Graphics Rivalry continues: AMD and Nvidia Hits Mobile Market
By Usman Aziz | March 10th, 2009The Laptop gaming market is certainly hot these days with both the graphics giants, AMD/ATI and Nvidia moving in with their best. AMD/ATI recently announced the release their fifth generation Graphics chips (GPUs) made on 40nm technology for the mainstream Mobile Market.
These two new GPUs are aimed at Mainstream mobile gaming notebooks. The two news GPUs are
1)Mobility Radeon HD 4860
2)Mobility Radeon HD 4830
Both of these new GPUs sport 640 stream processors, the only difference being the core and memory clock speeds. The list of known specifications about these new GPUs in given below.
|
Specifications
|
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4830 Graphics
|
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4860 Graphics
|
|
Process Technology
|
40nm
|
40nm
|
|
Stream Processors
|
640
|
640
|
|
No. of Transistors
|
826
|
826
|
|
Engine Clock
|
450 MHz / 600 MHz
|
650 MHz
|
|
Memory Clock
|
800 MHz – 900 MHz
|
Up to 4.0 Gbps
|
|
Compute Power
|
512 GFlops – 768 GFlops
|
832 GFlops
|
|
Memory Type
|
GDDR3/DDR3
|
GDDR5
|
|
Memory Bus Width (bit)
|
128-bit
|
128-bit
|
|
DirectX® Version
|
10.1
|
10.1
|
|
UVD 2
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Integrated DisplayPort™
|
5
|
5
|
|
DisplayPort™ with Audio
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
HDMI with 7.1 Surround Sound
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
ATI CrossFireX™ Ready
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
ATI PowerXpress™/ATI™ Switchable Graphics Ready
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
The 40 nm GPUs are expected to give high performance while keeping energy consumption low. This will allow the integration of faster graphics chips in laptops and increasing efficiency. Alongwith performance features, the new mobile graphics cards include the second generation AMD Unified Video Decoder (UVD) chips for full 1080p HD video playback, and advanced power-saving ATI technologies: PowerPlay, PowerXpress, and Switchable Graphics, giving unique experience for watching HD content at low power consumption.
Following this move, Nvidia has also released a new series for their mobile graphics platform. The new GPUs unveiled are
1)Geforce GTX 280M and 260M
2)Geforce GTX 160M and 150M
The high-end GTX 280M and GTX 260M and variants from their desktop counterparts, and are expected to become the fastest GPUs in the laptop market. Nvidia claims that GTX 280M is “the fastest laptop GPU on the market, with up to 50 percent more performance than previous generation enthusiast laptop GPUs.”
Whereas GTX 160M and 150M are made for mainstream market. These can be expected to compete with the ATI’s new offering. Like their ATI competitors, they offer for HD video decoding. All the new chips are CUDA and PhyX enabled, and will certainly add to the computation power of the laptop, especially in softwares which uses GPU acceleration.