ATI Launches Mobility Radeon 9700

ATI has introduced the Mobility Radeon 9700--its latest generation of accelerated 3D graphics technology for laptops. ATI claims that the chip is the first mobile graphics solution to use the low-k manufacturing process, which provides better shielding of chip traces, thus allowing for greater performance and battery life. [IBM background on low-k--ATI is actually using competing technology from TSMC.] The Mobility Radeon 9700 fully supports DirectX 9.0, features four rendering pipelines, ATI's Powerplay power optimization feature (for greater battery life), and Smartshader rendering.