Wow! Renesas Announces "Dreamcast On A Chip"

The SH3707 will ship in the first quarter of 2005, Miyazaki said.

Almost implies a customer, although for the life of me, I cannot figure out who it might be. The article doesn't mention power envelope at all. If this is for portable use, a new player may actually have a chance.
 
Seems that the graphics core is based on MBX and the processor is twice as powerful as that used in the Dreamcast.

I guess this is intended to go into a handheld, although with a max resoloution of 1024X768 I guess it could have other applications too (arcade/slot machines?)
 
Cool nice find Deepak!

"Our goal was to accomplish second-generation (console) performance and first-generation cost," said Mitsuhiro Miyazaki, the project deputy manager for Renesas, based in Tokyo.

According to Miyazaki, the target specification for the platform is to achieve up to 1024 x 768 resolution, 10 million to 13 million vertices or 5 million to 6 million triangles per second, with up to 20 percent translucency per scene – in other words, anticipating a game where some of the polygons would be enhanced with transparency effects. That would place the SH3707 at somewhat over twice the performance of the Dreamcast, which could handle up to 3 million triangles per second. The SH3707 also has the capability of processing MPEG-1, -2, and -4 video and eight-channel PCM/ADCPM audio.

A new DCTwo perhaps?
 
This chip paired with 128 MB of RAM and a DVD drive could be interesting. I'd buy it for around $75 as long as SEGA makes some games for it.
 
So why would they capitalize on the DC moniker if the thing won't actually be DC compatible? That'd just be dumb.
 
Guden Oden said:
So why would they capitalize on the DC moniker if the thing won't actually be DC compatible? That'd just be dumb.

I was thinking more of a PSTwo type architecture ie single chip cpu+gpu. $75 would be a fair price with a DVD drive and software DVD playback considering this chip is more powerful than DC coupled with more memory too.
 
Hey what do you guys think about this idea-

What if sega makes a DCtwo with the above chip plus 32/64mb edram(dc had 26mb sdram), plus the old yamaha sound chip, a broadband modem and a 40/60GB HDD, but no media drive, no GD-roms, no DVD's.

What would happen is that games would be downloaded onto the systems large hard drive, while cutting out all the middlemen they'd only be priced at around 19.99 or 14.99.

The entire DC back catalogue plus new software(shenmue3?) could be available. Sega actually developed a few chapters of shenmue3 on dc as you can find numereous pics of chapter 5 "Luoyang" online.

The system could retail for a 2005 launch of around 74.99/99.99.

What do you think?
 
Guden Oden said:
So why would they capitalize on the DC moniker if the thing won't actually be DC compatible? That'd just be dumb.

AFAIK there may be some titles that would be compatible. Converserion of the backcatalogue may not be too tricky either.
 
If this is for portable use, a new player may actually have a chance.
1024x768 would be one bigass portable... Wonder if there could be a market for Tablet-form media/game player...
 
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