Chiplets Hit Laptop GPUs: AMD's Radeon RX 7900M Lands in the Alienware m18
AMD has announced the Radeon RX 7900M laptop graphics chip, which launches first inside Dell's refreshed Alienware m18, its giant-screen flagship gaming laptop.
This high-end mobile GPU will launch exclusively within the m18 as an AMD Advantage laptop, meaning both the CPU and the GPU are AMD silicon, and the system is engineered in collaboration between AMD and the OEM to meet certain standards around performance and cooling. The m18 features both this new graphics chip and an AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX processor for top-end mobile performance, which is no less than we’d expect based on our review of the first Alienware m18 machine, based on Intel and Nvidia silicon.
The RX 7900M is the star of this story, though, at least as far as competing with Nvidia in high-end mobile PC gaming goes. Team Red drew direct comparisons to Nvidia’s RTX 4080 GPU in the briefing prior to the chip’s launch, so let’s dive into the specifics.
As with the other graphics chips in AMD's Radeon RX 7000 series, the RX 7900M is built on RDNA 3 architecture. This platform was first announced at CES 2023, and while we still see far more Nvidia GPUs in gaming systems, we have reviewed a handful of laptops running this family of silicon since.
They range across the power spectrum, but the 7900M will sit firmly atop AMD’s pile as the first ever laptop graphics processor with chiplet design, the multi-segment architecture used in modern processors. The GPU also features AI accelerators and second-generation ray-tracing accelerators. Here are the hard specs…
The 16GB of video memory (VRAM), 72 compute units, and up to 180 watts total graphics power stand out immediately—this is one high-end GPU. In practical terms for you, AMD compared the specs with that of
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