Conclusions
ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro was the first graphics card to bring DirectX 9 features to the desktop, and it looks like these new Mobility Radeon 9600s will be the first graphics chips to bring DirectX 9 to mobile platforms. Bravo, ATI.

When will consumers be able to get their hands on notebooks with a Mobility Radeon 9600? Soon, but not right away. According to ATI, the Mobility Radeon 9600 is finished and shipping, but manufacturers won't have notebooks based on the chip available until May at the earliest. Notebooks featuring the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro won't be available until the summer, a few months after notebooks with the non-Pros are released. At some point, I'd expect that ATI will release a mobile version of ATI's FireGL based on the Mobility Radeon 9600, too.

If the Mobility Radeon 9600s weren't notebook parts, I might ride ATI a little hard for announcing the chips months in advance of their actual availability. However, since integrating a new graphics chip into a notebook is quite a bit more difficult than slapping an AGP graphics card into a desktop system, I can forgive what looks like an early product announcement.

On paper, the Mobility Radeon 9600s are easily the most full-featured and potentially fastest mobile graphics chips available, at least for now. ATI is also claiming that the Mobility Radeon 9600s have better performance per clock and higher clock speeds than NVIDIA's NV31M, which hasn't even been officially announced yet. Any manufacturer's performance claims that include comparisons with unannounced products from a competitor should be taken with a healthy sprinkling of salt, but it may be telling that ATI is audacious enough to make those claims in advance of NVIDIA's official NV31M launch.

In the end, the Mobility Radeon 9600s should be very, very fast mobile graphics chips with broad enough feature lists to appeal to hardcore gamers, business users, and multimedia enthusiasts alike. It wouldn't surprise me to see Mobility Radeon 9600s featured in 10lb desknote gaming rigs, lightweight Centrino-based business notebooks, and everything in-between.