Video Cards in 2001: Preview

Fun on the Road

On the mobile end ATI will be debuting a new Mobility chip in the first quarter of next year that will be based on the Radeon core.  This time around ATI won’t be announcing the Mobility until it is actually in laptops which will prevent a repeat of the Mobility 128 launch which occurred 6 months before the chip actually made its way into notebooks.

As you’ll soon notice, the performance of the new Mobility chip will come down to what type of memory bus is implemented since the chip will be memory bandwidth limited by far.  What could actually be very interesting is if ATI implements a similar strategy with the Mobility Radeon as they did with the Mobility 128 in terms of memory bandwidth. 

Remembering back to our Mobility 128 Review, ATI offered a single Mobility 128 solution, with 8MB of SDRAM integrated into the Mobility 128 package (read: not on die, but on-package) with a 64-bit data path to it.  This ended up saving quite a bit of cost for notebook manufacturers since they didn’t have to worry about routing traces to an external frame buffer, and at the same time, the design allowed manufacturers to include an external 8MB of SDRAM that would extend the memory bus to 128-bits in addition to doubling the memory size. 

With the Mobility Radeon, if they implemented a similar approach to memory bus configurations ATI could theoretically include a 32-bit DDR bus to the on-package SDRAM with an option of extending the memory bus width to 64-bits if an external frame buffer is implemented as well. 

This could potentially make the Mobility Radeon as fast as the Radeon SDR which would definitely be more than enough for mobile applications.  It will be interesting to see what implementations are actually provided when the Mobility Radeon does launch, but as we said before, the amount of memory bandwidth could make or break the Mobility Radeon and could very well determine its performance level in comparison to NVIDIA’s mobile solution.

The final point of discussion with the Mobility Radeon is its power consumption, a topic which ATI would not discuss much about outside of the fact that they will be focusing on power consumption and making sure that it’s very competitive with NVIDIA’s solution.