By other measures of design success Gamecube has wins over XBox, but "how much was the design recycled for the next generation" is a very poor measure. I think your any measures fails to include the one of how good the games looked, and there XBox had the advantage.
The advantage in graphics fidelity the xbox had over the cube (as minor as it was) was irreleveant given the design was not sustainable for the market it was trying to compete in. Again, a top-of-the-crop pc would have had even bigger advantage in that aspec - would that have been the better console? Sorry for repeating myself, but you did not quite answer that question the first time.
Also, we will have to agree to disagree on this one: a design's reuse versus a design's early abandoning is not exactly a conundrum. Please note I'm talking from the POV of the design owners, not the userbase, the devs, the press, or anybody else.
MS couldn't have carried the design if they wanted, since they didn't have nVidia's onboard anymore.
NV was responsible only for the GPU/north bridge, from what i remember. MS could have easilly continued in the same lane of pc centrism, if they deemed that suitable. Instead they went with a highly-custom, bottleneck-ironed design. Why?
What exactly was not viable about XBox?
Its BOM and price/performance for the market it was trying to compete in.
I said substantial - I'm well aware of the RAM contention, but I simply don't think it was on the level of N64's issues which were much more serious handicaps to either latency or capacity wherever you looked (not to mention the same common framebuffer issue).
N64 was nintendo's first (and among the world's first) 3D consoles - of course you'd have more fundamental handicaps there than in something of the same breed a few generations down the road. Why even bring that up?
Of course, all of the handheld SoCs we're looking at have that same issue too. Is nVidia making a fatal mistake with Tegra in having unified memory?
Cannot speak of tegra just yet, but none of the other SoCs I'm aware of repeats xbox's framebuffer-in-UMA design. SGXs are TBDRs, and yamato are tilers too. Both offer some 'direct shader memexport' functionality, but none of that is meant to be the primary modus operandy of the parts.
If MS dumped billions in giving away high end PCs that'd be one thing, but I think you're exaggerating how much they were drilling through. I think the "repurposed PC" argument is misleading, as several hardware features were actually developed for it and therefore had some of the same basic advantages any custom PC hardware has. Is your beef really with x86 being in a home console? Or a GPU design that shares a familial relation to a PC one showing up in a console (yeah, not like Dreamcast did that move)..
Ms
did dump billions in giving away upper-end pc's. And my beef is with designs poorly suited for their target markets. As for the dreamcast - it was a too advanced design for its time and/or vendor (read: sega could not afford it at that stage). And yet MS could wish the xbox was as streamlined a design as the dreamcast was.
Your experiment is invalid because it lacks control - it only works on your presupposition that Nintendo is withholding impressive information on their console, not that they're withholding mediocre information. If they DO release specs then that'll put it to rest, but that'll make the entire argument moot, since it's speculation as to why they won't advertise them.
We
will know the specs of the new handheld one way or another, so we will have all the information necessary to draw sound conclusions from the experiment.
Do you know that Wii contains the chips "Broadway" and "Hollywood?" That's how. If you think telling us the capabilities of the hardware is a waste of time then how about telling us the names? But apparently that's supposed to impress someone.
Come on now, do you really believe nintendo hoped to gain popularity among the specs-minded audience by giving out such information as the codenames of their silicon? 'Hollywood at 90nm SOI' - that blurb has got to totally win over the gigaflop crowd, yes? For all we know, it could be just a japanese custom, same way that blood type of characters in japanese RPG/brawlers is usually quoted - the point of that puzzles me to this day.
Panajev2001a said:
Moving into PR and away from coding
?
Nope, just the codebase getting fatter and fatter and the compile turnaround getting longer and longer ; )
Because of what Wii's purpose and goals were, Nintendo was able to just enhance GCN's tech removing some bottlenecks here and there as well.
Outside of errata fixings, TEV stages increasing and the addition of a couple of extra TEV inputs, I can't think of any architectural changes that would point out at an 'Aha! Here we had this major bottleneck' moment.
MS wanted a different console, re-using any old-gen design and enhancing it was not an option.
I'm not disputing that. I'm arguing about
why ms went with a fundamentally different console design the second time around.