The possible thing is killing the units on the RSX that makes the video functions (Mpeg-2 playing for example) and to put more Pixel Shader Units.
The games and movies can use the Cell for the video playing. We don´t need the "video unit" on the RSX when we have a powerful CPU that can display HD videos without problems.
Yes this has been talked about before but at the moment we don't know enough about what the RSX is to speculate what the yeilds on such a setup would be.
Yes this has been talked about before but at the moment we don't know enough about what the RSX is to speculate what the yeilds on such a setup would be.
Well, that's been one of the theories running around... that plus the "phantom transistors" should return, I believe, ~40m transistors to the RSX budget, which could be used for any number of things. I've said and I think others as well that it could be used for adding hardware GS emulation to RSX others say more shaders. So, yeah, very possible.
wouldn't a PPU be a waste of hardware? I mean, if Cell was design to handle near-accurate physic's...who add somthing that may conflict with the hardware...if it was a custom built PPU to ASSIST the CELL processor, I can see that....
Now that you have "insider cred", this will be posted all over the internet. Now that you have "insider cred", this will be posted all over the internet.
The possible thing is killing the units on the RSX that makes the video functions (Mpeg-2 playing for example) and to put more Pixel Shader Units.
The games and movies can use the Cell for the video playing. We don´t need the "video unit" on the RSX when we have a powerful CPU that can display HD videos without problems.
Well... while they could remove the circuitry for things like that... it would require more design work and thusly would be more expensive in doing so. Removing features like that really won't have that much of a impact on the transistor count though... and certainly not enough transistors to warrant replacing them with more shader units. The most transistor consuming part of a GPU are the shader units. As an example... the Geforce 6600 series had half the shader units of the Geforce 6800 series and went from 220 million transistors (in the 6800 series) to 140 million transistors (in the 6600 series), but gained clock rate in exchange as the 6600GT had a clock rate of 500MHz versus the 6800 Ultra's 400Mhz. It basically lost 80 million transistors in losing 8 pixel pipelines and 3 vertex pipelines. On the Geforce 7800 series you have 24 pixel pipelines and 8 vertex pipelines and you also had a tad over 300 million transistors and a clock rate of 430Mhz. So the Geforce 7800 series picked up 8 pixel pipelines over the 6800 series and 2 vertex pipelines for a increase of ~80 million transistors. Pixel pipelines consume more transistors in the nvidia archtecture (due to various reasons) and pixel pipelines are added in quads so you would have to account for that. In the end you would need about 30-35 million transistors for each pixel quad so in order for the RSX to have 32 pipelines you would need an extra 60-70 million transistors (+5-10 million for another 2 vertex pipelines) so that would increase the transistor count of the RSX to around 370-380 million... there would be an awful lot you would have to cut from the RSX to make room for that and maintain a 300 million transistor count... and cutting various small features such as the MPEG2 is no where nearly enough to do it. The pixel/vertex pipelines in the Geforce 7800GTX accounts for about 200-220 million transistors or about 2/3 of the GPU space.
It is not plausible to add more shader units at this point... they still have bigger problems to worry about than adding shader units... there is such thing called yield that has to be considered.
Well... while they could remove the circuitry for things like that... it would require more design work and thusly would be more expensive in doing so.
The rest of your post I agree with, seems highly unlikely they'd add any more pixel shaders, its just something here that's bothering me. Nvidia were contracted to design RSX by Sony, the only thing we know is that it's based on the G70 architecture. There still had to be a design phase, so dismissing it as an expense seems ludicrous since they were obviously paid to do exactly that. They havent spent two years sitting idly with a 7800GTX in hand.
As per this article, Nvidia's current video processing budget is ~20million transistors so that plus any other PC environment functionality certainly leaves some room for speculation.
Yeah, it was more or less that Sony and Nvidia have been working together for about that amount of time but i've brought it up before and the counter argument is that they probably where partnered over something else at first, then started working on a GPU.
should return, I believe, ~40m transistors to the RSX budget, which could be used for any number of things. I've said and I think others as well that it could be used for adding hardware GS emulation to RSX others say more shaders. So, yeah, very possible.
