I was wondering since alot of you are in the game industry do you have any clue has to what type of CPU the next handheld from Nintendo will be. Now Im not in the industry but if history has anything to say about it, it should be somewhere above the Gamecube and Wii but prob. not above the next sony one but I dont know.
Next Nintendo handheld
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DeadlyNinja
Veteran
They could go overclocked DS for all I care, I just want better battery life.
It sure has hardware to accelerate 2D/3D Graphics: Ambigous Wikipedia Article. Doing everything on CPU is way to inefficient.
Oh, and I cant give you "straight answers" as I can only give you (reasonable) guesses.
Uh, Im sorry, but the PSP has alot of dedicated graphics hardware.. Im beginning to think you mean "GPU" as in DX8/DX9 Class Hardware, PSP and DS dont have a "GPU" in this context.
Both handheld have hardware for rendering textured Triangles and more.
Actually its quite the opposite, if you had to replace the graphics hardware with a CPU fast enough to do everything in software, you would add costs and worse than that, use a ton more power for the same result.
Given the timeframe and the negligible die size, it'll nearly certainly be a Cortex-A9 at 600MHz+ with a plain FPU (no NEON) and a moderately sized L2 cache, probably 256KiB. FWIW, that would make it faster than any other handheld in the world today that I'm aware of, but that's more of a testament to ARM and Moore's Law than Nintendo. Here we're talking about an entire CPU subsystem that costs ~$1 to make...
It is interesting to point out that I find MIPS' CPU roadmap to be noticeably less impressive than ARM's. If Sony does choose to remain on the MIPS road for PSP2 (what choice do they really have? CELL-like? Puh-lease. And that's just asking for trouble anyway), then that might prevent them from achieving a real raw CPU performance advantage this generation; although honestly the bottleneck would presumably be the GPU anyway (and both systems will nearly certainly have OpenGL ES 2.0 GPUs)
It is interesting to point out that I find MIPS' CPU roadmap to be noticeably less impressive than ARM's. If Sony does choose to remain on the MIPS road for PSP2 (what choice do they really have? CELL-like? Puh-lease. And that's just asking for trouble anyway), then that might prevent them from achieving a real raw CPU performance advantage this generation; although honestly the bottleneck would presumably be the GPU anyway (and both systems will nearly certainly have OpenGL ES 2.0 GPUs)
Hmm, I havent seen any comparisons between ARM/MIPS and much less their future roadmaps. But judging from specs alone, MIPS 74K holds up well with ARMS Cortex A8. Both have 2.0 DMIPS/MHz, scale above 1Ghz and the MIPS having a amaller die area (2.5 mm² vs "<4 mm²" on 65nm).
Am I missing something ?
Am I missing something ?
I think we're both missing something, because the numbers I was remembering are less extreme than I thought, simply because I was thinking of MIPS' only core with multi-core capability which, surprisingly, is not their fastest one. And what you are missing is that you're looking at the A8, when the A9 is what I was thinking of.
Comparing die sizes between different IP vendors is kinda a waste of time, because there might be slight differences in the units included or they count certain things differently, but everything I've seen points at the A9 being competitive size-wise. Anyhow, that core is 2.5 DMIPS/MHz with a 8-stage pipeline including Out-of-Order dispatch/completion. MIPS' 74K is 2.0DMIPS/MHz with a 15-stage pipeline and Out-of-Order dispatch/completion.
If you want to have more than one core, then it's the same Cortex-A9 versus a 1.6DMIPS/MHz in-order core with 2 threads/core, the 1004K (i.e. that's *very* similar in Atom perf-wise most likely, but lower power/cost of course). So given this, I find it difficult to see how it's possible to have a higher-performance MIPS solution than a Cortex-A9, unless you manage to clock the former substantially higher of course.
Yeah, I googled the ARM page and the list on the side had "ARM Cortex" highlighted, so I thought I found the only relevant page. Things like DMIPS dont give you the full information about the CPU anyway, but my impression is that they have compareable performance.
You forgetting that the CPU alone is only part of the console. The PSP has 2 customized MIPS 4K-Cores, one with a very nice Vector/Matrix Coprocessor (1 instruction for 4x4 Matrix Multiply). And some fancy stuff on the graphics side aswell. Sony has tradition to heavily customize their processors, while Nintendo slaps cheap stock parts on a pile (well, atleast after GBA and Wii).
You forgetting that the CPU alone is only part of the console. The PSP has 2 customized MIPS 4K-Cores, one with a very nice Vector/Matrix Coprocessor (1 instruction for 4x4 Matrix Multiply). And some fancy stuff on the graphics side aswell. Sony has tradition to heavily customize their processors, while Nintendo slaps cheap stock parts on a pile (well, atleast after GBA and Wii).
Panajev2001a
Veteran
CELL-like... why not ?
It does not have to have complete ISA compatibility on the PPU-side, but you could keep (if it launched at 45 nm) the SPE's the way they are and you might get away with something simplier than the fat EIB since you'd have less and much lower clocked SPE's.
You'd still gain by keeping SPU compilers and tuned tools, including all the SPU optimized OS code (reserved isolated mode SPU, etc...) and you'd just need to port the rest of the XMB Game OS to the new PPU (which might be an ARM, or a smaller/modified PowerPC core, etc...).
SPE's EVERYWHERE!
Low learning curve for PS3 developers and yet another reason for developers to learn how to code for SPU's.
I think that at 45 nm the impact of a CPU-core + 4 SPE's (1 reserved for system use) clocked between 400-600 MHz and paired with a PowerVR SGX GPU connected through the FlexIO bus would be quite interesting.
Make the FlexIO connection fast enough, use XDR/XDR-2 (800-1,200 MHz effective data rate or 100-150 MHz base clock), or mobile DDR as main RAM... have the SGX read and write to it... UMA-style if you can
.That would give you 6.4-9.6 GB/s of main RAM bandwidth given a dual channel, 32 bits x channel, XDR1 set-up.
Compared with 2.5 GB/s for PSP it is already quite a nice upgrade... and don't TDBR's need low external bandwidth anyways
.ok... ok... need more time to tweak these paper specs
.Low learning curve for the elite few versus zero learning curve for everyone - hmm!
With just one catch: That would have absurdly low single-threaded performance (unless you got one of MIPS or ARM's OoOE core and clocked it higher than the SPEs I guess) and absurdly high power consumption that is completely unviable for a handheld platform.
And... how many watts would that take? Because that's pretty far from the power levels required for a handheld I don't really see how to viably scale it down and get anything decent out of it.
I would agree that a MIPS 74K combined with two SPEs @ ~900MHz might be a very solid combo. Very good single-thread performance for a handheld combined with nice vector-centric processors for physics/particles/AI/etc. and a solid GPU next to it. Mind you I'm still not convinced it's the best approach: two Cortex-A9s with NEON for both would beat it in every single way (higher or similar perf for every metric, lower power, lower cost). Still, it would be able to achieve a clear superiority over a single-core Cortex-A9+FPU solution from Nintendo.
...
OK, the PS1, N64, DC, PS2, GC, X-Box, X360, PS3 and Wii all have GPUs. You don't need shaders to have a GPU. That term has been around since the GeForce 256, which is around... 9 year old or so?
The DS has a GPU, and the PSP has a GPU as well. All of those consoles have 3D chips in them. None of them do everything on the CPU, or even have the capability to do everything on the CPU.
Panajev2001a
Veteran
Oh come on
. It would not be THAT bad .So, WATT? Sorry...
, couldn't resist .I'd think it would still beat single threaded GP performance of the current 333 MHz (max) R4000i PSP uses, I think the battle on single-threaded performance from the GP CPU core is dwindling down a bit... see PPE vs 7 SPE's faster at almost everything even in the PPE domain...
Do you have good numbers for a MIPS74k or similar processor (I'm not convinced an in-order design would not fit the bill) on 45 nm at 600 MHz?
One would be OS reserved for security/media processing/OS helping reasons (locked away in SPU Isolation mode), so you'd leave just a single SPU available for game use.
I think that we should rely on a smaller, leaner, and meaner GP core and afford more SPU's on the die.
you can take a look at current handhelds, batteries wont improve much. In the case of the PSP you are looking at a 2000mAh Accu, which lasts 4-6 hours, meaning the whole PSP (LCD,2xMIPS CPU, Gfx Chip, RAM) draws less then 0.5 Watt. Should give you an idea how much you can spend on 1 CPU.. it aint much and I cant see anything but MIPS or ARM fitting the bill (both beeing way leaner then PPC btw). 1-2 cutdown SPEs might be possible, but I doubt it.
And if you think there will be whole cores (out of 2-3 available) sucking power while beeing locked away for the OS, then you are nuts
And if you think there will be whole cores (out of 2-3 available) sucking power while beeing locked away for the OS, then you are nuts
