I think that the new GT640 gives a good hint at what cheap hardware could achieve in near future (it is still a 28nm product), see that review for extra details.
The card (so does the HD 7730 by the way), runs lot of games in medium quality just above 30fps (which is different from sustained 30FPS) @1080p. The card burns 49Watts, the chip is 79mm^2 and fast GDDR5 is accessed through a 64bit bus.
It is quite a feat.
It is interesting to see how the GT640 evolved from v1 to its second impersonation:
they removed a third of the tex units, cut the ROPs in half, they did the same to the memory bus, on the plus side they increase the ALU throughput (higher clock speed) and the bandwidth.
As a side note it got me to wonder about MSFT choice in Durango, I actually wonder if the "south of 70GB/s" they have to the main bandwidth would have been actually enough, on its own, for a system build around a reasonable GPU aiming at resolutions in between 720p and 1080p.
That is a bit OT, but it is pretty interesting to see that a custom tegra SoC could power a cheap next alternative.
I've search for proper comparison between Jaguar cores and A15, did not find something real good, looking at some anandtech figures, the x4 A15 @1.9 in the tegra 4 lags slightly the performances of a quad core Kabini @1.5GHz. There seems to be room to clock the A15 higher.
Now if those rumored 8gb gddr5 actually make it to the market it would be possible to pack 4GB of RAM on a 64 bit bus.
The thing would fall short of the XB1 and further from the ps4 yet it would be a sane target for ports.
NB that is based on 28nm technology, I would estimate the size of the whole SoC (4+1 CPU set-up, Gt640 GPU, video engine) around the size of Cap Verde, that an be sold for cheap.
That kind of realization makes me more confident that more companies will give "consoles" a try, not sure what Amazon effort is about (home or handheld) but I guess that it will be a repeated effort /the product will get upgraded more or less at the same pace their Kindle line is.
Speaking of Nvidia, they already released an handhled and it seems that they are to realese a slate under their own brand, one has to wonder if they could go a bit further than too, I wonder if they could find some agreement with Steam and launch something based on Android.
From Google pov all those (possible) efforts from companies that could possibly bypass their "PlayStore" has to be ill perceived, which ultimately makes me believe that even in a reactive manner Google may have to do something on its to secure the sales of software through their appstore.
The card (so does the HD 7730 by the way), runs lot of games in medium quality just above 30fps (which is different from sustained 30FPS) @1080p. The card burns 49Watts, the chip is 79mm^2 and fast GDDR5 is accessed through a 64bit bus.
It is quite a feat.
It is interesting to see how the GT640 evolved from v1 to its second impersonation:
they removed a third of the tex units, cut the ROPs in half, they did the same to the memory bus, on the plus side they increase the ALU throughput (higher clock speed) and the bandwidth.
As a side note it got me to wonder about MSFT choice in Durango, I actually wonder if the "south of 70GB/s" they have to the main bandwidth would have been actually enough, on its own, for a system build around a reasonable GPU aiming at resolutions in between 720p and 1080p.
That is a bit OT, but it is pretty interesting to see that a custom tegra SoC could power a cheap next alternative.
I've search for proper comparison between Jaguar cores and A15, did not find something real good, looking at some anandtech figures, the x4 A15 @1.9 in the tegra 4 lags slightly the performances of a quad core Kabini @1.5GHz. There seems to be room to clock the A15 higher.
Now if those rumored 8gb gddr5 actually make it to the market it would be possible to pack 4GB of RAM on a 64 bit bus.
The thing would fall short of the XB1 and further from the ps4 yet it would be a sane target for ports.
NB that is based on 28nm technology, I would estimate the size of the whole SoC (4+1 CPU set-up, Gt640 GPU, video engine) around the size of Cap Verde, that an be sold for cheap.
That kind of realization makes me more confident that more companies will give "consoles" a try, not sure what Amazon effort is about (home or handheld) but I guess that it will be a repeated effort /the product will get upgraded more or less at the same pace their Kindle line is.
Speaking of Nvidia, they already released an handhled and it seems that they are to realese a slate under their own brand, one has to wonder if they could go a bit further than too, I wonder if they could find some agreement with Steam and launch something based on Android.
From Google pov all those (possible) efforts from companies that could possibly bypass their "PlayStore" has to be ill perceived, which ultimately makes me believe that even in a reactive manner Google may have to do something on its to secure the sales of software through their appstore.
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