Nintendo + Intel will be the killer next generation combo.

[Squilliam]

alephnull said:

Squilliam said:

Joelcool7 said:

Nintendo's a loyal company they will likely stick with IBM. Not to mention backwards compatability issues. Its better to stick with PowerPC!

PowerPC is likely out because I believe Nintendo will want to have a combined CPU+GPU on the same die. It means a great savings in power, heat, packaging size and board complexity. It only really leaves AMD and Intel as viable options.

If the machine was designed for realtime ray-tracing it wouldn't necessarily need a GPU. Furthermore, the papers I've read involving the RPU (a different ray-tracing chip) seem to conclude that the kind of architecture you would want to pair with ray-tracing hardware is a so-called "broadband" architecture (high memory bandwidth).

I like the idea of larrabee as an acceptable compromise as it can do everything. However it looks like the jig is up and my nefarious scheme for stimulating debate about more technical ideas in the Nintendo forum is coming to an end.