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I didn't. Sorry about that.You DO realize the DS has a GPU, right? Why would you go from a design with a GPU to one without?
I didn't. Sorry about that.You DO realize the DS has a GPU, right? Why would you go from a design with a GPU to one without?
I thought any > linear power increase is not strictly due to the frequency increase, but due to using a higher voltage to attain the higher frequencies.
Isn't 4MB of vram and 64MB of ram a bit on the low side?
I would go with a triple core ARM11 @ 450MHz (32KB instruction+32KB data L1 cache, 256 KB L2 cache/core), no GPU, MoSys 80MB 1T-SRAM, and bigger game cards.
Indeed it has! ...And it is one described by developers as "bizarre" in the way it is programmed - perhaps because it may have been cooked up in-house by Nintendo R&D, and not being experienced in 3D graphics hardware design... *shrug* I dunno.It had a GPU?
I think if power consumption is the number one concern then a better CPU could possibly improve it, not worsen it... I don't have actual numbers in front of me but my gut feeling tells me that a Cortex-A9 has better perf/Watt than an ARM11; I know that the Watt/MHz numbers are lower but that's 65nm vs 45nm; still, even if the consumption is much lower between the nodes, the perf/MHz is much better on Cortex-A9. And Nintendo would win a lot more recognition with it.
Epic lists shader tech used in Epic Citadel and Unreal Engine 3 for iOS at a page on their website, so some notion that the demo is not computationally intensive and its looks are mostly attributable to pre-baked texture work (as if many high quality texture layers were not extremely expensive on a hardware level anyway) is misguided.
Processing cores like the A9 or an SGX take up square millimeters of space and cost literally just a few bucks in silicon, whether they're brand new or not. Their true cost to a mobile system currently is, of course, their power consumption.
Designing even a relatively basic GPU core like the DS's would be outside the expertise of Nintendo's hardware engineers, so they definitely brought in somebody's work.
Based on DS's rendering algorithm and the recently sparked possibilty that Stellar Semiconductor was not completely devoured by Broadcom for all these years, the DS might've gotten it's GPU from them -- yes, it's quite a stretch.
I spent more than a few moments closely observing the demo on an iPad - there it has *zero* dynamic per-pixel lighting. It's so apparent at places it's not even funny (diffuse highlights and shadows in disagreement with light sources, non-existent or blatantly pre-baked specular components, etc). It does seem to have a (rather shallow) parallax mapping effect on a portion of the surfaces though. Perhaps the demo does do everything the brochure claims on the iPhone4 (higher relative fillrate, etc). On the iPad though it's essentially a static world with two textures (albedo and GI map), with a subtle bloom filter as a post-effect.Epic lists shader tech used in Epic Citadel and Unreal Engine 3 for iOS at a page on their website, so some notion that the demo is not computationally intensive and its looks are mostly attributable to pre-baked texture work (as if many high quality texture layers were not extremely expensive on a hardware level anyway) is misguided.
I never heard that.. are you sure? That's truly a big waste of potential.The vector processor in the BCM2727 isn't directly available to 3rd party developers, so how is that relevant?
Of course that simply playing some sound files won't tax even a low-end CPU. But if a developer would like to do 3D positional audio with ~32 voices of ~128kbps MP3 quality and with some reverb effects to the boot... well, he won't.It's perfectly possible that there is dedicated hardware for audio, and even if there isn't you seem to be exaggerating the processing cost involved (it's just 20MHz per MP3 and you can do it in advance for the usual small sound effects).
Sorry, didn't mean to. My point was just to show that there's already a real product in the market using a parallax barrier screen and that's a huge step from showing early prototypes in a tech conference.And how about not removing the context of the quote? You said 'as soon as 3D displays become standard'. A single model is as far from standard as can be - while I agree OS support will probably come in less than 2 years, the number of features supported by various OSes that never became mainstream is a staggering number.
There is a difference between casual gaming and casual games. The DS is all about what many would call casual games, but people who own one used them a lot more than cellphone gaming on average, so it's not casual gaming per-se. That's presumably the distinction MfA wanted to point out.
Bull shit.
Etrian Odyssey, SMT, Contra 4, and Dementium beg to differ.
I wouldn't even go to A9s, even a single 600-720MHz Cortex A8 would make a big difference from 2*266MHz ARM11.The licensing fee may be higher and the royalty rate per unit definitely would be, yet the point about A9 availability within the time frame of a 3DS launch definitely would've been the big obstacle.
The licensing fee may be higher and the royalty rate per unit definitely would be, yet the point about A9 availability within the time frame of a 3DS launch definitely would've been the big obstacle.
Of course that simply playing some sound files won't tax even a low-end CPU. But if a developer would like to do 3D positional audio with ~32 voices of ~128kbps MP3 quality and with some reverb effects to the boot... well, he won't.
Not unless there's some dedicated audio dsp hardware, like you said.
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I wouldn't even go to A9s, even a single 600-720MHz Cortex A8 would make a big difference from 2*266MHz ARM11. .
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Sorry, didn't mean to. My point was just to show that there's already a real product in the market using a parallax barrier screen and that's a huge step from showing early prototypes in a tech conference.
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The commercial success of some DS titles doesn't really belong to the discussion. I was talking about platform's success.
Check out the list of best-selling games for the DS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_DS_video_games
Now take away all the imaginative low-budget, depth-less and simple games (all the brain-trainings, pet, puzzles and more). What would you get, in terms of console sales and market relevance? A portable Gamecube..
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The only selling points that a 3DS could offer above smartphones with a 3D screen is more battery life, better controls and AAA games.
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Does a 720mhz A8 really have the same (or lower) power draw than dual 266mhz ARM11s? I'm somewhat doubtful and if it doesn't then it was never an option open to Nintendo.
What about BC as well? Its quite possible that this dual ARM11 setup has been chosen as its allowed Nintendo to offer full BC without legacy hardware and if that is the case would a single A8 be able to offer this feature?
All of these potential alternatives have to be discussed under those qualifiers, truth is we'll probably never know whether Nintendo got it right but I think its naive to doubt that their engineers don't have some pretty solid justifications for going with the hardware they did. They've designed some utterly fantastic systems over the years, the GCN and NDS were both perfect examples of supremely efficient designs for their target market.
At launch the 3DS will have more S3D content than any other device on the market. It packs a stereo3D camera (a first for an affordable consumer device), will ahve dozens of S3D games available and even several S3D movies.
An Android or iOS device may be able to offer a S3D screen within the next 12 months but how long is it going to be before it has anything like the amount of S3D content that the 3DS will have at launch? I'd say 3 years would be a rather ambitious estimate.
Lazy8s said:The difference is measured in dimes, not dollars, between the royalty on a new and/or lower volume IP core and an old and/or high volume one. Indeed, the entire royalty per unit for a single core is under a buck.
NIntendo has a long history of squeezing every penny, especially in their handhelds. Their feature bullet lists always look aggressive, but everything they do include has been and is going to be offensively cheap. Microphone in the DS anyone? When I think about what they passed as audio DACs in the GBA I still want to punch the whole lot in their faces. Multiple times. Or how they saved literally half a penny per unit by removing S-Video capability from EU Wiis.
It's not surprising at all that they go cheap on the CPUs. They always have done so.
What's surprising to me (still) is that two CPU cores come out cheaper than one CPU core, especially at such low clock speeds. Maybe it really is about security, running one of them locked down for system libraries. Piracy has to be a big concern for them right now.