3DS uses DMP's PICA(R)200 chip

[jarrod]

WereKitten said:

jarrod said:

Those figures are from 2006 era series chips.  Here's data we have from 2008 (I'd imagine 3DS likely uses a newer variant too)... you'll notice geometry's gotten a decent bump up to 40m tri/sec (well past PSP or GC)... if it has 2 2008 chips clocked at 400 MHz that's 80m tri/sec and a whopping 3.2b pix/sec fillrate!

That page talks generally about Pica as a core family, and its specifications at 400MHz.

But DMP's official leaflet (2010) about the Pica200 specs it at 15.3M tri/s and 800M pixel/s at 200MHz. And again according to the DMP site, the Pica200 is officially the chip used in the 3DS, it doesn't say "a custom chip based on the Pica core tech".

While N could -in theory- overclock it, I suspect that in nomen omen and that the 200 means that for yield reasons those are cores supposed to work up to 200MHz.

Of course the 3DS has two of them, but it also has two screens to fill. In the end it seems to be slightly stingy on triangles, with good fill rate and the great vantage for the devs of the fixed shader extensions, as you underlined.

It's all coherent with the first-hand assessments of something more powerful than a PSP (the triangle specs for PSP are debatable), inbetween a Dreamcast and a GC in raw power, but with fixed effects that will look good with little work instead of more flexible and complex programmable shaders.

 

Well, I'm pretty sure Nintendo will be customizing the chip to order.  They did the same with IBM for Gekko/Broadway, and again with the ARM series in GBA/DS... Nintendo really hasn't used anything "as is" off the shelf since like 1990.

I agree though 40m triangles would probably be overkill, and geometry looks below GC/PS2 generally (but above DC, mostly on par with or slightly above PSP imo).  Graphics functions seem on par with (but with better APIs than) Xbox 1.