ATI releases Mobility Radeon 9800

ATI Technologies announced today the release of the Mobility Radeon 9800.

Despite the name, the Mobility Radeon 9800 is in fact a cut down AGP version of the X800 series chips, with added power saving features. Performance is said to be a marked jump over the Mobility Radeon 9700. Unfortunately, power utilization is also markedly increased, at least at full tilt. Hopefully during standard 2D application usage however, power utilization does not show the same increase.

Assuming the power dissipation of this GPU is acceptable, we can expect the 9800 to make an appearance in the next PowerBooks, which likely will use the G5 as well. Thus, one can predict that the next 15" and 17" PowerBooks will look something like this:

G5 970FX 1.8 GHz
450-600 MHz bus
AGP Mobility Radeon 9800 with 128 MB (and 256 MB option)
DDR333 single-channel

This will make for quite an update to the PowerBook line in 2005, especially since the 64-bit OS X 10.4 Tiger will likely be released within a few months of the G5 PowerBook release, too.