Revolution's Broadway CPU to be G3+VMX variant?
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Megadrive1988
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correct me if I am wrong, but Gekko does what, about 1.9 Gflops. Now IF Broadway is merely a tweaked Gekko running at roughly twice the speed, and has roughly twice the performance, then that leaves Broadway, Revolution's CPU, with roughly ~4 Gflops of floating point performance compared to *over* 100 Gflops for Xenon-X360 and *over* 200 Gflops for Cell-PS3.
A very well respected developer said a little while ago that Nintendo had licensed a multi core programming tool. It was actually on these forums but unfortunately I've never been able to find the comments again with a search. Anyway pure speculation mode here but lets say it is a Gekko CPU at 1Ghz with 1MB cache. Use dual cores and 2 VMX units per core added in and you'd be looking at about 46Gflops. Not exactly right up there with the other two, but certainly many many times faster then Gekko (25 times more powerful in Gflops alone).
Though personally I still don't think the final CPU is a Gekko chip. Remember the Metroid Prime 3 video at E3? When asked about the graphics in that video Nintendo said that it was not running on Revolution. But instead just on very early Revolution development kits with overclocked GC hardware and added ram. And that we should expect better graphics from the actual Revolution console which had still not finished development. Now first how could a overclocked and slightly modified Gekko CPU not have finished development by then? IBM had 1Ghz CPU's based on the same tech as Gekko in 2001.. Second it sounds like the developers IGN are talking to are using the same development kits and quoting from documents given for those development kits. Lets wait and see what developers have to say when they get final dev kits that are actually the same as the final console.
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[edited] - due to me not reading dates. Yep, I was treating old replies as new. *sigh*[/edit]
I've been considering the same thing. One good reason to go for smaller componets might be to allow them to integrate them all onto one (lets say) 90nm chip and to be able to mass produce it from day one in a way which Sony and MS can't hope to do. With their Aurora system, Sega basically put a Naomi on a chip, updated it, tweaked it, added some new stuff and bumped the clockspeeds up by %50.
The point people seem to want to ignore [edit] - or maybe not [/edit] is that Nintendo must want this thing to be cheap AND profitable. They aren't competing on a hardware level with Sony and MS and they want to sell to people who aren't bothered about that (either because they don't know or don't care).
Someone who has a clue a clue about transistor counts please answer this: would an updated, tweaked, overclocked GC on a chip be possible and practical at 90nm? Given that GC games are supposed to access the GPU through an API I figure this gives Nintendo/ATI some freedom to update the GPU with newer technology if they choose to and maintain full backwards compatability.
thomase said:
I've been considering the same thing. One good reason to go for smaller componets might be to allow them to integrate them all onto one (lets say) 90nm chip and to be able to mass produce it from day one in a way which Sony and MS can't hope to do. With their Aurora system, Sega basically put a Naomi on a chip, updated it, tweaked it, added some new stuff and bumped the clockspeeds up by %50.
The point people seem to want to ignore [edit] - or maybe not [/edit] is that Nintendo must want this thing to be cheap AND profitable. They aren't competing on a hardware level with Sony and MS and they want to sell to people who aren't bothered about that (either because they don't know or don't care).
Someone who has a clue a clue about transistor counts please answer this: would an updated, tweaked, overclocked GC on a chip be possible and practical at 90nm? Given that GC games are supposed to access the GPU through an API I figure this gives Nintendo/ATI some freedom to update the GPU with newer technology if they choose to and maintain full backwards compatability.
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function said:
Who is? I haven't seen anyone speculating along these lines. Sounds to me like everyone is talking about ~1 GHz with some kind of "advanced" (i.e. not merely a PPC 750) architecture, which would put it somewhere between 1/8-1/4 the power of the XCPU II, rather than being pwn3d by two orders of magnitude the way a merely 2x Gekko would.
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Just take a look through the last few pages [edit] oops, old pages [/edit]. I don't want to get into a discussion about anyones particular "hi-spec" theories so I'm not going to quote 'em.
Looking at what Nintendo could do in terms of a cheap, easy to manufacture setup is far more interesting. Just look at how "outclassed" by the PSP the DS is - but look at how popular they are. I think Nintendo want to go for a similar plan of attack with their home hardware.
Nothing that's come out so far about Revolution indicated they're even trying for a system with even 50% of what PS3/360 can do. 88MB of main ram, supposedly. That, like everything else, says a lot. At least to me.
Looking at what Nintendo could do in terms of a cheap, easy to manufacture setup is far more interesting. Just look at how "outclassed" by the PSP the DS is - but look at how popular they are. I think Nintendo want to go for a similar plan of attack with their home hardware.
Nothing that's come out so far about Revolution indicated they're even trying for a system with even 50% of what PS3/360 can do. 88MB of main ram, supposedly. That, like everything else, says a lot. At least to me.
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Teasy said:Erm Function, the posts from the last few pages were made 4 months ago
Erm ... I'm a bit of a retard? I'll go back and edit that bit then.
I do think it's a potentially very interesting tactic though, to start with a single chip (or at least significantly integrated) system. Most console sales occur when a system hits $150 or lower. If you design a system for that price point from the start you might not be "cutting edge", but for the people who won't spend more than $150 you effectively are for that price range. Tie that to a unique feature like the revolution controller and you can create a very compelling product.
In this sense it doesn't matter if you only have 1/10th the flops of Xenos (or whatever). Dual Screen vs PSP must have given Nintendo a lot of confidence to persue a strategy like this. High value product for a low cost (or something like that).
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When you say it like that it sounds like it would be possible on PS1 never mind GC
In the end its more a matter of the number of polygons and quality of textures/effects that go into the demo rather then the number of objects on screen. Either way it was claimed that the video was running in real time on an upgraded GameCube development kit.
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Sorry but the demo does not look like it uses all or more than the 12-15M poligons that GC can do, besides a few high rez textures it all looks like GC work from the light, colors... to the enviroments it really looks like a bit higher qualitity MP.
Meybe Laa-Yosh can help us with the poligon counts.
Meybe Laa-Yosh can help us with the poligon counts.
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