3DO MX (successor to the M2) CPU and 128-bit ASIC

[Megadrive1988]

Thanks and credit to parallax scroll for this:

The new hardware picture wouldn't be complete without including 3DO, so we'll now shift gears over to the MX. Like the M2 before it, 3DO claim the MX will be its generation's top gun. Our Q-spies report that the M2's successor is already past the design document state and is actually living breathing hardware. At the moment, the MX chipset is physically huge (it can barely fit on a good-sized table) but once 3DO gets all the bugs out, they'll work on reducing the size (common practuce in the hardware biz). By all accounts, the MX is a screamer, with close to 5 million polygons boogying around the screen at once. Not only can the MX produce N64/M2-type graphic effects like Trilinear Mip Mapping and Edge Antialiasing, but it can handle such esoteric realtime graphic functions like Anisotropic filtering, Phong-Lighting and Surface Antialiasing. The secret to the MX's ultra-high performance lies in its radical hardware architecture. Unlike all others before it, the MX's RAM is incorporated into the same chip as the CPU and graphic processor. Set up in this manner, game information can now run at the same clock speed as the CPU (a 110 MHz Power PC 604) or the graphic processor (which is basically a 128-bit ASIC). The MX is less than a year away from completion, but 3DO has already shown the technology to a large Japanese software company who has shown interest in developing for the machine and perhaps even buying the hardware rights outright. The mystery software company is led by a certain Mr. Hironobu Sakaguchi, but you didn't hear it from me.

Nice. A PowerPC 604 @ 110 MHz and a custom graphics ASIC that was much more powerful than the M2's BDA (Bulldog) ASIC, with the following features:

*on-chip RAM
*5 million polygons/sec performance
*Phong Lighting (is that possible)
*Anisotropic Filtering
*Anti-Aliasing (the M2 had no real AA hardware)


The 3DO MX was basicly 'M3' and Microsoft ultimately acquired the 3DO Systems hardware team (CagEnt under Samsung) and chipset in 1998, but not before Nintendo took a serious pass at CagEnt & MX in 1997 before moving onto ArtX in 1998.