X-bit labs

Acer Targets to Ship World’s First PCI Express Notebook.

Category: Mobile

by Anton Shilov

[ 09/09/2004 | 11:36 AM ]

Acer, a maker of various computer components, and ATI Technologies, a designer of graphics processors, said they aimed to ship world’s first mobile computer with PCI Express x16 graphics, bringing new feature-set and performance to customers seeking for speedy notebooks.

Acer Aspire 1800 features Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor with 800MHz processor system bus, a PCI Express-enabled chipset, ATI’s MOBILITY RADEON X600 graphics processor, dual-channel DDR memory, wide-aspect 17” display and a range of value-added multimedia features including, Aspire Arcade multimedia suite for application management and Aspire cinema vision for lifelike, full-screen DVD quality.

“By selecting ATI and MOBILITY RADEON X600, the Acer Aspire 1800 is the first to bring mobile PCI Express technology to market, and delivers the visual horsepower and versatility needed to provide leading-edge performance for digital media, content creation and 3D gaming,” said Campbell Kan, Head of Mobile Computing Business Unit, IT Products Business Group, Acer Inc.

The MOBILITY RADEON X600 chip inherits the architecture of MOBILITY RADEON 9700, includes 4 pixel and 2 vertex processors, but builds-in a number of enhancements that touch upon power-saving capabilities (POWERPLAY 5.0) as well as image quality (LCD-EE). ATI MOBILITY RADEON X600 is made at TSMC using 0.13 micron fabrication process with low-k dielectrics. In idle mode the chip consumes around 1W of energy, while under maximum load the processor devours about 9W to 10W, the company said. Core-clock of MOBILITY RADEON X600 was originally said to be expected to be from 390MHz to 450MHz depending on applications and feature 128MB of DDR memory clocked at 500MHz – 600MHz.

Both companies declined to say when exactly the Acer Aspire 1800 is planned to sell. Pricing and further technical details were also not touched upon.

Earlier this year Liebermann, a reseller of advanced mobile computers, said it was the first to ship a laptop with PCI Express interconnection used by either ATI’s or NVDIA’s mobile graphics chip. However, at press time the firm that is usually referred as “L” did not offer to buy its “Hollywood Gold XPress” laptop via its online store.