Mobility Radeon HD 3000

AMD's turn at CES announcements has added the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series, its latest graphics chipset for notebooks. Similar to what standard Radeon HD 3000 line did for desktops, the Mobility version is said to bring visual and interface features that have never been seen for portables; it adds new graphics shader support for games and other 3D apps that can use the new features of DirectX 10.1 or more recent updates to OpenGL 2.0, such as new lighting techniques. The HD 3000 range also adds PCI Express 2.0 and can theoretically send data out much faster than the original version. This also adds the first-ever option of relaying video to DisplayPort monitors such as Dell's recently announced Crystal LCD, AMD says.

The HD 3000 series is also more power-efficient than before while still maintaining useful extras such as full hardware decoding of 1080p video when exposed by software. AMD says it is already shipping a low-end HD 3400 chipset with 40 stream (shader) processors and a mid-range HD 3600 sibling (120 stream processors) in notebooks as of today, beginning with ASUS' M50 gaming notebook [link to be active soon]. Future versions, such as a likely HD 3800 version, are also expected in the first half of 2008. Operating system support is not mentioned but may include Mac OS X as well as Windows XP and Vista.

By Electronista Staff