Another day of CES 2010 and another groundbreaking announcement. This time AMD has turned all the heads to its lot with the latest ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series graphic cards range manufactured using 40nm fabrication process. This is the second generation of AMD's GPUs that have full support for Microsoft DirectX 11 technology and the very first one designed for notebooks. Which, of course, will require Windows 7 installed. The lineup offers a surprisingly wide choice of different variations such as VRAM varying from 256MB to 1GB and compute power with just over 1GFLOPs at the starting point and over 1TFLOPs at the peak.The whole ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 lineup is divided into four series. The entry level HD 5400 series is the only one with 64-bit memory bus width. An absolutely needed option for notebooks as I see it - keeping cost and power consumption extremely low but still providing DirectCompute 11 support, Shader Model 5.0, etc. Mind you that despite overall mainstream concept of the HD 5400 series, you can still have it with 1GB GDDR5 memory which I wouldn't fancy. With given bus width it will do almost as well with half of that.
HD 5600 and HD 5700 series have the least amount of differences between them and are aimed for all the types and sorts of multimedia entertainment. There is no 256MB VRAM option for them. However, the compute power has been risen significantly to over 500GFLOPs. It would be really nice of them if at least HD 5600 series unit with 512MB would add up no more then a hundred dollars to the cost of a laptop.
The fastest and the most exiting mobile graphic card will be, of course, one of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5800 series. Unparalleled performance of 1.12TFLOPs and distinctive list of features will put some desktop GPUs into a shed. Speaking about features, there are lots of them really, but ATI Eyefinity is the most desired one by anyone from games to businessman. ATI Eyefinity will allow you to split the picture on up to six displays simultaneously.
So, we have the specs, for more of that see the following picture, and a lot of impressions, what we don't have is the pricing and availability hasn't been spelled clearly yet noting first half of the year only.
