As we had expected, today ATI officially announced its response to NVIDIA’s notebook chip, GeForce2 Go. The newcomer is mobile RADEON version aka RADEON Mobility. However, we have to point out that the architecture of new graphics chip is a bit different from the ordinary RADEON and is closer to RADEON VE, actually. RADEON Mobility features only 1 rendering pipeline and doesn’t have the hardware T&L engine. However, this doesn’t mean that in this case RADEON Mobility won’t catch up with the GeForce2 Go, which represents a slower GeForce2 MX. The situation is most likely to turn out just the opposite. The thing is that one of the key features of ATI RADEON Mobility is 8 or 16Mb of embedded DDR SDRAM with the 128bit bus. as for GeForce2 Go, the regular configuration will be equipped with 64bit SDR SDRAM working much slower. Only due to higher memory bus bandwidth and to HyperZ technology, RADEON Mobility will be the most high-performance notebook graphics solution.
The specs of the newcomer look as follows:

• Core/memory frequency: up to 200MHz;
• PIXEL TAPESTRY architecture;
• 1 rendering pipeline with 3 texturing units;
• No T&L engine;
• 8/16MB embedded DDR SDRAM with 128bit bus;
• Up to 48MB external SDR/DDR SDRAM with 64bit bus;
• HyperZ technology;
• HydraVision (multi-display configurations);
• DFP;
• VIDEO IMMERSION (DVD support).

As for the really important power consumption parameter, RADEON Mobility doesn’t have any problems with that. Due to special energy saving technology, the core clock frequency may be reduced when the notebook is powered by the batteries. This allows to prolong the operation time in this case, which is an indisputable advantage of RADEON Mobility over GeForce2 Go. However, even without this cool technology, RADEON Mobility with 16MB memory consumes 2.2W in the worst case, while GeForce2 Go – 2.8W.
RADEON Mobility will start shipping to the mobile PC makers this week.