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AMD shows off Radeon 6990M on YouTube

Remember this thing from last night’s announcement? You know, world’s fastest mobile graphics card? At least for the time being… AMD has just posted a video of their Radeon 6990M featuring the Alienware M18x (or from watching the video, should it be the other way around?).

Well, it’s yet another video with yet another Alienware laptop. Still waiting for the day an Envy appears in one of these kind of videos. Personally, I would sacrifice one of the two hard disk bays in the Envy 17 or EliteBook 8760w if they could somehow squeeze in two of these Radeon 6990M’s under the hood… it might also defer the “Oh noes, my notebook is outdated” that happens every year to every two years when Nvidia/AMD announce their new stuff.

AMD announces Radeon 6990M graphics card, HP take note?

AMD Radeon 6990M

AMD has just announced their Radeon 6990M mobile graphics card, which they proudly tout to be the latest fastest mobile GPU in the market at the moment… yup, faster than Nvidia’s flagship GeForce GTX580M. The AMD Mobility Radeon 6990M is a DirectX 11 card that boasts HD 3D support, Eyefinity (of course!) and will come in at least a 2 GB GDDR5 256-bit flavor, with a huge bandwidth pipeline of 115.2 GB/s.

Well, as usual, we’ve all got our fingers crossed and hopes up that HP will put this monster into at least something… maybe a refreshed Envy 17, refreshed EliteBook 8760w (we all know the EliteBooks love workstation-class Quadro and FirePro cards… but pretty please?) or even a higher end Touchsmart desktop would be great… though right now in reality, the AMD 6990M will be making its way into Clevo high end laptops and the Alienware M18x: very big and thick notebooks. We like to think that at least the EliteBook 8760w’s relatively svelte but well designed chassis should be able to take the heat from running this big boy.

HP updates Pavilion and ProBook models with AMD Llano APUs

The news is out, HP has just announced the addition of AMD’s brand new APUs (a combination of a traditional CPU and graphics processing unit) in some of their existing notebook models.

First a little about AMD Llano chips: they’re made as an answer to Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors. Made using the 32 nm process, they are available in dual and quad core variants that the system can dynamically and automatically scale and overclock when needed, what AMD calls Turbo Core (Think Intel’s Turbo Boost). The processors support USB 3.0, stereoscopic 3D and AMD Wireless Display; certain models also can take 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM (which is fairly fast on a laptop), while the others will go up to 1333 MHz.

They also have built-in AMD HD 6000G series graphics that are quite a bit more powerful even versus Intel’s HD 3000 Integrated graphics, support DirectX 11 and Open CL/Open GL.

TDP ranges from 35W to 45W, with AMD naming their dual core A4 chips (not to be confused with Apple or Audi’s naming conventions!) as direct competitors to Intel’s Core i3 series, A6 chips as competitors to Intel’s Core i3 and lower tier Core i5 while their A8 chips will take on upper tier Core i5 and Core i7. The AMD A6 and A8 chips also feature quad core as standard, with clock speeds ranging from 1.4 to 1.9 GHz (boostable to a range of 2.3 to 2.6 GHz). AMD is claiming very ambitious battery life numbers, ‘up to 10 hours’, for their new chips thanks to improved efficiency and power management.

And now, on to the notebooks… HP has named several notebooks ranging from 14 to 17 inches in screen size to begin sporting these new AMD processors. From the consumer side, we have the updated Pavilion dv4, dv6 and dv7 (starts at $550) as well as more affordable Pavilion g4, g6 and g7 laptops (starts at $450), which will be available with AMD’s new goods beginning July.

If you’re looking for a business-class notebook, HP has updated their ProBook 6465b and 6565b series as well as ProBook 4535s, 4435s and 4436s series ‘entry-level’ business notebooks. Availability of AMD’s new Llano A-series chips in these notebooks should begin June 27.

As for their Intel variants, no worries, they aren’t going anywhere. This is just in-line with HP’s trend of giving folks a choice between AMD and Intel processors. For years, AMD has been more of the ‘affordable’ choice while Intel has been known for better and more stable performance. But looks like AMD is planning to change that this time… I wonder how these new processors will fare because they sure look good, on paper at least!

ATI FirePro M5800 to be based off ATI Mobility Radeon 5850?

I’m a curious person who likes doing a lot of thinking and analysis of things. And after yesterday’s revelation of an unannounced ATI FirePro M5800 card, I’ve been thinking… which consumer ATI card would be the mysterious workstation-class FirePro M5800 be based on? The answer, I suspect, lies with HP and their Elitebook 8540w. See, their current Elitebook 8540w makes available two Nvidia Quadro graphics options: the 512 MB Quadro FX880M and 1 GB Quadro FX1800M. Both are 40 nm chipsets. All of ATI’s new Mobility Radeon 5000 series graphics cards are based on the 40 nm process, plus the fact that ATI (with their recent reputation of coming out with all the good stuff) is very unlikely to use their “old” 4000-series designs for a new product… first part solved – the FirePro M5800 will be based off a card in the 5000-series.

Now, which specific card in the ATI Mobility Radeon 5000 series? The Nvidia Quadro card options for the Elitebook 8540w have bandwidth figures of 25.6 to 31.2 GB/s and TDP values of 35W and 45W respectively. So the ATI FirePro M5800 card HP has chosen should sit with specifications somewhere near those ranges. Also, the Nvidia Quadro FX1800M is a DDR3/GDDR5 card. So at first guess, one would probably suspect the ATI Mobility Radeon 5470 as the “base” of the new FirePro card, but no… it has a lower minimum bandwidth (12.8 GB/s) and significantly lower TDP (13W-15W) than the Nvidia cards.

Under the fairly accurate assumption that HP would like to keep power consumption/heat output/TDP similar to Nvidia’s cards, so to get the most out of the Elitebook 8540w’s design, the ATI FirePro M5800 will likely (with high probability) be based off the ATI Mobility Radeon 5850. The Mobility Radeon 5850 ticks all the boxes for being the perfect candidate for creating a workstation-class graphics card which matches/bests Nvidia’s top offering (FX1800M) for 15 inch notebooks – bandwidth (28.8-64 GB/s), DDR3/GDDR5, manufacturing process, TDP (30-39 W) and all are a closer match than any other graphics card that ATI has. So I’m almost 99% certain this will be it – the FirePro M5800 will be based off the ATI Mobility Radeon 5850, and time will tell if my guess is correct.

ATI FirePro M5800 graphics leaked; coming to HP Elitebook 8540w!

ATI FirePro M5800 listed in a HP Elitebook 8540w document

Big, big, BIG new folks! In the specifications/overview section of a PDF document (PDF reader required! ATI FirePro M5800 is listed on Page 9) posted on the HP Elitebook 8540w support page. Initially said to use “exclusively Nvidia Quadro” cards (though I did beg to differ), looks like HP had a change of heart over choice of graphics on the new Elitebooks (after reading my widely-spread bright idea?) and will be giving those that lust for high-end performance (example: me) a dose of ATI graphics! Workstation-class graphics too!

For now, all we have is a name in the document: ATI FirePro M5800, yet I can draw several things from this piece of info alone. First off, this card will be part of ATI’s new workstation-class graphics line for notebooks, and will be equivalent to or better than Nvidia’s Quadro FX1800M/GeForce GT335M graphics cards. Several of my trusted sources have confirmed the news of ATI making a comeback to HP’s Elitebook mobile workstation notebooks. The ATI FirePro M5800 workstation card is expected to be derived from its ATI Mobility Radeon 5830 or 5850 consumer-counterpart and have 1 GB of DDR3/GDDR5 graphics memory. Given my cool experience (no pun intended) with HP’s new Elitebook 8440p/w and 8540w notebooks, I’d say the airflow/cooling of the 8540w will be more than enough to handle this new, fast and furious graphics from ATI!

Oh, there are also numerous other references to the ATI FirePro M5800 throughout the rest of the document as well (such as the fan/heatsink section). For those interested, go ahead and download it; it’s a pretty interesting read on the guts and components of the Elitebook 8540.