ATI Mobility Radeon 9000: Raising the bar again

The Contenders

The Mobility Radeon 9000 marks a lot of firsts. Not only is the Mobility Radeon 9000 the first mobile video chip to offer DirectX 8.1 pixel and vertex shaders, it is the first time that a high-end mobile video chip will be available in laptop computers at the same time as the chip's launch.

ATI has a large number of launch partners for the Mobility Radeon 9000 including ECS, FIC, and Alienware. We got a sneak peak at what the future of mobile gaming will look like when ATI presented us with a number of systems that made use of the Mobility Radeon 9000, all of which will be shipping within the next month or so.

The first notebook to market will be an FIC designed notebook that will likely find itself rebadged and sold under a variety of names. This notebook will actually be shipping in the states starting next week.

FIC Mobility Radeon 9000 system. Click here to Enlarge

ATI also displayed three other soon to be shipping notebooks that were Mobility Radeon 9000 based in addition to the FIC system.

Alienware Mobility Radeon 9000 system Click here to enlarge.

ECS Mobility Radeon 9000 system. Click here to enlarge.

Clevo Mobility Radeon 9000 system. Click here to enlarge.

We also got wind of the fact that a good number of tier one OEMs will be shipping Mobility Radeon 9000 notebooks soon. The validation and verification time for these historically cautious OEMs is much longer than the tier two and tier three vendors but even so designs are near finalization. One thing we did learn: Compaq/HP will be producing a Presario 2800 notebook that makes use of the Mobility Radeon 9000. ATI tells us that we should see these notebooks shipping in about 3 weeks. Judging by what we saw in our Mobility Radeon 7500 based Presario 2800, the Mobility Radeon 9000 version of the notebook should be very impressive.

It is exciting to see Mobility Radeon 9000 based notebooks come to market as soon as they are. Past mobile GPU launches have proven that it can be months before a new notebook design is ready to go. Hopefully the Mobility Radeon 9000 launch will set precedent for future mobile GPUs.