Nintendo 3DS hardware thread

A standard FPU and dual-issue might be nice from the programmer and compiler's perspective, but I'm not sure if it'd translate into anything tangible, other than higher cost for Nintendo, all other things being (mostly) equal.
 
Do you believe that Cortex R4 could be a good CPU for 3DS instead of ARM11?

Cortex-R4 is targeting realtime applications like automotive. This includes a lot of features for debugging/diagnostics like EmbeddedICE-RT, debug access port, tracing, etc.

It also has some differences due to implementing ARM v7-R instead of v7-A. A quick scan of the manual shows this mainly includes protected memory instead of virtual memory. That might fit migration from ARM9 better, I don't know.

I guess it boils down to which is a more compact implementation, although I think Cortex-R4 has a lot of features that wouldn't be that useful on 3DS. I expect Cortex-A5 to be more likely.
 
Left without HDR, right with HDR
cap24.jpg
cap25.jpg

I like the left pic better. More is visible.
Looks like all they did on the right pic was turn the brightness down...

Though a combination of the 2 would probably look better.
Just don't apply HDR to the characters.

I wonder if you get motion blur by literally just blending the left and right eye frames together.

I dont think that'd work for motion blur. They probably went the same route as dreamcast and blended the new frame with the previous one.
 
Nintendo president admits that 3DS will need re-charged more often than previous generations:-

"As for the battery, it is inevitable that Nintendo 3DS will be a device which requires more frequent recharging than Nintendo DS."

http://www.gamingunion.net/news/nintendo-3ds-battery-life-shorter-than-ds--2987.html

"He added: 'Perhaps we may need to dispatch to our consumers a message, something like, "Please place your Nintendo 3DS on the cradle as soon as you return home with it".'"

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/843464-nintendo-3ds-battery-life-will-be-worse-than-the-ds

seems they are preparing the ground for significantly poorer battery life.
 
Well it should be obvious. It's more powerful, thus it uses more power.

Though people didnt understand that 6 years ago with PSP...
 
They've said from the beginning it will have battery life similar to DSi, between 7 to 10 hours sounds about right. Less then other DS models but still plenty, even 7 hours (the bottom rating for DSLite) would be easily enough.
 
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AFAIK we don't know what battery they're using.

I shoulda said
"one might equally obviously think, "more powerful, equally more powerful battery",but they havn't gone that route for whatever reason (size,price,portability)."
 
Though people didnt understand that 6 years ago with PSP...

People still don't understand it today. They're people whining about how much more powerful Nintendo could make the 3DS without putting thought into cost and power consumption. Next thing you know, someone's going to complain about the 3DS using carts again when they could be using mini DVDs or whatever.

seems they are preparing the ground for significantly poorer battery life.

That's the deal breaker for me. I'll be waiting for the 3DS lite instead.
 
More powerful than DS while having the same battery life doesn't mean bigger battery... process technology has gotten better since DS, architectures have gotten more power efficient... for the same amount of power you can get better performance.

As an extreme example, ENIAC in 1946 consumed 150kW of power and performed somewhere on the order of 5,000 additions/subtractions per second (of numbers that were roughly comparable in capacity to 32-bit integers) and could possibly do up to like 20 in parallel, so make that number 100,000. In comparison, a Cortex-M0 processor consumes under 100 uW at 1MHz and can do a million additions/subtractions per second. So that's 10 times the performance and at 1.5 billion times lower power consumption, or 15 billion times better perf/Watt.
 
That's the deal breaker for me. I'll be waiting for the 3DS lite instead.

Less battery life then Nintendo DS still leaves plenty of room for good battery life though. But I suppose that depends how extreme your needs are.

I've been expecting battery life of 7 - 10 hours for 3DS since it was announced, due to what Nintendo was saying at the time, if its significantly less then that I'll be surprised.
 
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Those comments seem to be more about tag mode and the automatic firmware upgrades than battery life while playing games. When you switched the NDS off it didn't consume any power at all but, by default, the 3DS will continue to sip power because it'll continue to use wifi to search for other 3DS units and wifi hotspots. If the machine is constantly sipping power then of course its going to have to be charged more often.

I'm still expecting very decent battery life in the region of 6-10 hours. 6 hours would still be much more battery life than any other (none Nintendo) handheld gets in high end 3D games.
 
NDS uses some power while "off", for instance to keep the RTC going. It's not a lot but it won't last more than a few weeks.
 
Here's a funny anecdote, related to the whole 'armchair analysis of handhelds' BOMs'.

So one of my PSP1K's needed screen replacement (due to some very unfortunate events that had previously occurred to it). A replacement 'Sharp PSP 1000 screen' was diligently ordered for $30 from an Amazon-trading merchant (what a steal!), was delivered, and was uneventfully installed by yours truly.

Then I powered the unit.

Frontally, the screen is almost true to the original. But wait, a 35 degrees change in the vertical view angle and *boom* - the image is either practically washed out to white (at 35 degrees up), or faded to almost compete darkness (at 35 degrees down). Or put in other words - those must be the most abysmal vertical view angles I've seen in my life, let alone on something presenting itself for a genuine PSP1K-quality Sharp TFT panel.

Conclusion: that's either a genuine knock-off, or a C-grade, never-meant-to-be-used-on-psp original Sharp production (which I doubt, as it has the correct Sharp model number). Either way, there's no theoretical chance it shares the same TFT tech with the original panel.

So next time you see BOMs for handhelds based off 'scientific evidence' from sites like iSuppli et all, just chuckle lightly, and metaphorically slap the 'analyst' on the back of their head, which hopefully would knock some sense into their vessel.
 
Here's a funny anecdote, related to the whole 'armchair analysis of handhelds' BOMs'.

So one of my PSP1K's needed screen replacement (due to some very unfortunate events that had previously occurred to it). A replacement 'Sharp PSP 1000 screen' was diligently ordered for $30 from an Amazon-trading merchant (what a steal!), was delivered, and was uneventfully installed by yours truly.

Then I powered the unit.

Frontally, the screen is almost true to the original. But wait, a 35 degrees change in the vertical view angle and *boom* - the image is either practically washed out to white (at 35 degrees up), or faded to almost compete darkness (at 35 degrees down). Or put in other words - those must be the most abysmal vertical view angles I've seen in my life, let alone on something presenting itself for a genuine PSP1K-quality Sharp TFT panel.

Conclusion: that's either a genuine knock-off, or a C-grade, never-meant-to-be-used-on-psp original Sharp production (which I doubt, as it has the correct Sharp model number). Either way, there's no theoretical chance it shares the same TFT tech with the original panel.

So next time you see BOMs for handhelds based off 'scientific evidence' from sites like iSuppli et all, just chuckle lightly, and metaphorically slap the 'analyst' on the back of their head, which hopefully would knock some sense into their vessel.

I have never, ever put stock in iSuppli's numbers. Too much is based off of speculation and not taking into account deals.
 
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