ATI moves up to Mobility FireGL V5200
Mobile processor technology supports up to eight hours battery life
ATI has introduced a new graphics processor which seeks to conserve power by borrowing some of the ideas of mobile processor technology.
The new mobile processor known as the Mobility FireGL V5200 sports 256Mb of RAM, five vertex shader units and 12 pixel shader processors. This is in contrast to the earlier FireGL V5000 that had just eight pixel-shader units and six vertex engines.
One of the first machines to be equipped is the new version of the T60p ThinkPad from Lenovo.
ATI tells us that notebooks based on these new GPUs have a battery life of up to eight hours. Although clearly, total power consumption depends on a lot more than just the graphics chip. Nevertheless, as anyone who has seen one of the fan assisted graphics cards will testify, they do use a lot of juice.
ATI's solution is to borrow some of the ideas used by processor manufacturers in their notebook lines. ATI Technologies has introduced a new BIOS that drops the clock speed down when 3D applications are not being used.
The company's engineers have also built in dynamic clock gating technology, which shuts down unused parts of graphics processor.
