC Japan 2008 trade-show a working sample of its Mobility Radeon HD 4000-series graphics processors. The interesting part of the news is that ATI is on its way to have a dual-chip graphics solution for mobile computers as well, after marking quite a success with the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which was designed for desktop computers.
The Sunnyvale company has been working on a new breed of ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 graphics processing units for quite a while, and that is no secret to anybody. The 55nm GPUs code-named ATI M98-L and ATI M96 received PCI Express compatibility validation at PCI-SIG sometime in June. Yet, the company has kept silence over these products since then.
The chip manufacturer didn't give any information on the model numbers or performance of the demonstrated ATI Mobility Radeon HD graphics processors. There are suppositions that the company demoed at CEATEC either a Mobility Radeon HD 4800-series or a Mobility Radeon HD 4600-series processor. Traditionally, the company had the ATI Mx8 (where x represents the generation – the 9th, for ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000) graphics processing units designed for the high-end, while Mx6 aimed performance mainstream market, and the Mx4 and Mx2 were targeted at mainstream and low-end mobile machines.
Evidence of the company's plans to release a card featuring two graphics processing units comes from the list of devices that are supported by ATI Catalyst drivers, where a Mobility Radeon HD 4850 X2 card can be spotted. The company has now in preparation a wide range of new Mobility Radeon HD models, including 4650, 4670, 4850 and 4870, besides the dual-GPU solution.
The company used a development motherboard for the demonstration, which means that the card will have to wait for notebook machines able to use it. There are some that expect ATI to be able to roll out the card by the end of the year. The current AMD offerings for notebooks include mainstream Mobility Radeon HD 3600-/3400-series GPUs, but the market segment offers means of expansion and it is relatively stable.