PC-Engine said:
You cannot compare the retail card price. This would like be comparing the cost of the GF 3 retail and the Celeron 733MHz and 64MB of DDR ram at the Xbox launch... doh! That example does not work
But you get my point.Also, I stated this in the other threads on the PPU: We do not know the exact reasons the PPU needs 128MB of GDDR3 memory locally. My guess is that it needs fast memory of a wide bus to process all the information. Even slow GDDR3 would be in the 15-20GB/s range; compare a PC with DDR400 in dual channel configuration is 6.4GB/s--and that is shared with all the other system resources.
Just as a console GPU and CPU can work fine with a UMA, I think a PPU could be designed in there just as well.
But I still doubt Xbox 360 will have a PPU. Would it be nice? Of course... but if they have 3 tricore CPUs at ~3.0GHz each with a vector unit, well, that is a lot of power sitting there just waiting to be used. They may not be as effecient as a PPU, but they are more flexible.
I am still waiting for the news that the Xbox 360 will have two, yes two, R500s because due to their unified/programmable nature they will just use the extra R500 for Physics and advanced collision detection
I jest...
