Eurogamer is reporting the 3DS hardware's BOM is estimated to be about $101, supporting my long held belief that the 3DS is wildly overpriced for what you get. Could have been nicely profitable at $200 or $180, or even comfortable at $150...
Nintendo 3DS hardware thread
- Thread starter brain_stew
- Start date
UBM TechInsights provided that "preliminary estimate". Considering half the specs they provided are just plain wrong, I'm doubting their credibility. Those companies rarely do a good job, anyway.
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
How come they're spilling out an estimated BoM if no one knows what CPU is in the console?
Well, my current opinion about the 3DS is that the games look way too outdated, and the initial software line-up is very weak.
I honestly fear for the future of the handheld, as it is right now. I see no interest at all in their current line-up.
Well, my current opinion about the 3DS is that the games look way too outdated, and the initial software line-up is very weak.
I honestly fear for the future of the handheld, as it is right now. I see no interest at all in their current line-up.
The current launch line-up is a combination of the usual issues with launch titles and Nintendo holding back bigger games to help support third-parties. I would not worry about it.
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
And what are they holding?
Another Mario Kart with gamecube looks? Ocarina of Time re-remake with N64 looks?
Star Fox 64 remake? Snake Eater re-remake?
These analyst estimates are very rough, but if you have some idea of the die size and the process it was produced on, as well as who fabricated it, you can probably on alright idea of about how much that part costs. The variations in cost due to licensing choices are probably much smaller than that.
And the cost of the whole SoC is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the combined cost of everything else. You'd expect the primary screen to be the most expensive BOM item.
That 3DS would be sold with large margins shouldn't surprise anyone. I'm sure Wii was sold with very high margins. Due to being much less powerful than the competition they still manage to sell for less.
I don't think that's at all a consensus. The market actually eats up ports/remakes, especially Nintendo ones, just look at how many were on GBA. That list also has lots of sequels to high selling games. A game like "Nintendogs + Cats" will probably sell over 10 million just by itself. Handheld Mario Kart games sell like hotcakes despite mirroring some previous console release - Mario Kart DS sold over 20 million. In fact, I think you need to look at the best selling games list for DS to get a better idea of the disparity between what you personally want and what the market wants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_DS_video_games
And it's not even that the release list has nothing more than the highest selling current staples. A new Kid Icarus game, new Megaman Legends, SMT/Persona games, Etrian Odyssey.. it's clear a lot of bases are being covered here. You can't really dismiss the sheer breadth of this list.
The games don't have to look cutting edge; the fact that they look far beyond what the high selling DS games looked like a scant few years ago is more than enough for them to sell.
Now I think this actually makes sense because if you have thin pixels but still using normal RGBRGB arrangement, each subpixel would be extremely thin and that could be more difficult to manufacture. Another possible arrangement is to make a 400x480 display, using vertical interleave for each eye (e.g. even rows for left eye and odd rows for right eye). But this would make the parallax barrier more complex. So it looks like its current configuration is the most cost effective way.
RaolinDarksbane
Newcomer
Even though the BoM might be at $101, you still need to take in account the cost of other things such as the cost of labor(how much does it cost to pay people to put together that 3DS?), the shipping materials/cost, mark up cost for retailers(seems to be at least $25 based on what Amazon and other retailers are selling them for), etc... Also because of the Earthquake, I expect prices of some components to shoot up like flash memories and the display. So nintendo is not making like $100 buck on each unit sold.
there is a new super mario coming out , its 3d graphics with the 3d effect and it seems to be based off super mario 3 . They are going to show more at e3.
Also yea OOT is a remake of one of the best games of all time and mario karts are allways good.
I don't see what the problem with the line up is. Sony with the NGP will have a bunch of sequals (sometimes 18th verisons ) of big sony exclusive titles and ms with the next xbox will do the same. People find games that they like and buy newer verisons or simlar games. You can bet sony is doing everything in their power to get COD to launch with the NGP or in the launch frame.
I don't see anything bad with that
ltcommander.data
Regular
Any idea how backwards compatibility with DS games is achieved? I don't remember hearing people finding native DS chips on the 3DS so is the 3DS emulating both the ARM9 and ARM7? It would explain the slower loading times people are seeing. And the DS's 3D hardware maps perfectly to the PICA200?
Technically, people haven't found anything about the silicon in the 3ds yet. If it wasn't for DMP's press release, we would have not known there's a PICA200 of a kind in there either.
I was saying that from the POV that developers can show separate content on separate parts of the display. Of course, depending on how the GPU is optimised to produce two framebuffers, the developer may not actually be able to send sufficiently independent scenes to the two framebuffer portions. But at the very least, they should be able to send an identity-mapped texture, that shows even columns for one eye, and odd for the other. From there on, one just needs to disable the barrier.
That's a good workaround I hadn't thought of. Yes, render a single camera to buffer, then split it into separate left and right fields before output. The savings from rendering 3D would be enough to cover the small overhead, so it should be doable as long as devs have decent enough access to the hardware.
DS has some pretty esoteric functionality in its 3D so you'd probably have a difficult time perfectly mapping it, especially without programmable fragment shaders. In fact, that also goes for a lot of the 2D functionality.
Maybe someone can report if there are any video glitches anywhere, but otherwise I really doubt they'll have gotten video mapped out. And if the CPUs really are dual ARM11 @ 266MHz then there's absolutely no way they could have gotten DS 2D and 3D software rendered.
I also think that it isn't enough power to even emulate the DS CPUs and other peripherals at a low level. I could buy the ARM7 and all of the peripherals attached to it being emulated at a high level since it's pretty nicely abstracted in DS games, but for the ARM9 to be emulated one of the CPUs would at least have to see the same memories and peripherals (mainly video, geometry engine, gamecard, DMA, and timers) at the same hardware locations. An MMU isn't enough, the overhead of capturing accesses is too much for at least some games which heavily use CPU I/O directly to the 3D.
It's not at all out of the question that the necessary DS or whatever glue necessary to bridge the hardawre was integrated verbatim into the SoC. An ARM9 with 4K/8K cache, ARM7, and some small SRAMs, some of which that can be consolidated with other things, don't take that much space on a modern process. The GPU has some unusual functions but is still pretty rudimentary when it comes to things that take up space (it's low clock design without a lot of parallelism and simple nearest-neighbor texturing)
Confirmed that 3DS isn't HLEing ARM7 for DS compatibility:
http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17501&highlight=&sid=c1927866c8fa30715f50ef4d6146c3f3
So that makes software emulation of the CPUs that much less likely.
http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17501&highlight=&sid=c1927866c8fa30715f50ef4d6146c3f3
So that makes software emulation of the CPUs that much less likely.
Chipworks decapped the Fujitsu chip and concludes that it contains two MB82DBS08645 512Mbit FCRAM modules on a single die. So we're looking at 128MB RAM, not 64MB as IGN reported nor the 64MB FCRAM/ 32MB LPDDR mix iSupply assumed.
http://www.ifixit.com/blog/blog/2011/03/28/nintendo-3ds-has-128mb-ram/
http://www.ifixit.com/blog/blog/2011/03/28/nintendo-3ds-has-128mb-ram/
Ah, I was beaten to that post. So the initial speculation in correct?
the last i read at neogaf the dev units were avalible with only 64MB so mabye this was a late stage game changer when the system was pushed back till 2011 ?
Maybe. The lead hardware designer at Nintendo mentioned in an interview recently that he doubled the initial system specs rather late in development.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
128 MB RAM is really nice compared to the original DS' 4 MB and the DSi's 16 MB.
