Sony's Next Generation Portable unveiling - PSP2 in disguise
- Thread starter Farid
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Found this on GAF:
http://gdcvault.com/play/1014742/-SPONSORED-Next-Generation-Portable
It's a full presentation with audio and video and slides.
Things I didn't know:
- both touch screens are pressure sensitive
- cameras are optimised for video/image processing, not photos
- game cards have a percentage that's writable (5-10%) reserved for writing info like your savegames
- 3G has GPS, WiFi-only uses SkyHook
ARM9 has full cache coherency between cores
3 cores of 4 available to games
Split memory that can both be used for graphics very similarly to PS3. I heard somewhere already that VRAM would be 128MB (which is probably comparable to PS3's 256 considering the lower resolution of the NGP). No news yet about normal RAM. I would expect 256MB there, but perhaps 128MB could sitll happen.
http://gdcvault.com/play/1014742/-SPONSORED-Next-Generation-Portable
It's a full presentation with audio and video and slides.
Things I didn't know:
- both touch screens are pressure sensitive
- cameras are optimised for video/image processing, not photos
- game cards have a percentage that's writable (5-10%) reserved for writing info like your savegames
- 3G has GPS, WiFi-only uses SkyHook
ARM9 has full cache coherency between cores
3 cores of 4 available to games
Split memory that can both be used for graphics very similarly to PS3. I heard somewhere already that VRAM would be 128MB (which is probably comparable to PS3's 256 considering the lower resolution of the NGP). No news yet about normal RAM. I would expect 256MB there, but perhaps 128MB could sitll happen.
The confirmation of VRAM is very interesting. On a SoC, there really isn't any reason to have dedicated VRAM: if both of the GPU and CPU are sharing the same die, there isn't a good reason to burn different pins to get to two separate memory pools.
That suggests two possibilities, both interesting:
a) The VRAM is actually on-die (such as EDRAM), and thus will be much smaller than 128MB.
b) It isn't a SoC: the GPU is on a separate die, and thus has its own memory interface and DRAM device.
Yeah, I think there's a very real possibility that the NGP chipset features discreet CPU and GPU chips. Obviously, they'll integrate those down the line.
D
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Except it's easier to dissipate the heat if there's two separate chips.
This is, after all, 4*A9 + SGX543MP4 @ 40nm (for the moment).
If the A5 is already considered "huge", you can only imagine how big a single SoC for the NGP would be.
Of course that making it in 28nm or lower would avoid that.
I guess it would also make the use of the ACP bus (Accelerator Coherence Port) by the GPU more difficult, or at least it would probably require as many pins as dual memory bus. OTOH I wonder if any A9 SoC connects the GPU to the ACP.
O1net.com's pre-announcement report on specs has proven extremely reliable so far, and it suggested 512MB+128MB (on the basis that there's 1GB in the dev kits). I think David Coombe's comment about it having 'a lot of RAM compared to PSP and PS3' tallied with that somewhat...
Driving external pins is (probably) one of the main consumers of power.
For the record, I do not know what is in NGP system.
Any change that the 128MB will be faster memory than the 512MB memory?
It could be one rationale for a separate memory pool, but there are other possible explanations per some of the above posts too.
I'm curious about it as well, but looking around I don't think there's been any hint about what type of memory the VRAM is, if it differs from LPDDR2.
Get him, boys!
That's true.
There other dual-channel SoCs that have been announced (OMAP). Perhaps this is a dual-channel device, with one channel going to a slower (and more importantly, cheaper) DRAM device, and one going to a more exotic memory. The address space could be a low/high split, rather than banking between the two channels.
As for the type of memory, I have no idea if LPDDR2 would be considered exotic vs. cheap (I guess it depends on Sony's cost sensitivity).
D
Deleted member 13524
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Yap, there's the current case of Symbian^3 devices, with an ARM11+stacked 256MB and a "multimedia processor" in a separate chip (2D/3D GPU + dual vec16 DSP + dedicated imaging processor + video coder/decoder + 32MB stacked SDRAM)
Cortex-A9. If you call it ARM9 people will think you're talking about a DS
Arghh, Sony *shakes fist*
Would have been better had they put some other slower CPU core for whatever it is they think they need a core for. I don't know what code tends to be running on the Media Engine on PSP or that reserved SPU on PS3 but I have a hard time imagining it's really maxing them out.
Hopefully the core clocks and voltages are asynchronous, at least.
128MB of VRAM is reasonable - tiled architecture means that you usually can get away with less VRAM, because:
- You usually don't need to store depth/stencil off-chip.
- There's no incentive to storing a floating point > 32bpp framebuffer, and in fact you can get away with a 16bpp one that looks nice.
- There's no real incentive to use several render targets for deferred shading techniques since the GPU does deferred shading already.
- NGP has PVRTC which supports better compression than S3TC on PS3.
You might need a little bit more memory due to storing binning information, but if it overwrites transformed vertex data in the process it could be a wash, given how much geometry gets culled off the list.
They seem to have more substantial multitasking ambitions with NGP, in terms of a 'in-game OS' and speedy access to LiveArea and other things while a game is running - at least going by their presentation in January.
That said, they've only shown a mock-up, and we've been burned by Sony's OS mockups in the past. I hope there is a very good excuse for it, by way of good multitasking in-game.
Yes, there's scope for quite busy background work, as long as they actually use it.
What about security? How can the lessons from PSP and PS3 be incorporated into these chips?
What about security? How can the lessons from PSP and PS3 be incorporated into these chips?
running away laughing 
