The Power of Bitboys Acceleon G40
- Thread starter Nappe1
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Panajev2001a
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TEXAN said:
I have been told one product is already in the market, selling like hotcakes and it makes a package that is sexy, cool looking and really plainly great
.PSP's GPU is a nice processor and it works well with the other chips in the PSP's SoC, I guess it is what Sony wanted and needed to launch in December 2004 and hit in mid 2005 U.S. and Europe with 1,000,000 units each.
Will a MBX based system, retailing for $249 (with the equivalent of the value pack) or for $199 (plain system) be able to blow off the water graphically the PSP and be a better system over-all ? One day yes, but it does not look like for the time being and every motnh that passes is one more month that the PSP has been on the market and gained marketshare.
Panajev2001a said:
MBX is actually already on the market in at least one form; not particularly targetted towards gaming yet though.
Panajev2001a
Veteran
TEXAN said:
If they can get it at the same price (and bundling it with cell-phone deals for 1 year or two is not just the same
) more power to them.PSP launched December 2004, it is only natural that more powerful platforms will be able to be made with time passing.
TEXAN, I also heard that <X GPU coming out after PowerVR MBX> will PowerVR MBX 1 out of the water as well...
Dave, what is that product and when did it launch on the market ?Also, how fast is that MBX incarnation and what is the price of the device (if it launched, this should be all public info, maybe not the exact specifications of the MBX GPUm but the rest should be available).
TEXAN said:
well, there was even rumours about shrinking Pyramid3D to nowadays tech and putting it to one of the more gaming / youth market placed phones. Eventually that didn't happen.
There's so much rumours flying around Nokia that I would not put much weight on those. Besides, Nokia laid off 200 Engineers from it's Multimedia R&D, so it's even unclear if there is going to be any n-gage 2.
(this was not nokia's first try to gaming... their previous one, Salora Fellow home computer back in mid 80's failed even worse than n-gage.)
With the big hitters of DS and PSP looking set to dominate, and Zodiac and Gizmondo approaching from the other end, there's little room for more multifunction portable devices. DS and PSP have the huge advantage in generating software revenue that other machines can't generally match - why would anyone pay Nokia to write for NGage if no-one's going to buy the platform?
There's never room for millions of formats. That why we have PC and Mac, and not BBC model H, the Sinclair Spectrum series XV or the Acorn Archimedes. The only time you get lots of manufacturers surviving in such markets is creating for an open standard. If there were a standard of software for portable media phones to write for, phone companies could have improving gaming phones. But I can't see that happening in the near future, and I reckon PSP would trump such an idea anyway at this point in time.
There's never room for millions of formats. That why we have PC and Mac, and not BBC model H, the Sinclair Spectrum series XV or the Acorn Archimedes. The only time you get lots of manufacturers surviving in such markets is creating for an open standard. If there were a standard of software for portable media phones to write for, phone companies could have improving gaming phones. But I can't see that happening in the near future, and I reckon PSP would trump such an idea anyway at this point in time.
Nappe1 said:
With the only other difference that TI's OMAP 2420 is probably being manufactured as we speak. I've no idea what they want it for, yet if SiBoy's former 10mm^2 number is real for MBX alone, then I doubt it's a chip that would be suitable for a mobile phone. At 200MHz 1024*768*32 sounds perfectly feasable on that one.
Agreed. They don't seem though as they're willing to give up though, irrelevant whether they'll give up or not or what chip they'll use in the end.
Ailuros said:Those are FPGA numbers? Now I feel stupid
Don't feel stupid, I don't mean the numbers were measured on an FPGA. I meant that when all you have is an FPGA, the power measures are "estimates", and subject to all kinds of funny business.
Ailuros said:
I'm sure MBX claimed areas like 3mm^2 at first too
I never believe IP core vendor area estimates until I see it in a product's real die photo. They tend to do things like leave out the memories, leave out the interfaces, estimate power and ignore the clock trees, etc.
SiBoy said:Ailuros said:Those are FPGA numbers? Now I feel stupid
Don't feel stupid, I don't mean the numbers were measured on an FPGA. I meant that when all you have is an FPGA, the power measures are "estimates", and subject to all kinds of funny business.
Ailuros said:
I'm sure MBX claimed areas like 3mm^2 at first too
Hmmm I've never seen claimed die areas in ARM's whitepapers (PowerVR has mentioned only power consumption rates if my memory serves me well). The initial ARM pdf claimed for MBX (as already mentioned) 480K/15K ram and at 130nm TSMC 1.0V = lower than 1.3mW/MHz (160K gates and 6K ram for VGP). I don't know whether those claimed numbers have anything to do with the final rates, yet the whitepaper in question is being quite clear that there were only FPGAs available back then and no sign of silicon.
Bottomline of the story is that you're absolutely right; w/o final silicon claimed numbers can be anything between simple estimates to fancy marketing numbers.
TEXAN:
The demo is on an MBX-Lite chip integrated with a SuperH mobile core. The system has unified memory of 32 MB SDRAM. The CPU base seems similar to the DC's, but with a slightly higher clockrate, at 216 MHz and 389 MIPS (not sure about floating-point set-up). The graphics part runs at only 54 MHz and apparently comes equipped with an accompanying VGP.
Called PowerVR Racer, it was a 30 fps and above demonstration of multiple cars riding through a large city. It ran FSAA and used MIP-mapping. Geometry rates were decent, coming in a bit under Dreamcast levels. Multitexturing and reflection mapping were being performed.
BitBoys appears to have a great IMR architecture, so it's not too surprising that they could compete. Falanx seems to me to be some kind of smart, hybrid tile-based immediate mode renderer, allowing great efficiency and some powerful anti-aliasing features. They should provide good competition to the MBX.
Ailuros:
Kristof:
Shifty Geezer:
Panajev2001a:
Just more screens: http://www.pvrgenerations.co.uk/
The demo is on an MBX-Lite chip integrated with a SuperH mobile core. The system has unified memory of 32 MB SDRAM. The CPU base seems similar to the DC's, but with a slightly higher clockrate, at 216 MHz and 389 MIPS (not sure about floating-point set-up). The graphics part runs at only 54 MHz and apparently comes equipped with an accompanying VGP.
Called PowerVR Racer, it was a 30 fps and above demonstration of multiple cars riding through a large city. It ran FSAA and used MIP-mapping. Geometry rates were decent, coming in a bit under Dreamcast levels. Multitexturing and reflection mapping were being performed.
MBX was an efficient implementation done in 2003 of PowerVR's Series 3 Kyro generation. These other chips are a good amount newer and in different states of readiness.
BitBoys appears to have a great IMR architecture, so it's not too surprising that they could compete. Falanx seems to me to be some kind of smart, hybrid tile-based immediate mode renderer, allowing great efficiency and some powerful anti-aliasing features. They should provide good competition to the MBX.
Ailuros:
It apparently breaks the scene up into tiles, but then processes the pixels from the polygons in order, somewhat like an IMR, to produce many subsampled pixels for use in its signature anti-aliasing features.
Kristof:
I remember the spaceship demo and others from the earlier video presentation. What did you think about them in person?
Shifty Geezer:
PSP graphics push a lot of geometry, G40 is showing a lot of performance functionality, Mali can give fast framerates with the anti-aliasing on high, and MBX gives great IQ precision.
Panajev2001a:
Can't compare an end-product manufacture to a technology. PowerVR is highly cost competitive due to small size and gate count, memory efficiency and simple interface for implementation.
MBX was in silicon by 2003 and in product earlier in 2004, and that's been with the timing inefficiencies of having to deal with licensees and their interest/schedules.
Not from MBX; the PSP isn't being sold to their market of licensees for mobile/embedded solutions.
MBX SoCs for car information systems, phones, PDAs, etc have been shipping since earlier in 2004. The SH7770 sampled in May and is the 400 MHz, 2.8 GFLOPS, 720 MIPS SH-4A core integrated with an MBX 3D engine (2D engine on the SuperH apparently) and presumably VGP (maybe clocked at 100MHz?).
Hmm... Simon, just coincidentally noticed you corrected someone's mistaken assumption that MBX was a "scaled-down version of the Kyro architecture". While I've always interpretted MBX to be a custom mobile design based upon the benefits of the PowerVR architecture in general created during the Kyro generation and don't find classifications too insightful anyway, MBX has been listed before as a mobile design based upon Series 3. Was you correction to indicate that it wasn't related to Series 3 in any substantive way, or just that the assumption that had been made was falsely implying that MBX was designed by stripping-down Kyro for mobile implementation?
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