ATI have a number of new graphics circuits coming for the stationary market where we’ve told you about the Radeon X1950 Pro and Radeon X1650 XT. But ATI is also about to upgrade its mobile platform and its Mobility Radeon family. At Elite Bastards they’ve published a walkthrough of the new circuits and what ATI has done to renew the circuits. Mobility Radeon X1350 and X1450 are the successors to the budget segement and here the focus has been better performance/watt. The really interesting circuit is instead Mobility Radeon X1700 which use a new kind of manufacturing process.
The fundamental architecture is still the same as with X1600/X1650 but ATI has managed to improve the performance of the new X1700 circuit and done so without increasing the power consumption. The solution to this perhaps odd equation is strained silicon, a manufacturing process which originally was created by IBM and has been used by both Intel and AMD. The technology manipulates the stucture of silicon and by straining it more electrons can pass through the circuit, thus the performance can be increased while there is less energy needed as the resistance is lowered.
ATI Mobility Radeon X1700 is the first graphics circuit which is launched with strained silicon and it is pretty obvious how important the manufacturing process has become. NVIDIA recently announced that it manufactured the first 80nm graphics circuits and now ATI has countered with strained silicon, we’re curious to see what will be next.
