My bet is flash. Re the Fujitsu chip - I suspect Nintendo get preferential treatment by Fujitsu so that part won't be on the shelf some longer.
Nintendo 3DS hardware thread
- Thread starter brain_stew
- Start date
Probably. Also, judging by the Fujitsu catalog, the biggest FCRAM chip they sell is 64MB. Assuming the old leak is correct, the 3DS should have at least 96MB, and the chip would need to be custom. Maybe two 64MB FCRAM dies in one package or something.
Last edited by a moderator:
32MB die for the CPU, 64MB die for the GPU.
What are you basing this on?
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
More memory for the GPU than the CPU? That would be a first..
It could kinda make sense if the PICA200 had GPGPU capabilities and they were extensively used, but I doubt that, being fixed function and all.
On a related note:
Satoru Iwata just mentioned "it would be fun to add 3d video recording" to the 3DS, which IMO is pretty much a confirmation that 3D video recording will be added to the 3DS eventually via an update.
Does the 3DS have a dedicated DSP for image processing, or is it all done through software?
Could the rumoured 266MHz dual-ARM11 handle real-time encoding of two VGA video streams + sound?
Last edited by a moderator:
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
And Nintendo wouldn't risk the "black cloud" of providing choppy video recording for their clients.
Hum...
We know that the system has 96MB and 32MB units of FCRAM exist.
It's a SoC so even if it's 96MB, there's no reason why it couldn't be dynamically partitioned between the CPU and GPU.
You mean unified memory pool, right? That to me makes most sense in a small memory system where every byte counts. You don't want a hole anywhere, so a single pool of flexible RAM makes sense. The only reason not IMO would be a specialist fast framebuffer like eDRAM.
A guess then, its reasonable of course (if you mean 32MB for OS and 64MB for gaming) just thought it might be based on more firm info the way you stated it.
Last edited by a moderator:
Oh well, I am not based in firm info and perhaps I am wrong but the PICA200 specs says:
Frame buffer: Maximum 4095×4095 pixels
Pixel format: RGBA4444, RGB565, RGBA5551, RGBA8888
4095x4095 pixels with RGBA8888 are 64MB in total for the GPU.
The GPU limits don't dictate how much memory is actually included externally. 3DS isn't going to have any use for a 4095x4095 framebuffer, but on the other hand VRAM is needed for textures and vertex data as well.
A 96MB unified RAM would be extremely weird, when was the last time any of you saw a memory chip that isn't a power of two in size? There are still some advantages to having separate GPU memory, especially for Pica200 which afaik isn't a tiler and I'm not aware of bandwidth savers like early/hierarchical-Z or color cache.
Unified memory has been the norm in SoCs but in the console world dedicated for GPU is usually how things are done. This includes both PSP and DS. The two big examples to the contrary that I can think of, N64 and XBox, suffered for it.
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
Though the x360 uses a unified memory pool right? And I heard devs being not too happy about the ps3 having 2 seperate memory pools. And how about the wii? It's not unified but arn't both pools available for cpu/gpu?
When Nintendo released the Wii. MEM1 is 24MB. Custom built, of course.
Anyway, 5th Cell already confirmed that the 3DS has dedicated VRAM. But I guess that's just some eDRAM for the framebuffer and texture cache. Rumored to be 4MB if I remember correctly.
Not sure that's a valid generalisation. Often GPU's have just had a small working RAM, not a significant slice. If you're going to go that route, 8 MB's Video RAM + 88 MB's RAM would be a more conventional setup. As long as the GPU can stream textures from RAM even if it can't access them directly, you only need a small amount for framebuffers, and in these cases the GPU RAM is made very fast, trading size for performance. 32 or 64 MBs RAM dedicated to GPU, used only for FB and texturing, is too limiting a design - you'd be forcing developers into a design of more or less graphics than they may like if they are wanting to utilise the system efficiently, or finding workaround to fit in what they want to do. PS3 has a 50/50 split and it's not a comfortable design, versus 360's small pool of eDRAM and general system RAM, or PS2's (not quite so) small eDRAM and general system RAM.
Okay, I take it back, consoles have been moving in the direction of having a smaller but still fairly large dedicated RAM for GPUs that at least usually contains a large part or all of the framebuffer. I'm still talking about something more than on-die caches (if you can get a several MB eDRAM on-die then that's great too, but most haven't yet). I think we have a different order of magnitude in mind for what's considered "small" though.
What I'm saying is not having a unified memory so extreme as current mobile platforms which only have caches + tile memory on the GPU that are in the dozens of KB at most, including the setup in N64 or XBox where the framebuffer was fully in shared main memory. In PSP, PS2 and XBox 360 you can at least usually have the framebuffer in VRAM.
What I'm saying is not having a unified memory so extreme as current mobile platforms which only have caches + tile memory on the GPU that are in the dozens of KB at most, including the setup in N64 or XBox where the framebuffer was fully in shared main memory. In PSP, PS2 and XBox 360 you can at least usually have the framebuffer in VRAM.
To be fair, PSP is closer to PS3 as a segmented-ram platform - ie. the two memory pools are functionally equivalent, storing any data. It also doesn't have the ultra-wide eDram others do, and coupled with the bus-configuration which wasn't meant to handle external DRam, it still suffers very similar to how N64 and XBox did in the end.Exophase said:
Anyway - who says 3DS doesn't have dedicated VRam?
I actually already said it does. It was confirmed at E3 by Jeremiah Slaczka (5th Cell): http://e3.nintendo.com/interviews/#/?v=interview_slaczkaTo be fair, PSP is closer to PS3 as a segmented-ram platform - ie. the two memory pools are functionally equivalent, storing any data. It also doesn't have the ultra-wide eDram others do, and coupled with the bus-configuration which wasn't meant to handle external DRam, it still suffers very similar to how N64 and XBox did in the end.
Anyway - who says 3DS doesn't have dedicated VRam?
