With all the announcements spilling out of CES last week, AMD’s release of the entirely revamped ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 platform seems to have slipped under radar, which is surprising considering how bold AMD’s performance claims for the new chips are. According to the AMD representatives I sat down with at the show, the Mobility Radeon 4000 series cards will double performance benchmarks set by the old 3000 series.
Which cards? According to AMD’s press release, the company was able to double 3DMark Vantage scores on an AMD Turion machine when comparing the new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 to the old ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670. From a sheer hardware spec perspective, the new flagship 4800 series also outguns the old flagship 3800 with 800 stream processing units to the old unit’s 320.
In order to stay within the slim power enveloped afforded hardware developers by notebook manufacturers, AMD had to radically increase the graphics boards’ efficiency to turn notebooks into poly-pushing gaming machines without also turning them into power hogs. To that extent, the company claims it has increased performance-per-watt by 60 percent, meaning that even playing games that don’t push the card to its limits, it should be using significantly less power than the same game on the old platform, extending battery life.
The real test, of course, will come when AMD releases the chips into the hands of critical reviewers and testers – which will be soon. Notebooks from Asus, MSI and others with the ATI Mobility Radeon 4000 inside will be coming out by the end of the first quarter.
