Notebook Critic

As discovered by www.notebookjournal.de the upcoming Mobility RADEON 5650 does not deliver the massive jump in performance versus the 4650 that I was expecting. There is still hope for the 5670 (or 5770 if AMD really want a granular product assortment) which may use fast GDDR5 to kick performance into the 8,500 point range in 3dmark06 – but one gets the feeling that AMD really missed an opportunity to put the hurt on Nvidia.

When Dell, HP and Acer start shipping this then things will be a lot clearer. For all we know the 5650 may be a part that ships in $700 notebooks and that would change my feelings about it a lot.

But now details are slipping out regarding the high-end Mobility 5800 series. If AMD does this part right – with fast RAM instead of the Mobility 4870′s pokey slow GDDR3 – then this could be a part that Nvidia has no answer for. At the moment the Mobility 4870 x2 and Nvidia 280m GTX SLI solutions are too close to call. AMD could have easily crushed Nvidia last round if they wanted to, but they opted to equip the 4870 with slow memory that hurt the overall performance significantly.

No one is selling a lot of these premium notebook GPUs, so the real opportunity is in the mid class premium notebook segment (from $750 to 1,500). If we can infer the the 5670′s performance from the 5650 it looks like opening up more shader cores and equipping better memory will allow AMD’s rival to stay in the game.

In the middle Nvidia will continue to happily sell the 8600m/9600m/120m/130m and at the high-end it is likley that 8800m/9800m/260m/280m series components will continue to sell well. Regardless of what label they apply to these parts, they manage to hang in there with the best from AMD generation after generation.

What’s funny is how old these Nvidia parts are – their R&D was probably fully paid for several years ago! Shareholders should be proud!