ATI's Mobility Radeon 9700 - What's in a name?

NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5700 - And so the tumbleweed rolled...

While NVIDIA announced their product back in November, we have yet to find a shipping notebook with that design. According to our previous talks, we should have expected to see at least one shipping notebook by the end of January. For whatever reason, the shipping timeline for that specific launch partner of NVIDIA's GeForce FX Go5700 has been delayed a bit, as no specific design wins have been announced. We still expect to see something from Alienware, Compal, FIC, Toshiba's Digital Products Division, Quanta, or Uniwill sometime within a few weeks. Alienware already confirmed that they will be using the Go5700 in their upgradeable graphics module, which depending on how you look at it, it can be considered a design win. However, Alienware is not taking orders or shipping it quite yet.

The only thing that is new to the mobile GPU scene (other than ATI's Mobility Radeon 9700) is NV36M Ultra. We don't have many details on this, but it is logical to assume that the official clock speeds of the NV36M Ultra should be higher than NV36M. Because the higher clocks, the NV36M Ultra should be like the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra in the sense of requiring an additional power bridge or operating at the lower disconnected power clocks.

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The naming of the NV36M may likely be the Go5700 Ultra, similar to the tiering of the desktop family. However, it is interesting that in the release notes of the Forceware 52.16 drivers, there is something called, "GeForce FX Go5750". We aren't quite sure if it is a fluke, but NVIDIA has already abandoned the wire bond package for post-NV35 architectures, which was the basis to name the Go5650.

With this line up, NV36M (Go5700) would then be pitted against the M10 family (Mobility Radeon 9600) while the NV36M Ultra faces off against M11 (Mobility Radeon 9700). Because notebook manufacturers are concerned traditionally with power consumption and thermal emissions over performance, NVIDIA is already at a disadvantage, since the NV36M and NV36M Ultra GPUs are based on NV36 architecture, which was designed to implement an auxiliary power source. This would seem to suggest that NVIDIA will likely compete more aggressively with ATI for desktop replacement design wins, while ATI has an advantage in the traditional and thin and light notebook form factors. The question for desktop replacement notebook manufacturers would then be the benefits of NVIDIA in the context of performance as a trade off for power consumption. The verdict is out and perhaps NVIDIA will have surprises for us. We will touch more on this later.