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ATI touts mobile chip's low-k technology

Mobility Radeon 9700 launched

ATI unveiled its latest mobile graphics chip, the Mobility Radeon 9700, yesterday, calling the processor the first of its kind to be fabbed using a low-k dielectric material at 130nm.

The insulator was developed by ATI's fab partner, TSMC. It reduces the diffusion of current between the chip's layer interconnections. That improves the circuits' electrical properties, reducing the chip's power consumption - and thus boosting the host notebook's battery life - into the bargain.

Or, ATI can clock it higher yet offer the same power consumption rates as previous, slower chips.

The 9700 offers the same feature set as the existing Mobility Radeon 9600: four rendering pipelines with one texture unit each; two vertex shaders; ATI's Smoothvision 2.0 anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering engine; DirectX 9.0 support; PowerPlay 4.0, which monitor's the chip's load and clocks down the part when it's not being fully utilised, to conserver power; support for resolutions of up to 2048 x 1536; dual 400MHz RAMDACs; DVD playback acceleration; and AGP 8x support.

The 9700 also offers VPU Recover - software that allows games to continue to run even when the graphics processor stumbles.

ATI said the part will feature in upcoming notebooks from Acer, Alienware, Fujitsu-Siemens, Gericom, LG, Medion, Packard Bell, Rockdirect, Samsung, Targa and VoodooPC. Manufacturers Asus, Clevo, Compal, ECS, FIC, Quanta, Uniwill and Wistron will also offer notebooks using the 9700 - probably for the vendors named above. ®

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