Recently ATI announced the Mobility FireGL 7800 chip which is positioned as their first "Mobile Workstation" graphics chip, and builds on the solid Mobility Radeon 7500 core we recently previewed.

During the end of November Ryan and I met in New York City with Chris Hook and Darren McPhee from ATI's Mobile Business Unit for a demonstration of the new Mobility FireGL 7800 chip in action.  For those of you that have already read our Mobility Radeon 7500 Preview from August, you'll already know much of the basic specifications of the Mobility FireGL 7800, as the core architecture is the same.  You can expect the 7800 to generally have faster core and memory clocking, and given the target market of niche high-speed mobile workstations, will sport a 128bit memory interface with 64MB of ram.

Among the technologies that transfer to the 7800 from the 7500 are ATI's POWERPLAY technology. This includes the clock gating and dynamic voltage and clock speed modification technologies, which you can find more details on at this page in the Mobility Radeon 7500 Preview.  Also noted on that page is the advanced memory interface, which the 7800 inherits as well.  All mobile workstations equipped with the Mobility FireGL 7800 will be using 64MB of ram with the 128bit memory interface for top performance.

ATI already leads the mobile arena in terms of market share. With the Mobility FireGL 7800 graphics chipset they continue to be aggressive and target future areas of growth. ATI's mobile division knows what the market wants and is providing the ProGL market with a great performing chipset. The FireGL branding gives the chip a large following of Pro graphics users who trust the companies product.

So, what actually differentiates the Mobility FireGL 7800 from the Mobility Radeon 7500?