[Dave Baumann]

Today ATI is announcing their latest notebook graphics chip, Mobility Radeon 9800. ATI state that they are targeting the emerging "desknote" market, which have bigger power budgets and better thermal environments and their desktop and mobile teams have collaborated on to mix the full performance of their desktop parts with the mobile integration and power management features, including clock gating, to cater for the "Mobile Gaming Enthusiast".

We’ve already taken a look at ATI’s previous high end mobile graphics, Mobility Radeon 9700, and while its performance is good in many cases, its not enough to dissuade most high end gamers from their desktops. Mobility Radeon 9800 is set to redress this situation and raise the mobile performance bar a step as this mobile graphics solution is based on 130nm low-k silicon and feature 8 pixel rendering pipelines, 4 Vertex Shaders, a 256-bit memory bus and up to 256MB of graphics RAM for the first time.

Click Image to Enlarge

Mobility Radeon 9800

In keeping with the rather confusing naming schemes ATI adopt between the mobile and desktop variants, Mobility Radeon 9800 is not based on Radeon 9800 PRO’s R350 core, but instead based on the X800’s R420 technology – ATI’s mobile division are saving all the "X" brands for their PCI Express notebook offerings for the time being. However, being based on R420 technology means that Mobility Radeon 9800 also features X800’s increased shader lengths and 3Dc normal map compression.

Although ATI states that the Mobility Radeon 9800 chip is physically a different ASIC to R420, reading between the lines would suggest there are more than just architectural similarities – indeed, it was not expected that ATI would actually introduce any non-AGP ASIC’s after R420, which might suggest that this is in fact an R420 based chip with pipelines disabled. ATI are also making noises that there are further performance increases to come which could mean that we’ll see 12 or 16 pipe mobile solutions from ATI in the coming months.

The first to take up the option of the Mobility Radeon 9800 will be Dell, who already have their "gamer" oriented notebooks that utilise the Mobility Radeon 9700 - the Mobility Radeon 9800 can fit on the same module so the transition between them should be fairly easy. The Dell Inspiron XPS (US markets) or Inspiron 9100 (Europe) will be available in configurations including a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB DDR400 RAM and the Mobility Radeon 9800 clocks at 350MHz for the core and 300MHz (600MHz effective) DDR RAM. ATI have supplied some 3DMark03 numbers on such a configuration which would indicated performance in the equivelent desktop range of around Radeon 9800 PRO levels in this case - we hope to have access to the laptop in for verification and full Beyond3D performance testing at a later date.

[Dave Baumann]

ATI supplied 3DMark03 Scores:

GT1     GT2  GT3   GT4   Fill-rate   Fill-rate
                         Single Tex  Multi tex
(FPS)  (FPS) (FPS) (FPS) (MTexels/s) (MTexels/s)
198.60 33.30 29.30 35.80 1474.6      2561.4

According to ATI these were taken with the 8.01 driver, however they are hopeful that Dell will qualify an updated driver (8.04 or greater), however this won't happen for initial release.

[Miksu]

Just excellent.

Any idea when we can read B3D's review?

[Guden Oden]

That looks like a heatpipe-equipped cooler sticking out away from that circuit board module in the second picture. Any chance we could get to see the OTHER side, perhaps?

[Evildeus]

Any idea of the power draw? What will be the Nv competitor?

[Anonymous]

Wonder if those other 8 pipes can be turned on then

[elroy]

Excellent - hopefully we'll see these paired up with some machines supporting Dothan!

[mreman4k]

Great, that notebook is now faster than my desktop.... :?

[Tim]

Originally Posted by DaveBaumann

....any non-AGP ASIC’s after R420, which might suggest that this is in fact an R420 based chip with pipelines disabled. .

ExtremeTech claimes that the mobile 9800 is 110 million transistor chip:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1627833,00.asp

[Razor1]

nice now we can play games at higher settings on the road

[Socos]

Originally Posted by Evildeus

Any idea of the power draw? What will be the Nv competitor?

Not sure NV is going to be able to make their 6800 into a notebook. You seen the size difference between a 6800 PCB and an x800 PCB, I know this really has nothing to do with the moblie side of things, but I think in some respect it does.
Amazing that we are seeing 9800 pro desktop speeds on a notebook already. Pretty soon I may have to start looking at replacing my desktop with a notebook.

[digitalwanderer]

Sweet! Am I missing something or does that look performance wise like it's an actual 9800 but for a laptop?

[digitalwanderer]

Oh, and Dave? Does this count as one of the two product launches?

[McElvis]

So is this basically the RV420 (or whatever it was going to be called...). A dedicated 8 pipe R420, with a desktop equivalent that will replace the 9800 Pro?

A bit like the M10 is the same as the 9600Pro...

If so and its out for mobiles now, should not be too long until a desktop version comes out.

[Dave Baumann]

Originally Posted by Evildeus

Any idea of the power draw? What will be the Nv competitor?

Trying to get something on power draw, nothing yet though. And if I knew about NV variants, I’d be under NDA so I couldn’t tell you!

Originally Posted by Tim

ExtremeTech claimes that the mobile 9800 is 110 million transistor chip:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1627833,00.asp

Lop off two quads and two vertex shaders and that’s probably what you have remaining as active.

However, think about it what other chip it could be. All the mobile parts over the past few years are directly derived from desktop counterparts and given this would be a fairly niche part you would certainly expect that to be the same here. So, if this is still based from a desktop which would it be?

At present the only other part that has the same capabilities is R420, although the rumoured RV410 would certainly fit this specification – except that RV410 is expected to be PCI Express, it hasn’t been announced (which would certainly be unusual for an announcement this way around) and its expected to be 110nm.

At the moment I can only see this as being R420 – given the hints of “more to come�, indicating more pipelines, I can’t see them having separate chips for these as well as this.

Previous high end ASIC's from ATI didn't contain an on-die thermal probe, but mid range did because the mid range was destinded for mobile - R420 on the otherhand does contain the on-die thermal probe which is probably a hint at where it was destined for as well.

[phenix]

OMG this cards eats up battery in less than an hour.

I think God didn't made notebook computers for gaming.

[mczak]

Originally Posted by phenix

OMG this cards eats up battery in less than an hour.

Are you refering to tomshardware results? This is not really the graphic cards fault, the cpu alone can use up to 100W! And you can (again) clearly see that a prescott is a really really bad choice for a laptop - the prescott 3.2Ghz notebook uses 20% more power than the 3.4Ghz northwood one (which, needless to say, is faster). And a 3.4Ghz Northwood (with HT) isn't exactly a notebook cpu neither...

I think God didn't made notebook computers for gaming.

I think you could get quite a bit of improvement when pairing it up with a dothan 2Ghz. Should be just as fast for gaming, and maybe double the battery life time - of course the Mobility 9800 probably uses quite a bit of power, but in this case I'd fully blame the cpu for the low battery life...
Tomshardware puts it this way:

in the battery benchmark, the Dell and Yakumo devices have a slight advantage due to the mobile CPUs that they use, the Pentium-M and Mobile Athlon64.

"Slight advantage" LOL

[Dave Baumann]

http://www20.tomshardware.com/mobile...n_9800-07.html

Look at the size of the ASIC - thats R420!! (Plus, you can see the control points that they use to block off the quads in on the package)

[digitalwanderer]

Originally Posted by DaveBaumann

http://www20.tomshardware.com/mobile/20040727/radeon_9800-07.html

Look at the size of the ASIC - thats R420!! (Plus, you can see the control points that they usxe to block off the quads in on the package)

Good eye Dave!

So I reckon we can expect to see some higher piped variants coming out in the future...

[SsP45]

I'm waiting for someone with this to try and activate the other 4 or 8 pipes.
________
Pop stocks

[Dave Baumann]

Originally Posted by SsP45

I'm waiting for someone with this to try and activate the other 4 or 8 pipes.

Yes, and I'm fairly certain this is exactly why they don't want to build to many similarities between this and R420 in people minds - laptops are qualified with strict thermal properties; if people start messing around with how much of the ASIC is enabled that will change the thermal charateristics.

[Humus]

Originally Posted by phenix

I think God didn't made notebook computers for gaming.

Pfft. Gaming on laptops rock. It's perfect for long boring flights. I don't have the Mobility 9800 though in my laptop, "only" a Mobility 9700, but that's not too bad either. I played a few UT2004 deathmatch rounds on the flight back from Meltdown today. Hard to find a better way to kill time.

[Mariner]

Originally Posted by Humus

Pfft. Gaming on laptops rock. It's perfect for long boring flights.

Just as long as you don't get carried away and start shouting, "Die you Bastard, Die!!!" at the top of your voice. Might not go down too well amongst the cabin crew and passengers.

[phenix]

Originally Posted by Humus

Pfft. Gaming on laptops rock. It's perfect for long boring flights. I don't have the Mobility 9800 though in my laptop, "only" a Mobility 9700, but that's not too bad either. I played a few UT2004 deathmatch rounds on the flight back from Meltdown today. Hard to find a better way to kill time.

Just thought battery running out in an hour or so would be disturbing. I personally prefer to spend 4-5 hours of uninterrupted quality time when I hook up to a game. thats all.

[Anonymous]

....I wonder if I can put one of these in my one year old Dell Insprion 8500 laptop, which currently hosts a woefully inadequate 64MB DDR NVIDIA® GeForce™ 4 4200 Go AGP 4X Graphics card.