[Deepak]

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paed...revolution.ars

[one]

Nintendo Revolution GPU: Custom ATI design, possibly 600MHz

This guy (Jon "Hannibal" Stokes) seems to upload several hyper-speculative console-related articles lately but for the hit/miss rate of his speculation almost every case tends to miss the point AFAIK.

[drpepper]

It's an interesting article but very heavy on the speculation.

He makes an interesting point that the Revolution's chip may be more efficient in terms of AI and physics. A trait that Sony is hyping up with the CELL. Does anyone have any comments on this? Is it more capable in terms of physics and AI calcultions than CELL and Xenos?

[Carl B]

Well, I respect Hannibal greatly, but after reading some of his forum thread where he was kind of prodding around for information on what the Rev specs might be, I think it's safe to say he's just guessing at things. I honestly think the collective knowledge of this forum leads to more likely Revolution scenarios than that article points to.

This quote says it all for that article:

If you've read any of my work on CPU architecture, you know that I'm a big fan of drawing conclusions about "overall approach and design philosophy" based on a close look at a processor's architecture. So what I'll do here is run that process in reverse, and draw some conclusions about the Revolution's hardware from the more general guidance that Nintendo has given.

I'm giving it middling scores myself. Plus he admits to not having talked to any of Nintendo's top dogs himself, he by and large quotes statements given to other publications - publications that you know are not as concerned with actually understanding the hardware.

[Titanio]

Originally Posted by drpepper

He makes an interesting point that the Revolution's chip may be more efficient in terms of AI and physics. A trait that Sony is hyping up with the CELL. Does anyone have any comments on this? Is it more capable in terms of physics and AI calcultions than CELL and Xenos?

First, I guess you mean Xenon, not Xenos.

Second, more efficient != more capable/powerful (though I'd question any characterisation of Cell, for example, as being inefficient or even less efficient - though again, we don't know what we're comparing to on Rev)

Third, it is interesting commentary indeed. He seems to point at cache size as a key to better performance in these areas, at least as far as traditional approaches to these problems go, and that makes some sense. But traditional approaches aren't the only ones, and certainly won't be the only ones going forward. And to that end, word has it for example, that Cell excels at physics/simulation, so..

(Also worth noting that Cell's PPE isn't quite as cache-starved, if you want to put it that way, as Xenon's).

[Shifty Geezer]

Only browsed the arcticle, but it was IMO very poorly worded to present ideas that aren't factual. One thing I remember was the comparison of the processors, to which he said they ranged from the big Cell to the efficient Broadway, implying Cell was inefficient. And anyone trying to talk about Revolution when there's NO details at all is just talking fiction.

To me it just seemed like a site creating a contemporary article for the sake of attracting readers. Next-gen consoles are something to talk about, PS3 and XB360 have been covered, so make some stuff up about Revolution to crete a new article comparing the three systems.

[pc999]

Nice especulation, but I would prefer if they invest in a less dev frindly but more powerfull CPU design.

[V3]

Very poor speculative article. But doubt anyone can do better with no information released so far by Nintendo.

[pc999]

Just one question

Both XB360 and PS3 are said to spend quite some CPU time compressing and decompressing data, will the lower rez of Rev make impact on this , if does it is possible to know to what extent (in the case of the same game/engine but with the modifications need to good image/performance)

[Titanio]

Originally Posted by pc999

Both XB360 and PS3 are said to spend quite some CPU time compressing and decompressing data, will the lower rez of Rev make impact on this , if does it is possible to know to what extent (in the case of the same game/engine but with the modifications need to good image/performance)

Lower resolution => lower resolution assets => less compression?

One of the things Nintendo's aiming for with Revolution is "fast startup", and I assume that means loading times of games too.

[Powderkeg]

Originally Posted by Titanio

One of the things Nintendo's aiming for with Revolution is "fast startup", and I assume that means loading times of games too.

Startup of games is determined by 2 factors. The speed of the optical drive, and the amount of RAM that has to be loaded. We know that the Revolution uses a DVD drive, so in order to load games significantly faster than the other guys they will have to load less data prior to game startup, which would suggest less RAM.

[Titanio]

Originally Posted by Powderkeg

Startup of games is determined by 2 factors. The speed of the optical drive, and the amount of RAM that has to be loaded. We know that the Revolution uses a DVD drive, so in order to load games significantly faster than the other guys they will have to load less data prior to game startup, which would suggest less RAM.

And, again, that may be OK given the resolution they're aiming for. It seems to make sense.

[Urian]

Originally Posted by Titanio

Lower resolution => lower resolution assets => less compression?

One of the things Nintendo's aiming for with Revolution is "fast startup", and I assume that means loading times of games too.

They can use the same idea of Xbox HDD but with the Flash ROM.

[phenix]

The last page of the article was also the most interesting part. Nice read IMO.

[Titanio]

Originally Posted by Urian

They can use the same idea of Xbox HDD but with the Flash ROM.

True, I'd forgotten about that. I imagine some of that is reserved for such functionality.

[scificube]

I disagree with points made in this article.

Cell and Xenon should be great at physics because they can both crunch through the math (as I feel physics is far more computationally bound than conditionally bound) and secondly physics is an embarrassingly parallelizable task which plays to the strength of both architectures. Cell at least has some real world examples that show it's just dandy for physics sims already so I tend to wonder how it can still be said it will not handle physics well.

As far as AI goes...let's put things into perspective a bit. 1 thread on the Cell's PPE or a Xenon core is like having a CPU in the range of 1.6 to 3.2 Ghz dedicated to AI alone as given the parallel nature of the architectures...other tasks will execute elsewhere for the most part eliminating contention for CPU time. This contrasted with a 733 Celeron, a G3 hybrid, and most certainly not the EE which had to to handle not only AI, but physics, post processing, game code etc. The way I see it if AI were given just one dedicated thread on the Cell's PPE or in a core in Xenon AI should be significantly better than what we've seen to date in games.

I also find it objectionable to in round about way imply Cell is inefficient, inelegant etc and at the same time imply Nintendo's Broadway is the opposite when there is virtually NO data on Nintendo's chip and everyone is still basically cutting their teeth Cell as to just what they can do with it and how best to do it. It think it's only fair to wait a bit before coming to any conclusions here.

Also where is it noted that Cell is especially hot or expensive? Perhaps it could be considered to be from Nintendo's perspective but in the overall and especially for Sony's needs it looks just fine.

I just don't like the write up too much I guess.

[PC-Engine]

Originally Posted by Powderkeg

Startup of games is determined by 2 factors. The speed of the optical drive, and the amount of RAM that has to be loaded. We know that the Revolution uses a DVD drive, so in order to load games significantly faster than the other guys they will have to load less data prior to game startup, which would suggest less RAM.

The assertion that in order to load faster you'll need less RAM is a fallacy. You don't need expensive RAM for a DVD buffer nor do you need to fill all of MAIN RAM. In fact you can use cheap multipurpose RAM for the DVD buffer and/or audio. Same way they do it in GCN. In fact I wouldn't be suprised if Revolution used cheaper slower RAM for audio and DVD buffering.

As for Broadway..maybe it will be a single or dual core OoO design with a nice beefy coprocessor? Isn't a PPU a coprocessor?