Gamestop now taking pre-orders: Yes!http://www.ripten.com/2011/01/28/gamestop-now-taking-sony-ngp-pre-orders-for-299-with-50-deposit/
Sony's Next Generation Portable unveiling - PSP2 in disguise
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If it ships this fall then yes, 40nm is the only option.
Unless Intel's fabs are making the chips, lol. J\K.
Or if Global Foundries are making the chips.. they'll be shipping 32nm before that too.
^^Highly unlikely they'll go with 32nm SOI, and all of GF's 32nm capacity is probably contracted to AMD at the momemt. The rest of the industry just pales in comparison to Intel. They'll be shipping 22nm chips by the end of this year while the NGP looks likely to launch at 45/40nm at the same time. Or would a 28 nm process at TSMC/GF be ready by then?
NGP is not clocked to 2 GHz.
This is where my Grand Vision would have worked, supporting a plugged-in mode to run at full pelt connected to a TV. Although cooling would be an issue.
You'd need a dock that doubles as a huge heatsink!
That would be the idea, but you'd need some effective interface between the handheld and the dock, which would mean placing the hot chips close under the user's hands. Probably not going to go down to well!
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I'm gathering a little quote from Shifty Geezer's link at Eurogamer:
Could this mean that 4xMSAA is mandatory for all NGP games, as 2xMSAA is for X360?
Could this mean that 4xMSAA is mandatory for all NGP games, as 2xMSAA is for X360?
Why should it be "mandatory". It isn't on XBox360 either. I unfortunately have lost track how tiling exactly works on Series5XT; but with the rather insane z/stencil fill-rate (12.8 GPixels/s) of that thing and the usually small bandwidth and memory footprint cost for MSAA on a TBDR I wouldn't suggest it could have any significant performance penalty. It'll still come down to the developer/ISV itself if he wants to use any MSAA or not.
A quick refresh on Xenos tiling mechanism: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/4/5
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I can't find any source right now, but I'm pretty sure I saw someone from Microsoft claiming 2xMSAA are mandatory, and are present in every X360 game.
Agreed that GF 32nm is highly unlikely, it's just technically not impossible.
Maybe it's possible we'll see TSMC 28nm in something by the end of the year.. but not NGP.
Probably not in products. Commercial chip availability on TSMC 28nm is highly likely though.
Prior to release, it was said 360 would come with 720p, 2xAA as standard in every title. That then became "IQ equivalent to" or something, and AA wasn't ever enforced as part of the TRCs AFAIK. If it ever was, that requirement has been dropped. MSAA doesn't always work well with various game engines, so it has to be optional.
I read the Eurogamer quote regards AA as it looks fabulous when used, but that's no indicator it'll always be present.
I just thought about it again, and the timeframe dosent make sense for 45/40m. If it was on 45/40nm then it should really have been ready for launch a lot earlier instead of end 2011.
I mean Apple is a week away from a shipping a product with a Dual core A9 + 543 MP2. Now understandably it would be a more complex to make a Quad core A9 + 543 MP4, but how much longer should it take. Presumably they've been planning the NGP for a while now so design would have started early. But the games developed for both platforms are a class apart and so the extra time may be for devs to get some good launch titles ready for the NGP. Another factor is the OLED shortage, which is only going to be solved in Q3 when Samsung's new factory goes online
Read through Wavey's article and you'll see that even 2xMSAA isn't entirely for free at all times. At 720p/2xMSAA you'd need in theory 15+MB eDRAM and the daughter die eDRAM has merely 10MB. The solution to that is to split up the scene into 2 macro tiles and the "but" lies here:
It would be nonsense to make it mandatory, since it should always be up to the developer how he wants to use the given hw resources.
We obviously still don't know how big the Apple A5 SoC is but I wouldn't be surprised if it's in the 75-80mm2 region. Remember the NGP wouldn't have much of a problem as a hand-held consuming a handful of Watts.
From Sony's point of view, getting it out as early as possible isn't necessarily the number one priority. Hitting the holiday season is very important, but beyond that there's some compromise in getting it quicker vs getting it out with more launch software and more buzz, not to mention more shipping capacity (although that doesn't generally stop game companies).
For an example of a pulled in launch date hurting a console see Sega Saturn.
Greetings. Sorry to bump a slightly old thread! I'm just wondering if anyone knows what the likely type of memory for the VRAM might be?
Just a separate pool of LPDDR2 for bandwidth/latency's sake?
Or something else? I'm not sure what the candidates could be.
The GDC talk did at least confirm separate VRAM, and that the SGX could read from main memory too, but that was about it.
It's kind of a shame Sony has gone spec-shy on us since Kutaragi left :|
By the way, since I don't think it was posted here already, some slides from Matt Swoboda's GDC lecture on PhyreEngine and NGP are available here:
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/3dcg/20110307_431711.html
Interesting from more of an application perspective.
Just a separate pool of LPDDR2 for bandwidth/latency's sake?
Or something else? I'm not sure what the candidates could be.
The GDC talk did at least confirm separate VRAM, and that the SGX could read from main memory too, but that was about it.
It's kind of a shame Sony has gone spec-shy on us since Kutaragi left :|
By the way, since I don't think it was posted here already, some slides from Matt Swoboda's GDC lecture on PhyreEngine and NGP are available here:
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/3dcg/20110307_431711.html
Interesting from more of an application perspective.
