ATI today announced its Radeon Xpress 1100 chipset family, pitching the part at notebook PCs designed around AMD's new dual-core Turion 64 X2 mobile processor and promising a 33 per cent performance boost over the chipset's predecessor, the Radeon Xpress 200M.

The chipset supports pretty much any of AMD'S 64-bit mobile processors, ATI said, but since ECS, for one, is using the product in a desktop, Socket AM2 motherboard, it's clearly going to work with any AMD CPU that does DDR 2.

At least two version of the 1100 are on the cards: the 1100 itself and the 1150. The difference lies in the on-board Radeon X300 integrated graphics core's clock: 300MHz for the 1100 and 400MHz for the 1150. The X300 is a DirectX 9 part, but it only supports Shader Model 2.0.

As expected, the chipset can control two parallel ATA peripherals and four SATA drives, with RAID 0 and 1 optional configurations. It will support up to seven PCI slots and four PCI Express x1 slots. It can handle eight USB ports. Sound support is limited to 7.1-channel AC'97.

All of which is pretty much what the 200M offers, suggesting the 1100 is as much about branding - it's name is in line with the Xpress 1600 and 3200 - and boosting the GPU's clock speed. ATI also gains from the AMD CPUs' support for 667MHz DDR 2.

ATI said the Radeon Xpress 1100 series will soon ship in notebooks from the likes of Fujitsu-Siemens, Gateway and HP. ®