enter 'Hollywood' - ATI's Graphics Processor for Revolution

[Evil_Cloud]

Nahh... Sony wont allow for that... Square can do a chrono trigger or something but not FF. Never happen.

Sony has no say . FF is a square-enix property and thus it can go where they want like the gamecube

Not to forget Sony has lost quite a lot of ownership in Square-Enix, due to the merger.

 

[jvd]

Nahh... Sony wont allow for that... Square can do a chrono trigger or something but not FF. Never happen.

Sony has no say . FF is a square-enix property and thus it can go where they want like the gamecube

Well, with a seat on their board and a fair deal of stock ownership, Sony may not have a say, per se, but they would have input.

as the other poster said not anymore . They are in a much weaker place to dictate anything to square -enix

 

[one]

As for Hollywood, it's almost certain that it contains some form of eDRAM for the backward compatibility to the GC and will be fabbed at NEC...

From the interview with ex-ArtX Greg Buchner in 2001 about the Flipper -
http://cube.ign.com/articles/099/099520p1.html?fromint=1

IGNcube: With the embedded RAM, was that a decision from the very beginning or was that added at a later date?

Greg Buchner: That was actually one of the "passionate" arguments, because making that step there's a huge benefit to system performance but there's also the addition of risk and cost. Nothing in life comes for free. It's one of those things [when decided] it changes what we want to do from a technology partnership with NEC, what kind of process we need, from tools, and it brings a new partner, MoSys, into the mix. It limits the choices of silicon providers because there's not many people who can do something like that. In fact very few people can do what NEC has done with this. They've done a phenomenal job.

So that was a decision where we said from a practical point of view, "Do we want to do this?" and just had a very rational discussion on pros and cons. In the end clearly we get a huge benefit. Not only from the embedded DRAM, but from how we structured it. One of the other products out there has embedded DRAM, but arguably they're not getting all the bang for the buck. They've got the cost in the silicon from a process point of view, but as for the performance in memory I don't think they have what we have -- or anything close to it.

IGNcube: Over half of the chip is embedded RAM, right?

Greg Buchner: On the version that shipped at launch it's on the order of a third. From a transistor point of view it's about half, but because it's a very regular structure it is very, very dense. So that half-transistor results in a much smaller area. So from an area point of view actually a little less than a third.

IGNcube: Is transform performance one of the big fights you had with using eDRAM, which takes up space?

Greg Buchner: That actually wasn't an issue. Those two are very separate discussions. You look at the embedded DRAM and it's going to be for performance on the fill rate side, and that's a cost trade-off. To get that kind of bandwidth with an external device, forget it, you're not going to even come close. So there's a huge benefit we get by having it.

Transform is a separate topic almost: how much do you shoot for, what's important, what are the typical cases with what developers are doing. Not many people send down triangles of the same color and never change anything else. It's these kind of fake benchmarks that are irrelevant. And so they're not streamed to data that is ever showing up in a game, so what's the point in measuring them? So what we went after is what's really happening in a game, what's really happening from a content creation point of view. We optimized around what the data patterns looked like and made a machine that screams for those kind of patterns.

On March 7 2005 NEC unveiled their new 90nm eDRAM technology called MIM2. According to their roadmap the 90nm eDRAM is ready now.

AFAIK Microsoft does the fabbing of the Xbox2 GPU at TSMC's 90nm process. In the cost aspect TSMC looks like the best choice, but it remains to be seen how TSMC can yield a GPU with eDRAM, if it contains an eDRAM block.

 

[PC-Engine]

You can't just say that their success is mainly due to their lead in install base though. Sega launched Dreamcast about a year before PS2, it had many awesome games, but we all know the rest of the story.

That's not what I'm saying though. SONY is selling a good number of PS2s compared to Xboxes and GCNs today because of what? That's right...games!!! How did it get that many games in the first place??? That's right the headstart that it had. Of course this isn't the only reason, but this is the major reason.

Regarding SEGA and the DC that argument has been beaten to death already and it has been shown time and time again that the DC's earlier launch at $200 crippled it fairly severely in terms of hardware performance when compared to PS2 18 months later which allowed the PS2 to pull away even though the DC already had a fairly good game library at that point in time. Also DC didn't have a lot of 3rd party support, no EA, no Konami etc. The reason why DC eventually failed wasn't due to it launching before PS2.

Now XBox launched in America roughly a year after PS2 launched in America, and in my honest opinion if Halo wasn't a launch title (or exclusive to XBox), the console would probably have been dead before it hit the ground.

Yes and that supports my arument pefectly especially when the gap between PS2 hardware vs Xbox hardware isn't as significant as the gap between PS2 vs DC. Now when you apply those factors to Xenon and PS3, the same thing will happen ie Xenon will sell well because of launch titles, however the difference this time is PS3 launches after Xenon.

Lets jump back a little in time, to the 32/64bit era. Sega and the newcomer at the time Sony, launched their consoles within pretty similar time frames, sales were pretty close until FFVII was released, then sales for PS1 started skyrocketing. Now enter N64 in all honesty I believe that it was the biggest disappointment after how awesome the SNES was. I don't believe it was as much that Sony launched PS1 before Nintendo launched N64, it was more that Nintendo made key mistakes such as "cartridge based system" and losing one of its key third party developers, Square.

Saturn had its own set of problems not to mention times have changed. FF isn't the highly sought after franchise as it was before. Also as you said N64 also had its own set of problems. FF isn't going to be a factor outside of Japan anyway.

Now regarding the Hollywood GPU, it will probably have some sort of eDRAM if Revolution doesn't use a separate single chip GCN for backwards compatibility.

 

[Nexiss]

I don't think that's the whole truth. I think there is such a brand awareness regards PlayStation that people's (the masses, not educated gamers) perception is they can rely on PS to deliver lots of game choice. It did in iteration 1 and iteration 2. It seems fair to assume the same in iteration 3.

For release titles, developers have to make a choice where they think they will get dividends. There are three consoles going to be launched, each starting with a userbase of 0. If you wait for someone to buy a console before writing any games, there'll be no games so no consoles sold. Instead you need to preempt the market and predict where the best sales will be so you can hope for the larger userbase.

Given the phenominal succes of PS with PS1 at over 100 million units and PS2 at 80 million (how do these figures compare wtih Genesis/Megadrive and SNES?) and a promise of backwards compatibility, purchasing PS3 will seem like an inevitable upgrade to many of these buyers I reckon. If I were a dev and had to choose only one platform, I'd pick PS.

Certainly, but I would argue that larger devs with their own well recognized brands, like Final Fantasy, have a lot more choice as to where they want to go. Certainly Microsoft or Nintendo can offer some incentives as well. PS3 will definitely have the momentum of PS2 and PS1 going for it, but it isn't invincible.