Advanced Micro Devices said today that it plans to launch new Radeon mobile graphics chips in January.

AMD says the new chips will fit well with trends developing in 2013, such as the launch of “ultrathin” notebooks and new machines with Microsoft’s graphics-intensive Windows 8 operating system. The chips are going to be integrated into notebooks that are hybrids, which can be converted into laptops or tablets.

“We brought up our game over the past year,” Jay Marsden, the product marketing manger for AMD’s notebook graphics, said in a press call. “We are introducing our next generation of mobile GPUs [graphics processing units].”

AMD calls the new generation the AMD Radeon HD 8000 series of graphics chips. This is the second generation of chips to use the company’s AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, and it is aimed at bringing great gaming to thin laptops.

The chips have full DirectX 11 support and are built with 28-nanometer manufacturing. Marsden said that the new chips are more energy efficient than past chips in terms of power consumed and performance. The chips have AMD’s Enduro technology, which powers down the chip when it is idle. It also has acceleration for better videos, image compression, and image enhancement.

The new products include the AMD Radeon HD 8500M and 8600M chips. Both have 384 cores known as stream processors. The 8500M operates at 650 megahertz while the 8600M operates at 775 megahertz. With double-precision floating-point math calculations, the chips operate at 33 gigaflops and 39 gigaflops, respectively.

AMD will also launch the AMD Radeon HD 8700M series product, with 384 stream processors and clock speeds ranging from 620 megahertz to 850 megahertz, with gigaflop performance coming in at 33 to 43. The company is also launching its HD 8800M series, with 640 stream processors and clock speeds ranging from 650 megahertz to 700 megahertz. That chip operates at 62 gigaflops.

The company said the chips replace the previous generation of 7000 series graphics products. The new chips will be available Jan. 7. More details will be available at that time. Laptops using the chips will also be announced later, although the ASUS U38 laptop uses the chip and has already been announced.

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The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker is launching its AMD Radeon 6900 series of graphics cards with its second-generation of graphics for Microsoft’s DirectX 11 architecture. (DirectX 11 enables computers to run the coolest 3D graphics special effects). The series includes the new AMD Radeon HD 6970 and AMD Radeon HD 6950 graphics cards, which house the graphics chips in an add-in card in a computer. Prices for the cards start at $299. That means gamers can buy screaming-fast graphics chips at prices that aren’t going to completely bust their budgets.

The new chips show that AMD is still dedicated to launching stand-alone graphics chips under the Radeon brand name. Meanwhile, AMD is forging ahead with combo chips, which combine a microprocessor and a graphics chip on the same piece of silicon. Those chips will begin selling early next year under the AMD Fusion brand name and will compete with Intel’s combo chips, code-named Sandybridge.

While the combo chips will take some time to take off, the stand-alone chips like the ones AMD launched today will be critical for high-end gaming PCs, which are racing ahead of game consoles in terms of what they can display.

The new stand-alone AMD graphics cards will compete with Nvidia’s recently launched GeForce GTX 580 and 570 graphics chips, which sell for list prices of $519 and $349, respectively. The AMD chips feature Eyefinity, which allows a single graphics card to display images on as many as six different monitors at the same time. AMD says more than 60 games now take advantage of Eyefinity.

The new chips have more tessellation, a special effect that makes surfaces of objects appear more realistic. The new chips have about 2.9 times the performance of AMD’s earlier AMD Radeon HD 5870 graphics chip. Tessellation is the feature that most distinguishes Nvidia’s graphics cards. AMD’s new chips also have other image quality and power consumption improvements, resulting in a 10 percent improvement in performance.

Overall, the high-end AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphics chip offers 2.5 times the game performance of AMD’s fastest graphics chip from 2008. The new Radeon chips also have non-graphics features, such as parallel processing that allows for better video playback quality.

These kinds of graphics chips are among the most complicated in the technology world today. The AMD Radeon HD 6970 has more than 2.64 billion electronic components known as transistors, which are the microscopic building blocks of chips. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 580 chip has 3 billion transistors.

The AMD chip runs at 880 megahertz, has 1,536 processing cores, has a compute performance of 2.7 teraflops and can push pixels through the chip at a rate of 28.2 gigapixels per second. By comparison, the Nvidia chip runs at 772 megahertz, has 512 processors, and has a compute performance of 1.58 teraflops. It can process pixels at a rate of 37.1 gigapixels per second.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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