ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 and NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5650: Taking on DX9

ATI - Mobility Radeon 9600

As you know, the Mobility Radeon 9600 (code named M10) and Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro (also code named M10) are mobile versions of the desktop Radeon 9600 (RV350). Seeing as we have already gone over that graphic processor, we won’t bore you with the details (read more here). Recapping from our last mobile graphics preview, the Radeon 9600 (including both mobile version) are produced on a 0.13 micron process, incorporates some serious memory controller optimizations, a new version of Hyper-Z compression technology, and support for component output. Power specifications, according to ATI technical documents, notes that the Mobility Radeon 9600 runs at 1.0V, and consumes 0.5W in Windows idle. We have still not been able to track down the maximum power consumption specification.

Since our preview, not much has changed in the clocks of the Mobility Radeon 9600. The official clock speeds are still at 350MHz core clock and 300MHz DDR memory clock (600MHz effective). So far, the highest frequencies in a shipping system that we have been notified of are 350MHz core clock and 270MHz memory clock. Despite market issues, we have been able to take a look at a Mobility Radeon 9600 system clocked at 350MHz core clock and 250MHz core clock.

We have had reports of memory timing and AGP issues with the Mobility Radeon 9600 A13 revision, and lately, we were informed that this problem was related to non-Intel chipset based mobile systems. But even with a non-Intel chipset based mobile system, the problems weren’t guaranteed to appear. ATI’s A14 revision of this chip solves this problem, while we should note that A13 will not encounter any problems of this nature on an Intel chipset based mobile system.

We covered Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro in past mobile graphics preview, which features OVERDRIVE, inherently higher clock speeds, and GDDR2-M, but we have still not been able to see any designs that feature this product. We are expecting to see some desktop replacement and high-end gaming notebooks that feature Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro sometime in early Q4. For a more detailed look into Mobility Radeon 9600 and Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro, read our original preview.