ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series IGP on the Way

[Charles P. Jefferies]

ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series IGP on the Way

ATI is reportedly preparing a Radeon HD 4000 series integrated graphics card. ATI claims the HD 4200 will be 15 percent faster than "anything comparable" on the market, which most likely means the GeForce 9400M; the 9400M is currently used in the Apple MacBook Pro.

Not much is known about the HD 4200's specifications other than it will support DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL equivalents. The HD 4200 is expected to hit to the market late this summer.

Full Story (The Inquirer.net)
Via (Electronista.com)

[Phinagle]

... The HD 4200 is not expected to appear on the market for at least another six months.

Articles say the HD 4200 should hit in late August and that Intel won't have anything to compete for at least 6 months. Or are you speculating that the actual for sale date is going to be 6 months after launch.


Either way I hope this chipset has support for Intel CPUs since it's my understanding that ATI hasn't had a chipset that supported them since AMD bought them in 2006. Is that accurate?

[Melody]

ATI IGPs haven't supported Intel CPUs in the mobile market for quite some time yes. However, I do believe certain desktop motherboards with ATI IGPs supprot Intel processors.

Anyhow, I'd think Intel would pick Nvidia again for their chipset as they have in the past in their mobile market.

I hope that we'll see more machines with this new IGP. The 9400M G didn't see that much light unfortunately and the HD4500, while getting the job done, is kinda abysmal lol .

[BlitZX]

This does sound interesting. Is it a 40nm part though? I agree with the other comments, ATI should make a chipset for Intel CPUs using this IGP. Also, i'm not sure if this has already been posted, but it's news to me regarding their discrete GPU lineup:

ATI PLANS ON UPCOMING EVERGREEN MOBILE PARTS

"ATI is reportedly planning a series of mobile GPUs shortly, nine separate mobile parts including three GPUs with three variants each. The family is called Manhattan; the chips are Broadway, Madison, and Park. Each has a high end XT, a mid range Pro, and a low end LP variant, but some of those names may change before eventually being released. Since they are part of the Evergreen series (R800), they obviously are all 40nm, DirectX 11 and should be notably faster than their mobile M9x predecessors – as reported by Semiaccurate.

Power is said to be 45-60W for the GDDR5 Broadway XT, dropping to 30-40W for the Pro, and the GDDR3 based LP takes only 29W. Madison uses GDDR5 for the 20-30W XT, either GDDR3 or 5 for the 20-25W Pro, and 15-20W for the GDDR3 based LP. Park goes down from there, 12-15W for the GDDR5 XT, 10-12W and sub-8W for the Pro and LP respectively, both of which use GDDR3. As with the 7xx parts, the memory controller will allow vanilla DDR3 in place of GDDR3 as well - informs Semiaccurate.

Broadway and Madison should be released in August and Park is expected by November. They are notebook parts, but looking at their compatible with the M9x, you might just see one or two on desktop as well." - NotebookCheck

[nacholambre]

WOW. Truely amazing!

[Clutch]

I wonder what it does for battery life.

[Melody]

Well apparently its based off an HD4330 which runs at 7W. Intel's HD4500 runs at 5W so I'd except the HD4200 to run within that gap.

I suppose AMD will include this as their IGP when they release their Tigris platform.

[jonlumpkin]

I wonder what it does for battery life.

The problem will be that this IGP will almost certainly only be available with AMD Turion CPUs. These are not bad chips, but they underperform Intel C2Ds clock for clock and are a LOT less heat/energy efficient.

It really would be nice to see more Intel equipped laptops offered with an IGP better than the x4500MHD (the only ones I know of at present are Macbooks).

[Melody]

Dell has the SXPS13 with a 9400M G and an Intel CPU and a few others use the 9400M G as their IGP with Intel. Intel hasn't adopted ATI IGPs since ATI doesn't make chipsets supporting Intel CPUs anymore in the mobile market.

Hopefully this will be paired with the newer AMD CPUs on their new platform and it'll work better.

[Phinagle]

Besides the Macbook and SXPS 13 you've got the Dell Studio 14z, Alienware M17x, and Clevo M980nu using the Nvidia MCP79/9400M/ION chipset.

Might see more notebooks using Nvidia chipsets (like the upcoming iG209) with i7/i5 since there isn't an Intel chipset for those CPUs with an IGP and not all of the CPUs are going to have the IGP on-die yet.