Asus has thoughtfully pre-announced AMD's next-generation mobile graphics chip, the ATI Mobility Radeon X2300, which the Taiwanese vendor today said it's planning to build into an upcoming Core 2 Duo-based notebook.

The laptop, the A8Jr, promises a "visual feast like no other", courtesy of its unannounced AMD GPU. Asus didn't provide any details, alas, but the X2300 is up to running Windows Vista's Aero user interface and uses HyperMemory to boost the graphics RAM available to the GPU.

The leak isn't without a quote from an AMD official, suggesting Asus simply uploaded the announcement a mite early. And to be fair, AMD's admitted it's working on just such a part, by mentioning the name in the most recent release notes attached to its Linux drivers.

Indeed, they reveal the presence of the X2300 HD, codenamed 'M71'. The vanilla X2300 appears to be codenamed 'M64'. Both have 'M' and 'S' variants, indicated by an appropriate suffix to the codename. AMD's M71M chip, incidentally, has been approved for PCI Express compatibility by the PCI SIG, so its release can't be far off.

The M71 is believed to be derived from the upcoming R600 chip, AMD's first DirectX 10 part and its first GPU to incorporated unified shaders. ®