| bobobologna said: That's not necessarily true. A chip dedicated to processing the information that the camera captures could very well be better than using 15-30% of the XBox360 CPU power. The chip would be designed for whatever needs to happen to process the data. CPUs are generally good at everything and are designed to be useful in almost any circumstance. A custom designed chip would probably be crap at doing almost, but excel at what it's supposed to do (process Natal data). An easy example is having a GPU with an h.264 decoder vs one without. If your GPU has an h.264 decoder, your CPU utilization when watching an HD video will probably be relatively light, even for weaker CPUs. If your GPU doesn't have an h.264 decoder, well I hope you have a powerful CPU. The NVIDIA Tegra can do 1080p h.264 decoding that an older desktop CPU would have a tough time with, but in terms of pure power, the older desktop CPU is probably more powerful than the Tegra. |
Correct. But I doubt they were developing a custom chip that was processing a neural network. A custom chip for convolutions and other such image processing would be faster than the 360 CPU and cheaper, but I am sure the tasks necessary for Natal would require either an incredibly expensive custom chip, or a cheaper slower general processor.
