We were challenged by some ATI folk to investigate what we can expect from the M9 card that is acronym for the future ATI mobile chip. [Don"t they know already? Ed.] The M9 code name will represent a DirectX 9 part, we believe.
This mobile chip will be clocked at an impressive 350MHz and it will be developed with a 0.15 µ process that makes sense to us since 0.13 is not ready, whatever any company says.
The card will have "full R300 functionality" so you can expect to see eight pipelines and four TMUs.
Yes, it will have displacement maps since everybody is talking about this for ages, and it will have pixel and vertex 2.0 support since that is just what you will find in DirectX 9.1
The chip will be able to address up to an amazing 256MB of memory for frame buffering and it will use 128-bit SDRAM or an DDR memory interface.
There should be two variants – a discrete one and one with integrated memory and the documents we saw claims 32MB for it.