M56, Mobility X1600 coming soon

IF YOU are interested in getting a notebook with decent graphics that won't be a 17-inch and six kilos machine that only works for 30 minutes on the battery, you might want to wait for M56, Mobility Radeon X1600.

ATI is about to present its mainstream mobile part based on the RV530 design. We learned that we are talking about twelve pipelines part and possibly four TMUs just like its desktop brother. This chip supports 128 bit memory only but it will be just fine for notebooks. ATI designs its chips for notebooks so this chip won't be just a tweaked RV530 core. It leaves this to Nvidia which is still just tweaking its desktop chips and brings a lot of desktop heat in its notebook designs.

It will be powerful enough to provide you very good performance in this notebook segment and it has all you need for high end games. M56, Mobility Radeon X1600 of course supports all the features of Shader Model 3.0 and we heard that the power consumption of the chip will be very good.

ATI already won some thirty OEM designs and will go live with this any day now. We know that M56 is a killer part in this market segment. Its power consumption is very favourable as it is built on a 90 nanometres process and it won't mean that twelve pipelines in the notebook have to burn your hand and warm the whole keyboard. At least we hope so.

So twelve pipelines are coming in thin and light segment and we could not be happier, we just wish that at least one of those thirty designs has a twelve inch display to go with it. µ