Sony's Next Generation Portable unveiling - PSP2 in disguise

[Arun]

Well first-gen Wide I/O gives up to 12.8GB/s on a 512-bit bus, but Chipworks says the Vita has 2x512-bit memory, which means the Vita potentially has up to 25.6GB/s of video memory bandwidth, more than the PS3. That would definitely put the bottleneck elsewhere.

I honestly don't know anything about the Vita's memory interface, but I doubt it's anywhere near 25.6GB/s for obvious cost reasons... Chipworks has done some mistakes in the past, and for example I wouldn't be surprised if these weren't all signal pins. At the very least it's likely clocked lower, but who knows.

But this assumes that the TBDR is playing nice with the conventional g-buffer techniques (that all the passes are staying in-tile)

I think the implication from a number of presentations was that at least some devs definitely were. One thing which can probably take a fair bit of bandwidth on the PS Vita is post-processing but framebuffer compression should help in Rogue

 

[Exophase]

Makes me wonder if the CPU bus has a reasonably fast path to that VRAM.

 

[anexanhume]

I honestly don't know anything about the Vita's memory interface, but I doubt it's anywhere near 25.6GB/s for obvious cost reasons... Chipworks has done some mistakes in the past, and for example I wouldn't be surprised if these weren't all signal pins. At the very least it's likely clocked lower, but who knows.

No, they wouldn't all be, but there is 1080 such pins. Plenty extra for non-data pins.

Makes me wonder if the CPU bus has a reasonably fast path to that VRAM.

I think it's typical of what you would see in other mobile SoCs. The VRAM is mounted upside down to allow for this wide interface but the rest is conventional PoP techniques I believe. If they went full TSV I suppose both RAM sets could have been wide like this one (not that there would have been need).

And despite having lowered resolution, towards the end of the game you'll have seen some pretty spectacular stuff in Uncharted too.

Makes you wonder what they could have done with Rogue cores if they had waited a year to release it.

 

[Tabris]

Sorry to thread necro but very interesting article about PS Vita, specifically the memory interface to the 128MB VRAM.

http://www.chipworks.com/en/technic...s-vita-uses-chip-on-chip-sip-–-3d-but-not-3d/

same technology as PSP, which have 256-bit bus and 5.3GB/s
http://www.sony.net/Products/SC-HP/cx_news/vol50/pdf/featuring_1.pdf

 

[mboeller]

is this already known?

sony-s-ps-vita-uses-chip-on-chip-3d:
http://www.electroiq.com/blogs/chip...vita-uses-chip-on-chip-sip-3d-but-not-3d.html

 

[Rurouni]

is this already known?

sony-s-ps-vita-uses-chip-on-chip-3d:
http://www.electroiq.com/blogs/chip...vita-uses-chip-on-chip-sip-3d-but-not-3d.html

Yes. Look the post above you. Quoted a post that has a direct Link to the chipworks article.

 

[mboeller]

Upps!

 

[Deleted member 7537]

Vita 2.0? 4G, HDMI Out

http://leviathyn.com/games-2/news/2...s-nex-generation-vita-could-have-4g-and-hdmi/

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Absolutely necessary and quite possibly too late in the game. If it had 50Hz HDMI out though, I might be 1% interested.

 

[wco81]

HDMI isn't going to make a difference in sales. They should have some easy DLNA scheme to set top boxes.

4G is necessary for gaming but are there good pay as you go LTE plans?

The difference maker is put about 16 GB of built-in storage (i.e. get rid of those crappy overpriced cards) and cut the price by half. Yes make it $99.

Then maybe people might bite on some of those $50 games.

 

[Billy Idol]

In one of the killzone mercanaries gameplay trailer, one can see a bunch of people playing multiplayer, with all their vitas connected to a TV?? I thought that hdmi is already included?

 

[ltcommander.data]

Seems like a response to Project Shield.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

SD card support is so much more important than HDMI out or 4G support..

 

[anexanhume]

HDMI isn't going to make a difference in sales. They should have some easy DLNA scheme to set top boxes.

4G is necessary for gaming but are there good pay as you go LTE plans?

The difference maker is put about 16 GB of built-in storage (i.e. get rid of those crappy overpriced cards) and cut the price by half. Yes make it $99.

Then maybe people might bite on some of those $50 games.

AFAIK uncharted was the only $50 game. All others have been $40.

As for DLNA, I wonder if the specs allow for tolerable latency? It already has PS3 connectivity and I only expect that to be enhanced for PS4.

SD card support is so much more important than HDMI out or 4G support..

And won't happen. It would kill their memory card sales and make it easier to get unauthorized content onto the device, which was one of the catalysts for piracy on the PSP.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

And won't happen. It would kill their memory card sales and make it easier to get unauthorized content onto the device, which was one of the catalysts for piracy on the PSP.

Yes, I'm sure Sony prefers to have no one buying a Vita and no one making decent Vita games than to lose this spectacular market of proprietary memory cards that no one buys because they can't be used in anything else and cost 10x more per-GB than a faster, high-end SD card.

And dear god.. no one would want the Vita to have the same unsuccess and botched-by-piracy software sales as the PSP, tight?

 

[Gitaroo]

Yes, I'm sure Sony prefers to have no one buying a Vita and no one making decent Vita games than to lose this spectacular market of proprietary memory cards that no one buys because they can't be used in anything else and cost 10x more per-GB than a faster, high-end SD card.

And dear god.. no one would want the Vita to have the same unsuccess and botched-by-piracy software sales as the PSP, tight?

honestly, we all love to have cheap and fast sd card support, but it just won't happen, no point to say anymore or argue over it.

Anyway, how likely is it to have miracast on Vita instead of HDMI out? The current model still have an unkown port at the top for a possible dongle for dual band wifi? And some kind of wii u like wifi tech.

 

[wco81]

I only mention DLNA because mobile devices can now stream to various set top boxes. One reason Sony may not want to enable something that easy is that it might eat into console sales.

Remember that the PSP didn't get HDMI (or some kind of connectivity to big screens) until late in its life.

Sony has to do something drastic to rescue this business or at least carve out a profitable niche. Devices this year will have Rogue and other comparably powerful mobile GPUs in the next year, so as time passes, the viability of the Vita declines.

Make it cheap and take out the annoyances like the overpriced cards.

Otherwise, cut their losses and bail on this business.

 

[anexanhume]

I only mention DLNA because mobile devices can now stream to various set top boxes. One reason Sony may not want to enable something that easy is that it might eat into console sales.

Remember that the PSP didn't get HDMI (or some kind of connectivity to big screens) until late in its life.

Sony has to do something drastic to rescue this business or at least carve out a profitable niche. Devices this year will have Rogue and other comparably powerful mobile GPUs in the next year, so as time passes, the viability of the Vita declines.

Make it cheap and take out the annoyances like the overpriced cards.

Otherwise, cut their losses and bail on this business.

I believe Carmack commented that the closer to the metal access of the Vita would keep it competitive with next generation mobile GPUs. They'll have a hard time matching its VRAM bandwidth too. Few mobile projects will have the budget or scope that Vita titles do, also.

As for memory cards, I agree. Cheaper memory cards are rumored to be announced on the 20th at the event. Personally, I think they should introduce a 64GB card at the 32GB price point and slide the rest down. 59.99 MSRP for 32GB is reasonable given you can probably find it regularly for less than 50 from amazon and such.

 

[wco81]

Competitive isn't the only issue.

Why should you spend $200 for another device to carry around in addition to your phone and/or tablet?

Make the price more attractive, maybe even something people might buy on a whim.

 

[anexanhume]

Competitive isn't the only issue.

Why should you spend $200 for another device to carry around in addition to your phone and/or tablet?

Make the price more attractive, maybe even something people might buy on a whim.

I doubt they can afford to. Probably less of an attach rate guarantee in that space and at those prices.