ATi's Radeon IGP320M Chipset A New Chance For Athlon Notebooks

2. The Current Situation

Right now, most Athlon-based notebooks out there are based on VIA's Apollo KN133 chipset. This chipset is like a time-travel back to the year 2000, when PC133 memory was still kinda hip and S3-graphics was still something people could remember. VIA's Apollo KN133 "ProSavage" is a mobile chipset with integrated S3 3D-decelerator and PC133 interface. It makes sure that AMD's great mobile Athlon 4, or now Athlon XP, processors are subject to a greatly reduced office application performance combined with pretty much non-existent 3D-graphics. Don't get me wrong, KN133 is not a bad chipset (for its price), but people with the slightest interest in system performance or 3D-graphics wouldn't possibly touch a desktop system based on this chipset. Yet, it is currently the 'best' chipset for Athlon-based notebooks. Go figure! VIA might have announced its next generation mobile Athlon chipset by the name ApolloKN266, but so far there isn't any product that comes with it and I have strong doubts if the integrated 3D-graphics will be any better than KN133's.

ATi To The Rescue

Now with the situation as described above, here comes ATi with its brand new mobile Athlon chipset, dubbed "Radeon IGP320M." Again, we are facing an integrated 3D solution with pricing advantages, but possible performance disadvantages. After all, ATi is not going to change Athlon's 'positioning problem.' AMD-based notebooks still need to be less expensive than those glorious ones with mobile Pentium 4. Still, ATi's name should stand at least for one thing, 3D-performance.

On the first look, ATi seems like a complete newcomer to the core logic (chipset) market, but in reality ATi has been working on chipsets with integrated 3D-graphics since the acquisition of ArtX a few years ago. I have visited ATi's headquarters in Toronto (Ontario, Canada) many times, and each time I was presented with a new prototype. It just took a bit long until ATi finally felt like launching the product. Theoretically, the result should be a very mature product.