The new VPU (M18) from ATI will be used by high-end laptop manufacturers such as Dell, Voodoo PC, and Alienware.

The chip appears to be based on the R3×0 architecture, however, it is actually based on the new R420 desktop chip used in the X800 series graphics cards. It has 110 Million transistors, almost double that of the previous M11 chip.

The eight pixel and four vertex pipelines VPU will be clocked at 350MHz, nearly 100MHz less than Mobility Radeon 9700. It will be paired up with 256MB of memory running at a 600MHz (effective) clock speed.

The benchmark results from major publications such as ExtremeTech and Tom’s Hardware show that the new chip doubles the performance of M11 in many tests. The M18 is also able to hit nearly 2700 marks in 3DMark 2003 with a resolution of 1280×1024 along with 4X AA and 8X AF settings.