MOBILITY RADEON X600

Going mobile with the X600: ATI’s MOBILITY RADEON X600

For the first time, ATI is releasing its mobile and desktop products at the same time, as ATI is also announcing its MOBILITY RADEON X600 today. The MOBILITY RADEON X600 is based on the same architecture as the RADEON X600 on the desktop, only its clocked a little lower to conserve power, which is important for the notebook market. ATI expects initial mobile offerings to top out at 400MHz, with some designs bumping the core up to 450MHz in later models. On the memory side, 280MHz will be the top configuration at first, with the possibility of over 300MHz on later models with additional termination.

One new feature ATI has added to its MOBILITY X600 line is their LCD Enhancement Engine technology. LCD-EE touts one new feature in particular that has caught our interest, LCD response time compensation (LRTC).

As you probably know, the LCD panels used in many notebooks sport high pixel response times, this causes quickly moving objects to appear blurry, an effect known as ghosting. LRTC is designed to address this by enhancing video playback to account for LCD latency.

LRTC in action

ATI has added enhanced POWERPLAY 5.0 technology to MOBILITY X600’s repertoire as well. POWERLAY 5.0 takes advantage of new power management and low power modes that have been added to PCI Express to improve its efficiency. POWERLAY 5.0 also boasts VARI-BRIGHT, a portion of the graphics core has been dedicated to control the panel’s backlight. We’re eager to see this technology in action as NVIDIA added somewhat similar capabilities to their Go 5700.

AXIOM

Last week NVIDIA announced its new interface for PCI Express, MXM. AXIOM is ATI’s equivalent.

Back of the AXIOM module

The top of AXIOM

ATI’s AXIOM (Advanced eXpress I/O Module) module provides a standard platform ODMs and OEMs can integrate into their PCI Express notebooks. When a new graphics core is released from ATI, the AXIOM module with the older graphics core can be replaced for one with the newer VPU – just like swapping out a graphics card or memory module on the desktop.

ATI has AXIOM modules that are designed to address the needs of various notebook segments. For the high-end desktop replacement notebooks, power takes a backseat to performance; therefore the AXIOM module for this segment is a little larger and designed to incorporate additional features such as VPUs with wider memory interfaces and more memory. A notebook that’s designed for performance, yet thin, (say for instance, with MOBILITY X600 graphics and utilizing Intel’s Pentium M platform) has different thermal and space requirements and therefore would feature a smaller AXIOM module.