Introduction

As amazing as the 3D graphics pace has moved on the desktop in the past 12 months, mobile graphics has moved even faster. Just think where we were a year ago today in mobile graphics technology.

ATI’s 4-pixel pipeline MOBILITY RADEON 9600 family was the king of the hill, MOBILTY RADEON 9700 wasn’t launched until Spring and even though it was branded as a “9700” part, it only featured what was essentially RADEON 9600 XT-level technology.

Things heated up over the summer though, as ATI announced their MOBILITY RADEON 9800, the mobile graphics world’s first 8-pixel pipeline chip. MOBILITY RADEON 9800 was also the first mobile part with a 256-bit memory interface and featured ATI’s 3Dc normal map compression technology as well as SMARTSHADER HD, which introduced 2.0b pixel shaders: the technology first introduced in desktop RADEON X800 just a few months earlier had found its way into mobile, albeit with fewer pixel pipelines. That didn’t last long though, as last November ATI introduced the MOBILITY RADEON X800, which increased the number of pixel pipelines to 12.

The really scary part is these weren’t even all of the mobile releases for ATI. 2004 also saw the introduction of AXIOM, MOBILITY RADEON X300, and MOBILITY RADEON X600!

Now ATI is off to a quick start to begin the new year, as they’ve decided to use today’s next generation Intel Centrino mobile launch as the coming out party for their latest mobile part, MOBILITY RADEON X700. The MOBILITY RADEON X700 aims to bring X700 technology down to the thin and light notebook segment Centrino/Pentium-M currently dominate in.

ATI endows MOBILITY RADEON X700 with an impressive feature list:

8 Pixel Pipeline DX9.0 architecture for performance thin notebooks

POWERPLAY 5.0 with new PCI Express-based power management

6 Vertex Engines for best gaming and workstation performance

GDDR3 memory support

HDTV component output support

FULLSTREAM video deblocking

AXIOM-TV module featuring THEATER 550