ATI offers lightweight Radeon card

ATI Technologies has unveiled the Mobility Radeon, a lightweight version of its Radeon desktop graphics card for the mobile marketplace.

ATI Technologies has unveiled the Mobility Radeon, a lightweight version of its Radeon desktop graphics card for the mobile marketplace.

Mobility Radeon features ATI's 2D/3D technology which includes video editing, DVD replay abilities and optional built-in TV tuner. The company claimed the card offers extended battery life because its power consumption levels have been reduced to 0.5 watts, lower than any of ATI's previous devices.

The Mobility Radeon supports resolutions up to Quad Extended Graphics Array standard (2048 x 1536 pixels), currently the highest display resolution available to the mobile market.

Dual digital-to-analog converter technology means it can also offer multi-monitor support. Dual display controllers allow each display to run independently with support for CRT monitors, flat-panel displays and TVs.

The card will be available in four flavours. The Mobility Radeon-S, a performance-oriented model with flexible memory support and AGP 4x graphics, is targeted at high-performance corporate and consumer notebooks.

The Mobility Radeon-P, which also has flexible memory support but lacks AGP 4x, is aimed at mainstream customers. Meanwhile, the 16Mb and 8Mb DDR memory variants designed for ultra-portable and small form factor notebooks have been named the Mobility Radeon-D and M, respectively.

Mobility Radeon is the latest variant of ATI's original desktop Radeon card released last year. The company's All-In-Wonder series of graphics cards was updated to include Radeon technology last August.

"The Mobility Radeon aims to offer the best performance for high-end notebooks and scales to the lowest power usage for long battery life in ultra-portables," said Lou Leung, general manager at ATI's mobile business unit.

ATI has not announced the prices of the graphics card, as it will be sold direct to systems builders. Devices including the graphics card should be released by the end of March.