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AMD's Radeon 7000 series GPUs have officially been out for, what, just over four months now? Time sure flies! But even though you've been able to shove next-gen Radeon cards into a desktop build for over a third of a year, laptop users haven't been quite as lucky, as mobile variants hadn't been announced -- until today. This morning, AMD announced the Radeon 7000M series with three new GPUs built around the 28nm manufacturing process.
The chart above lays out most of the pertinent specs for the enthusiast-grade 7900M ("Wimbledon"), the mainstream 7800M ("Heathrow") and the Ultrabook-friendly 7700M ("Chelsea"), the new 28nm GPUs. The other entries in the 7000M lineup are based off the older 40nm process.
TheVerge reports the flagship 7970M hits 70fps in Skyrim at 1920x1200 resolution, blowing away the 49.3fps put up by the Nvidia 675M. Keep in mind, however, that the 675M is basically a rebranded 580M and isn't based on the Kepler architecture. The 7870M and 7770M hit 41.4fps and 36.9fps, respectively. AMD claims the mobile GPUs are powerful enough to run up to six monitors using Eyefinity.
Energy efficiency is oh-so-important in this slim-and-light notebook days; the 7000M series lays off the juice thanks to AMD's new "Enduro" switching technology, which behaves like Nvidia's Optimus technology and swaps the graphical load between integrated and discrete graphics depending on need. Radeon 7000M series cards can also shut down unused portions of the GPU to save even more energy and disable the GPU entirely when integrated graphics processors are handling the workload.
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kixofmyg0t
April 24, 2012 at 10:36am
That's actually pretty impressive. Now, pair a 7870M with a Trinity APU and you have a buyer right here.
spazimspaz
April 24, 2012 at 11:55am
I agree but if they only got their heads out of their asses and stopped directly soldering the damn chips to the board and used a socket like the processors I think we'd have a better marked for laptop builders. I upgraded my DV9410US from a AMD Turion X2 64 1.8GHz to a AMD Turion X2 64 2.4 GHz with the simple turn of a screw. I'm dying to buy a new laptop but if they had a market for custom laptops like PC's seem to have I'd be in hog heaven.
vrmlbasic
April 24, 2012 at 2:38pm
For a while I was using a laptop with a similar Turion X2. The performance was decent enough (though nothing compared to a modernish desktop processor) but the biggest problem with the thing was the awful integrated Radeon Xpress 1150 graphics. I didn't go through with upgrading my Turion, props to you for that, as the gfx would still suck and choke in almost every game.
The only graphics "solution" that I've found to be worse than that card is Intel's integrated "HD" graphics. Bleh.
Had I been able to upgrade the graphics card to _something_ better, I could have gotten some more use out of that device, but I don't think that it would have been worthwhile.
bigtonyman
April 24, 2012 at 12:37pm
If you wanna be able to upgrade parts on a laptop go look at a clevo reseller or alienware. I have an alienware m17x r3 (hate all you want) and just about everything on it is upgradeable apart from the screen.(CPU,GPU, Hard Drives, Wireless Cards, RAM, Etc).
spazimspaz
April 24, 2012 at 1:43pm
I'm not against Alienware just Dell. Good tip though. I'll have to look into that since my pet DV9410US is maxed on the upgrades (Wireless N, 4 GB Ram, 256 GB Crucial M224 SSD) aside from adding a USB 3.0 port inplace of my expresscard reader or some how adding a Bluray drive... the sad part is that I haven't a HDMI or DVI port so shes on the road to replacement...
bigtonyman
April 24, 2012 at 2:39pm
Dell has the best warranty I have ever had. If you don't like dell though, I would look at a reseller such as xoticpc. They are a bit cheaper but don't have as nice of a warranty or as many features.
