ATI Technologies unveiled on Tuesday its latest graphics processor aimed at the mobile market. The new chip is based on the RADEON X1000 architecture released in early October, 2005. The technology provides new capabilities amid low power consumption, something that may allow the chip to become pretty popular on the mobile market.

The Mobility RADEON X1600 sports 12 pixel shader processors, 5 vertex shader processors and 4 texture mapping units (TMUs). Mobility RADEON X1600 with 128MB GDDR3 memory operates at 209MHz/270MHz (core/memory) clock-speeds in 2D mode and at 473/936MHz (core/memory) in 3D mode, according to ATI. Performance in 3D games provided by the Mobility RADEON X1600 should be similar to mainstream desktop graphics cards.

While the general specifications of the Mobility RADEON X1600 are similar to the desktop flavour, the chips are even made using the same 90nm process technology, the mobile version sports such technologies as back bias, mixed vt and dynamic voltage control in addition to PowerPlay 6.0, all of which are designed to lower power consumption.

"The launch of Mobility RADEON X1600 is a very important milestone for ATI: they have just launched a unique product that may not be the fastest and most efficient from the power consumption point of view in the today’s market, but which is still unique. It is a unique combination of features for a thin performance solutions segment, and it will certainly find its users there. Besides, the Mobility RADEON X1600 has no direct rivals as of today," said X-bit labs' analysts in the special article titled "Speed a Little, Gain a Lot: ATI Mobility RADEON X1600 Preview".

Mobility Radeon X1600 will be available from such manufacturers and suppliers as Acer, Alienware, Arima, Asus, ECS, Evesham, FIC, Gericom, HP, LG, Medion, MiTAC, MSI, Packard Bell, Rockdirect, Samsung, Targa, and Uniwill.