AMD Releases Two New HD4800 Series 40nm Mobile GPU's

March 3, 2009 by John Messina

(PhysOrg.com) -- AMD announced today, two new ATI Mobility Radeon HD4800 series mobile GPU's. The HD4830 and HD4860 are both built on ATI's 40nm process technology and both support DDR3, GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory, with the GDDR5's memory doubled over the GDDR3. GPU's performance is nearly doubled from 432 Gflops in the 4600 series to 832 Gflops for the 4800 series GPU's.

ATI PowerExpress and ATI Switchable Graphics Technology are used to power down the GPU when it's not in use. Advanced clock gating, which exist in three modes, and GPU activity monitor extend the power saving features by the ability to utilize a separate, built-in graphics processor of much lower power consumption and processing ability. Switching between the integrated graphics processor and ATI Radeon HD can be done without rebooting but is not initiated automatically.

The GDDR3 would target mainstream applications, while the GDDR5 would target the high end due to its increase in memory bandwidth from the standard GDDR3 and 64 GB/s. Memory bandwidth is somewhat crippled as compared to the chip's potential. This is due to a 128 bit bus which is down from 256 in Mobility 4800-series; however faster core clock slightly compensates for this while providing additional power savings.

There are several 40nm ATI Mobility Radeon HD win updates for the 4860 and 4830 that include the ASUS N81Vp, N51Tp and W90. MSI's GT727 will upgrade from 4850 and Toshiba's Satellite 300 upgrade 4650. AMD will be announcing additional partners at the CeBIT.

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