4. ATI Shoots And Scores On The Powerplay!

Of course, hockey references are a natural for a Canadian company like ATI. In Canada, hockey is the national game, thus it is no wonder that ATI chose to name its new power management technology with descriptive hockey lingo.

Powerplay is a lot more than its name implies. For the Mobility Radeon 7500, Powerplay provides dynamic voltage and frequency modulation, which reduces power consumption. Powerplay features clock speed and voltage scaling, and these are separate from the already integrated clock gating with support for more than thirty branches. Powerplay uses a higher level of power management integration that is built into the Mobility Radeon 7500 itself, which results in extended battery life, a very important factor on the typical mobile platform. The OEM can choose to use and integrate as much or as little of this technology as they wish to use.

ATI's clock gating technology found in the Mobility Radeon 7500 has the ability to shut down unused graphics blocks. For example, if the 2D engine and the LCD are all that are active, the remaining TV, 3D engine, TMDS, CRT, and iDCT & MC block are all shut down to save power. This happens behind the scenes and is not something that the user has to fiddle with, and is in addition to the Powerplay technology. The Mobility Radeon 7500 also includes the ability to offload some of the CPU functions during DVD playback, to extend battery life even further.

ATI's Powerplay technology handles the voltage scaling, clock speed scaling, and advanced features such as the "Power On Demand" and "Low Power LCD." The Power On Demand technology dynamically changes the clock/ voltage settings, depending on the on-screen activity. The Low Power LCD mode lowers the refresh rate to extend battery life. An easy way to understand this may be to think of it this way: when on AC power, the Mobility Radeon 7500 uses higher clock speeds and more voltage for more performance; when the Mobility Radeon 7500 is in DC mode, it lowers the clock speed and voltage for maximum battery life.

One of the best ways to test the battery performance of a notebook in a normal situation is to test it during the DVD playback process. The Mobility Radeon 7500 in our test unit was not fully Powerplay-enabled. This was a choice made by the notebook OEM - in this case, Dell. During our testing, we realized better performance with the Mobility Radeon 7500 due to its internal power management technology. As mentioned previously, the Mobility Radeon 7500 shuts down all of the unused sections of the chip and cranks the clock speed down to 66MHz at 1.2 volts (which is more than enough for DVD playback), resulting in less power draw.

We were able to gain more than an additional half hour of DVD playback, which is impressive. We estimate that with fully enabled Powerplay support, you might be able to lengthen playback time by as much as an additional thirty minutes, for a total one hour increase - which is simply an outstanding achievement. We will have to wait to see a notebook with a full implementation of the ATI Powerplay technology before we can document exactly how much additional power can be saved.