News Bits: ATI Mobility Graphics, Intel Penryn Benchmarks, and Eee PC Competition

AMD introduces ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 graphics cards

AMD has announced the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series graphics cards for notebooks at CES 2008. The initial models consist of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 and HD 3600; both are optimized for the upcoming 'Puma' platform. The cards fully support DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0. ATI Avivo HD technology allows for HD playback at 1080p. For connectivity, the HD 3400 and HD 3600 support DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort. Finally, the cards have ATI PowerPlay technology to balance power usage and performance.

Read More (DigiTimes.com)

Mobile Intel Penryn benchmarked
Anandtech has done a thorough review of the new Intel Mobile Penryn processor for notebooks. The current 'Santa Rosa' Intel platform for notebooks is being refreshed with the Penryn processors, which are based on a 45nm process; they are advertised to have better performance while consuming less power. In the tests, the Penryn T9500 2.6GHz chip had an increase in battery life of about 5 to 10% on average over a similar Merom (current Core 2 Duo chip) powered notebook. Performance also increased between 5 to 10% on average.

Read More (Anandtech.com)
Special thanks to forum member Han Bao Quan for submitting this bit

Packard Bell EasyNote XS/Nanobook could give Asus Eee competition

Image courtesy Engadget
The folks over at Engadget got some hands-on time with the new Packard Bell EasyNote XS Nanobook, a small ultraportable notebook. They report the notebook feels a bit 'plastick-y' but nice and runs Windows XP without any problems. The machine could give the Asus Eee PC a run for its money.

Read More (Engadget.com)
Special thanks to forum member JabbaJabba for submitting this bit

See our news story on the Everex CloudBook (US version of the same notebook) which will be available at Walmart.com later this month.

Samsung announces 500GB notebook hard drive

Right on the heels of Hitachi, Samsung has announced its own 500GB 2.5" notebook hard drive. The new Spinpoint M6 500GB features an 8MB cache, 5400RPM rotation speed, and a 3.0Gbps SATA interface. The drive is expected to be available in March 2008. Pricing has not yet been revealed.

Read More (Laptoping.com)

 

Just went to the website and got the specs.
This is for the ATI HD3600 mobile gpu

ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3600 Series - Specifications

ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3600 Product Features

* 378 million transistors using 55nm fabrication process
* Unified Superscalar shader architecture
* Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1
* OpenGL 2.0
* 128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
* Native PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
* ATI Avivo HD Video and Display architecture
* ATI PowerPlay 7.0 power management technology

Ring Bus Memory Controller

* Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes

Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1

* Shader Model 4.1
* 32-bit floating point texture filtering
* Indexed cube map arrays
* Independent blend modes per render target
* Pixel coverage sample masking
* Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
* Gather4 texture fetching

Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

* 120 stream processing units
o Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
o Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
o Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
* 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
* Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
* Shader instruction and constant caches
* Up to 40 texture fetches per clock cycle
* Up to 128 textures per pixel
* Fully associative vertex/texture cache design
* DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
* High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
* Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
* Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
* Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
* Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
* 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
* Physics processing support

If anyone understands that then feel free to explain.
All I see is 120 shader processors and 128 bit bus with DDR3 and DDR4
might be bottlenecking at extreme resolutions , with 256 bus then it might be the equal of the 8800M , not too sure though.

 

Thanks for the unexpected credit Chaz. You are too kind

For those who are interested, I just found some info and an interesting video of the Packard Bell Easynote XS as well as the Via Nanobook (reference design for the Easynote XS, Everex Cloudbook, etc.) with the very nice exchangeable module feature, such as VoIP handset, WWAN, GPS module, etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLR8wLDFtCU
http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/spearhead/nanobook/
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6873084010.html

 

Asus Eee Pc, Everex CloudBook and now another small ultraportable laptop?!
oh my my....... which one to buy... @.@

 

2nd Gen EEE. Is said to run Intel's Menlow platform and be fanless! I am buying an 8 inch one when they debut in April.

 

So the Mobility HD 3xxx series competes against the 8xxxm series right? Or the 9xxxm series?

 

IT compares ti the 9 series

the ASUS Looks a lot better

 

The Penryn CPU is pretty impressive. I wonder how Nehalem would perform. Can't wait !

 

Pretty much a HD2600 with faster clocks and smaller process. It'll be no where near a 8800M.

Expreview did a little preview with the desktop version (HD3670) and it was terrible, barely faster than a HD2600XT and consumed more power, despite the smaller process. Hopefully it's just immature drivers.

http://en.expreview.com/?p=178

 

I'm happy for ATI - there was one moment, when I thought we will have no competition for nvidia...

 

March 2008 for that harddrive, oh so mine.

 

looks like it's still a 128bit bus. Nvidia is supposed to give a 256bit one to the 9600. If that is the case, Nvidia will win the mainstream market defacto (perf wise, we never know how manufacturers decide to rip off their customers)

 

I have an ATI card now, but my next notebooke will definitely have an nVidia card. Seems like they win in most categories.

 

kind of disappointed that ati decided to stay in the mainstream market and isn't appealing the enthusiast market. still no high end gpu comparable to the 8800m cards.

 

Well i have the desktop HD 3870, and it couldnt be better, very cool, quiet and the performance/price matches the 8800GT.

 

Anandtech's look at Penryn indicates that the maximum pre-set voltages for Penryn CPUs may be lower than for Merom, but we need to see numbers for more CPUs to know that this is representative. What Anandtech didn't reveal is the minimum CPU voltages.

It's interesting that Samsung say they can squeeze 3 platters into a 9.5mm thick notebook HDD. Why hasn't this been done before? They must be extremely thin platters.

John

 

I think they and other companies should shift their focus on developing SSDs, as that will eventually, or should, become the medium for storage.

Doing this may help bring prices down sooner then later. I'd love a 120 GB SSD or something. I'm really surprised we aren't seeing more of these yet.

 

Too bad there's no announcement of "Eee PC with bigger LCD" - or anything like that.

Considering that DDR4 for HD2600Xt didn't help its performance, I doubt that 256bit bus can help it much. IMO, what it needs is extra ROP/rendering backend...And yeah, it does look like "HD2600 with DX10.1 and 55nm process" - kind of disappointing.

Penryn is sure impressive.

 

Oh ya.. nothing to do with how gpu works, but steam is giving away free copies of HL2: Portal (of which series, i forgotten... better go google) if u have a Nvidia, go get steam and run a update check or something... freebies for nvidia.. aint helping ati at all lol...

 

Portal is a standalone game, not part of any series. It just happens to have a bit of storyline tie in with HL2.

Otherwise, that is an awesome way to promote a company, free Portal.

500gb notebook drives, Geez. And I have a 160gb...only half a year old!

Penryn is a very evolutionary improvement, certainly to be expected.

Good news overall! I'm glad Asus now has a competitor in the ultra-cheap mobile market, although I have never understood the market for an Eee PC...can someone explain it to me?

 

Seesh, good thing I only bought a $900 Canadian laptop. The HD2400XT is more than good enough for my needs; needless to say, I'm not at all bothered by the HD3400 announcement.

 

The "Packard Bell EasyNote XS" that Mr. Engadgethand is holding is actually the Belinea S Note. The Everex and Packard Bell versions don't come with that VOIP phone docked next to the screen. The Belinea version also has a traditional, if tiny, touchpad you can see in the photo while the Everex and Packard Bell get a weird on-top-of-the-keyboard split arrangement. The Belinia also doubles the RAM, has an 80GB hard drive...and a touchscreen (?!?). Predictably, it also costs more than twice the Everex version the U.S. is getting.

 

You are right when it comes to the Packard Bell version. There are however many different spin-offs of the Via Nanobook UMD reference design, with or without the exchangeable module or regular touchpad. The Belinea S Note is one of them. From the picture you are referring to, it is not possible to uniquely identify it as the Belinea S Note. It could just as well be the Via Nanobook generic reference design, as you can see in these links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLR8wLDFtCU
http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/spearhead/nanobook/

 

It works like something tat u'll bring around like everyday, every hour, every minute.. but currently the battery cant make it... It's something bigger than a PDA but better at website surfing, word processing, plane riding, and so on... something like a uber PSP.. get it?

Oh, Portal aint free.. it's just a demo

 

Guys remember the HD3870 was essentially a HD2900XT with 55nm and DX10.1 and that card turned out to be VERY competitive against the awesome 8800GT.

Although I think it made a bigger difference in the desktop market because of the power consumption gap I still think it will be a good card in notebooks.

That being said nvidia hasn't even launched their mobile 9-series cards which I am looking forward to as well (hopefully it will be more than just a die shrink + DX10.1).

 

Or you could just call it an UMPC

 

Stuff the Nvidia 9 series , If my work bonus works out OK , I am trying for the 8800M equipped m15x , I am not waiting all this year just to see what the 9 series card will do.
The alienware m15x will have to do me for the next 3 years at least. Gotta the take the plunge sometime. Otherwise be waiting for ever.
Probably be waiting till end of Feb anyway in the UK for the m15x sigh...

 

If they are anything like the Packard Bell of the 1980's era I would run. I wonder if Lenovo or Acer bought them since they went into hiding in EU.

 

Cloudbook looks neat.

I tried its gOS and it seemed OK. I would prefer a small SSD drive like the EEE, but you can have it all.

 

I wonder when will the 8600GT be replaced as the king of 14" GPU...

 

lol I was about to say OMG its Packard Bell! Did they finally get with the times?

 

I was thinking that too when I saw that pic, and ironically, I'm typing on a 7-year-old Packard Bell.

 

At the moment I'm not that pleased with the mobile GPU market.
8600GT is to weak for new games like Crysis. 8800m is good enough but only currently available in one 15,4" notebook that only ships in other countries.
I want some in between cards with 5500-7500 3d mark 06 scores because a new notebook should at least be able to run a new game imo

 

My partner has a Packard Bell laptop, it's a tad lacking in features but it's more solid than a lot of notebooks I've used including my own Toshiba.

I also think their latest range are awesome looking, but most seem not to like them.

 

I hear Packard Bell doesn't have a happy history. Guess they got their act together. EeePC competition, eh... we'll see how that fairs. No moving parts FTW though.