Not to be outdone by Intel’s giant splash yesterday, AMD is trotting out its next-gen mobile GPU line. And while they still might be outdone, the Radeon HD 7900M series does look pretty damn terrific.
The top of the line mobile chip packs 1280 individual video acceleration processors, 2GB of memory, and can power six separate displays. What’s that really mean? According to AMD, it means 70fps in Battlefield 3 at 1920×1080 with settings on high — a crazy frame rate for a laptop. The company says this performance won’t murder your battery life, as the 7900M uses a new 28nm process (in English, it’s a big jump in efficiency over the last generation). Add in some special tweaking to push idle energy consumption down to zero watts, and the 7900M might help dispel the old notions that portable gaming is the stuff of 14kg laptops with 20-minute battery spans. Of course, we’ll have to see real-world benchmarks to know for sure.