"2x the power of the GC," can someone clarify what this means? (ERP)

[fearsomepirate]

Not quite that simple, bit of a balance.
Memory needs to be fast enough to be widely useful and the GC 16MB's isn't.

Talking of cartridge, in practical terms (as in for use in game) the N64 cartridge actually had somewhat worse transfer rate than a DC's GDRom drive. Although it didn't obviously have the latency issues.

It was a far cry from Genesis/SNES where generally all code would run out of ROM.

Yeah, I know that A-RAM isn't useful for much beyond sound, but that was the intent, wasn't it? Put the sound in the cheapest RAM that will do the job?

Anyway, to be more specific, I was wondering if you'd prefer not quite enough RAM for all the texture detail and world size you like, but enough efficiency that transfer rate, bandwidth, and latency never really caught up with you, or if you'd prefer plenty of RAM, but always struggling to keep the memory subsystem from getting bogged down. Let's avoid extremes (like 2048 MB of ARAM on a unified bus vs 32 MB of GDDR3 with 16MB of cache on-chip and dedicated bus for CPU, GPU, and audio, both of which would suck) and say you go a qualitative 10% one way or 10% the other way--which way would you rather go?

It's mostly a hypothetical question (since Xbox had a lot more $$$ worth of silicon under the hood than Cube at launch, I didn't want to ask it as a direct comparison).

 

[ERP]

Yeah, I know that A-RAM isn't useful for much beyond sound, but that was the intent, wasn't it? Put the sound in the cheapest RAM that will do the job?

Anyway, to be more specific, I was wondering if you'd prefer not quite enough RAM for all the texture detail and world size you like, but enough efficiency that transfer rate, bandwidth, and latency never really caught up with you, or if you'd prefer plenty of RAM, but always struggling to keep the memory subsystem from getting bogged down. Let's avoid extremes (like 2048 MB of ARAM on a unified bus vs 32 MB of GDDR3 with 16MB of cache on-chip and dedicated bus for CPU, GPU, and audio, both of which would suck) and say you go a qualitative 10% one way or 10% the other way--which way would you rather go?

It's mostly a hypothetical question (since Xbox had a lot more $$$ worth of silicon under the hood than Cube at launch, I didn't want to ask it as a direct comparison).

IMO


I love the 1T-SRAM in GC, it's extremly hard to write things that perform poorly.....
However I'd rather have had more conventional memory, I always felt the GC memory system was over engineered. They tried to solve the N64 issue in two seperate ways just having the L2 cache on the CPU was probably sufficient.

Same thing with the graphics chip, I really wish they hadn't cut some of the corners they did.

When moving stuff over from PS2 we'd commonly put code in A-RAM to get some extra space.

 

[function]

When moving stuff over from PS2 we'd commonly put code in A-RAM to get some extra space.

So you'd often run code stright from the A-RAM, and work on data stored in main ram? Is this because bandwidth requirements for accessing data stores are much greater than for code, and access is more frequent (therefore benefitting from lower latency access)?

Wouldn't particulrly branchy code have a particulrly big performance impact if you kept needing something not in L2 cache?

Sorry if these questions are a little dumb, I'm just trying to get my head around the performance tradeoffs.

 

[Urian]

So you'd often run code stright from the A-RAM, and work on data stored in main ram? Is this because bandwidth requirements for accessing data stores are much greater than for code, and access is more frequent (therefore benefitting from lower latency access)?

Wouldn't particulrly branchy code have a particulrly big performance impact if you kept needing something not in L2 cache?

Sorry if these questions are a little dumb, I'm just trying to get my head around the performance tradeoffs.

Oh, is easy to understand.

Latencies and the time that a processor can acces to its memory and caches is important for a better performance and GCN has this part very well optimized.

 

[Li Mu Bai]

My father works as a stock manager of an important robotic company from Europe and he has the list of prices from MoSys but I don´t know if I am allowed to post it in a public forum becuase is confidential material.

I also know MoSys's licensed prices for 90nm ASIC/SoC ram designs, (MoSys 1T-SRAM-Quad-core thanks to a friend at Fujitsu) not as prohibitive as say XDR whom Nintendo was initially in talks with. So 128mb is certainly not out of the question as a main ram pool for the Rev. I've "heard" due to the unparalled success of both the DS/DSL & its sw like Nintendogs, AC:WW, MK, & the BT series, etc. in jpn especially, (all far exceeded projected numbers) that 128 is a lock. But with Nintendo nothing is absolutely certain.

 

[darkblu]

I also know MoSys's licensed prices for 90nm ASIC/SoC ram designs, (MoSys 1T-SRAM-Quad-core thanks to a friend at Fujitsu) not as prohibitive as say XDR whom Nintendo was initially in talks with. So 128mb is certainly not out of the question as a main ram pool for the Rev. I've "heard" due to the unparalled success of both the DS/DSL & its sw like Nintendogs, AC:WW, MK, & the BT series, etc. in jpn especially, (all far exceeded projected numbers) that 128 is a lock. But with Nintendo nothing is absolutely certain.

it's not, but it'd be very nice nevertheless.

/wild tangent mode/
hey, my last-year desktop had 128MB and was doing fine w/o a swapfile under beos. of course, this year i had to go with 512MB for the mini, but it is running (almost) every known server under the sun plus quartz, and still compiles like a champ ; )

 

[pc999]

I've "heard" due to the unparalled success of both the DS/DSL & its sw like Nintendogs, AC:WW, MK, & the BT series, etc. in jpn especially, (all far exceeded projected numbers) that 128 is a lock. But with Nintendo nothing is absolutely certain.

I may be missing your point but what is the relation between those games and the quantity of 1T-Sram-Q on the rev

 

[Li Mu Bai]

I may be missing your point but what is the relation between those games and the quantity of 1T-Sram-Q on the rev

Justification of price, as an additional 40mb of Quad-core would certainly cost them. (88-128) Those aforementioned successes monetarily would be a financial windfall so to speak, helping to offset the increased cost of its inclusion. Similar to how the massive sales of the GBA, SP, 1st party developed, or Nintendo published titles performed marketwise on both platforms (referring to GC & the GBA) primarily helped them to maintain healthy profitability even in the face of declining marketshare. (only one quarterly loss posted of $25 million iirc, it was the company's 1st) Despite lackluster GC hw sales, & waning 3rd party support for the platform.

 

[Teasy]

128MB of 1T-Sram-Q would be ok if they also have some extra standard ram (64-128MB). Something similar to A-Ram but of course a generation on (so instead of 81MB/s bandwidth it would be, say a couple of GB/s bandwidth). The OS, sound and most of the game code could then run in this extremely cheap pool of ram leaving the 128MB pool of very fast 1T-Sram-Q free for things that really need high bandwidth and low latency.

 

[function]

Oh, is easy to understand.

Latencies and the time that a processor can acces to its memory and caches is important for a better performance and GCN has this part very well optimized.

Thanks, but I already understand that.

I'm hoping to hear a little more about datastore vs code access and whether you can effectively hide A-ram limitations for certain accesses (like for code *if* I'm understanding ERP correctly) with L2 cache.

 

[Li Mu Bai]

128MB of 1T-Sram-Q would be ok if they also have some extra standard ram (64-128MB). Something similar to A-Ram but of course a generation on (so instead of 81MB/s bandwidth it would be, say a couple of GB/s bandwidth). The OS, sound and most of the game code could then run in this extremely cheap pool of ram leaving the 128MB pool of very fast 1T-Sram-Q free for things that really need high bandwidth and low latency.

If the 128mb number does in fact become the standard, they will also have a dedicated secondary pool for sound, & e-DRAM. I agree wholeheartedly teasy, make that secondary pool faster (there are a multitude of ram types that are dirt cheap now & run much faster than 81mb/s) & just large enough to enable multi-tasking as you described above. Even if it is limited to only the OS & sound.

 

[darkblu]

i think you two are getting greedy.

 

[Megadrive1988]

from GDC:

 

[Urian]

Metalic Case

 

[pc999]

Inst that air port (whatever is caled) around the same size of the XB360?BTW wouldnt be morea proof of that the CPU is powerfull (as they genaraly are hooter)?

Justification of price, as an additional 40mb of Quad-core would certainly cost them. (88-128) Those aforementioned successes monetarily would be a financial windfall so to speak, helping to offset the increased cost of its inclusion. Similar to how the massive sales of the GBA, SP, 1st party developed, or Nintendo published titles performed marketwise on both platforms (referring to GC & the GBA) primarily helped them to maintain healthy profitability even in the face of declining marketshare. (only one quarterly loss posted of $25 million iirc, it was the company's 1st) Despite lackluster GC hw sales, & waning 3rd party support for the platform.

Wouldnt that mean that they would sell it at cost?

BTW Moore´s Law and the transition from the Q version would give around that at the same price, no?

 

[StefanS]

If the 128mb number does in fact become the standard, they will also have a dedicated secondary pool for sound, & e-DRAM. I agree wholeheartedly teasy, make that secondary pool faster (there are a multitude of ram types that are dirt cheap now & run much faster than 81mb/s) & just large enough to enable multi-tasking as you described above. Even if it is limited to only the OS & sound.

If they decide on putting a secondary pool of RAM in the console, there's no way in hell that is going to be A-RAM.

 

[Li Mu Bai]

i think you two are getting greedy.

Not really, just playing armchair designers. dark, you most admit that the GC's 16mb of dedicated A-ram solely for the Macronix DSP was overkill, & with this next-gen if they follow a similar architectural scheme, (as has been confirmed) cheap but much faster & more efficient ram would be readily available for use. I just recommended sound & OS support.

Wouldnt that mean that they would sell it at cost?

BTW Moore´s Law and the transition from the Q version would give around that at the same price, no?

pc999, almost every console ever released in recent times (10-15yrs) afaik is initially sold at a loss, & never at cost. Profit on consoles generally occurs gradually over time, when the manufacturing process matures & the associated tech. & fabs begin to drop in price. Even though in Nintendo's case since their focus isn't on creating cutting-edge CPU technology, their losses will be considerably less than their competitors. The DS/DSL's hw & sw sales monetarily merely help to absorb these losses. But do not think that a large amount of money did not go into the R&D for the FHC, (Free-Hand Controller) ATi's Hollywood GPU, MoSys, NEC, or even IBM's Broadway for that matter.

Elaborate further on how this relates to Moore's law, the data aspect doubling every 18 months? Also are you referring to MosyS Quad-Core's density?

 

[Rodéric]

That exhaust fan is no bigger than the NGC one, and likely smaller in fact, according to Iwata 3 DVD case stacked size.
I don't think anyone expected passive cooling anyway...

 

[function]

That's what I thought. Heck, they may even be using the same fan as for the GC (which would be a shame, as it can be a bit high-pitch and noisy like the DC!).

 

[pc999]

Thanks Li Mu Bai (I confused the terms), are you sure that GC has been sold at loss at the begining, after all (as long as we know) it still the exact same components I Know that at the begining it is pricier and usally even sold at loss but keep the exact same components and reduce the price to less than half is incredible.

24x4 (180nm-90nm)= 96 Mgs, someone said to me (here?, I will try to check) that the diference between 1T-Sram and the new 1T-Sram-Q is that the last one have a density of ~33% more, that would be around 32Mgs more, ie, a total of 128Mgs at the same cost of todays 24Mgs in GC.

I have no info about this "MosyS Quad-Core's density", once I got time I will search (is it the same of 1T-Sram-Q?, if so then the info should be very wrong considering the name).