ATI has introduced its latest graphics chip for mobile workstations, the Mobility FireGL V5200. The GPU's got five vertex engines feeding 12 pixel-shader processors. While the previous generation of the product, the FireGL V5000, had just eight pixel-shader units, it also had six vertex engines, one more than the new chip.

What can we read into that? That the V5200 is essentially a Mobility Radeon X1600 with a different brand name and certified for use with 'serious' 3D apps like AutoCAD, Catia, ICEM Surf, SolidWorks, 3dsmax, Maya and Softimage/XSI, which it has been, ATI said.

If the V5200 is the X1600 under another name, it will contain 157m 90nm transistors and connect to its 256MB of GDDR 3 memory - double the complement of the V5000 - across a 128-bit, quad-channel bus. It'll be a native PCI Express x16 chip and feature dynamic voltage control to moderate its power consumption.

ATI said it had already won the support of Lenovo, which will build the V5200 into its ThinkPad T60p. The Chinese PC giant also said it would incorporate ATI's Mobility Radeon X1300 and X1400 GPUs into other members of the T60 line-up.

All FireGL products come with a three-year warranty. ®