6. Graphics Media Accelerator 900 (GMA900) Now Also In Notebooks

With the introduction of the 915 notebook chipset family and the 915GM and 915GMS models with integrated graphics cores, a new graphics chip makes its entry to notebooks. We're talking here about the Graphics Media Accelerator 900, called the GMA900 for short, which saw first light in June 2004 during the introduction of Grantsdale.

As far as we know at the moment, the performance and equipment features of the GMA900 do not differ between the desktop and notebook 915 chipset series. The GMA900 brings DirectX9 support to the notebook, and can dynamically use up to a maximum of 224 MB of RAM for image-data processing by means of Dynamic Video Memory Technology 3.0 (DVMT). The maximum bandwidth of the graphics memory in a dual-channel DDR2 533 MHz notebook is an impressive 8.5 GB/s; in contrast, the earlier Intel Extreme2 Graphics in 855GME had to make do with only 2.6 GB/s.

The 3D performance improvement of this new platform could be considerable, but unfortunately, we can't provide any concrete performance scores yet in this review. On the basis of the technical data, however, it can be assumed that the "new" graphics core's performance ability is more or less on par with that of the GMA900 in the Desktop 915 (Grantsdale). Select measurements that demonstrate the 3D performance ability of the GMA900 in the desktop platform are provided here .

We will provide the appropriate data for the new notebook platform as soon as possible.