AMD has launched the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series graphics processors for laptop PCs.
The Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series (including the top-of-the-line HD 5870), is made for gaming, while the HD 5700 and HD 5600 are mainstream GPUs. The HD 5400 is a lower-end graphics processor with low power consumption.
The new laptop video cards support DirectX 11 API and DirectCompute technology that enables applications, such as video transcoding and rendering software, to take advantage of the parallel computing power of the GPU.
AMD’s mobile Radeon 5000 Series also includes ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology, “allowing mobile users to seamlessly harness up to six monitors for improved gaming, productivity, and entertainment”. Actual number of attachable monitors will vary by notebook model.
For hardware-based decoding of 1080p HD video playback, the GPUs feature the Unified Video Decoder 2 chip. HD audio technologies supported are HDMI 1.3a Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.
The Mobility Radeon 5000 is based on 40-nanometer production process and has an improved processor design. These provide “four times the performance-per-watt efficiency” over the last two generations of Mobility Radeon graphics.
Laptops with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series are scheduled to be available in the first half of 2010.
