2. What Does The Mobility Radeon 9600 Bring To The Party?

Since THG's Lars Weinand and Harald Thon have already written extensively about the Mobility Radeon 9600 in article titled Mobile Graphics: DX9 on the Go , we suggest that you refer to this article for more specific information.

The biggest highlight of the Mobility Radeon 9600 is the clock speed. This is the first mobile GPU that is able to run at a core clock speed of over 300 MHz. This is very impressive when you consider the fact that the Mobility Radeon 9600 often offers almost twice the performance, while using the same power or less, than the Mobility Radeon 9000. Of course, it still has to live within the thermal guidelines already established by the OEMs.

A close up of the Mobility Radeon 9600 core.

The Mobility Radeon 9600 core is built on a .13 micron process. While it is a new design for the mobile market, it has its roots in a combination of the desktop version of the Radeon 9600 and the mobile Mobility Radeon 9000 GPUs. This cross-pollination of technology is what ATI feels gives the Mobility Radeon 9600 its edge.

The Mobility Radeon 9600 delivers floating point precision which is in full compliance with the DirectX 9 specification. In addition, it has quad rendering engines, dual vertex engines, 16 textures per pixel and 12 shader ops per clock. This isn't different from the desktop version of the 9600. To deliver the highest bandwidth in a mobile solution, the Mobility Radeon 9600 is coupled with GDDR2-M memory.

We didn't have a chance to experiment with the new PowerPlay 4 technology contained within the Mobility Radeon 9600. The most interesting of the new PowerPlay 4 technologies is the dynamic clocking technology, called ATI Overdrive, that is coupled with their Power-On-Demand technology. According to ATI, they have implemented what they call "Hyper-Aggressive" clock gating for even more energy savings.

Certainly, the technology seems impressive, but, as always, the proof is in the testing, which we will get to in a moment.