sc94597 said:
Soundwave said:
sc94597 said:
Some details on the GPU you are citing by the way.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/199933-powervr-goes-4k-with-gt7900-for-game-consoles
"On paper, the GT7900 is a beast, with 512 ALU cores and enough horsepower to even challenge the low-end integrated GPU market if the drivers were capable enough. Imagination Technologies has even created an HPC edition of the Series 7 family — its first modest foray into high-end GPU-powered supercomputing. We don’t know much about the chip’s render outputs (ROPs) or its memory support, but the older Series 6 chips had up to 12 ROPS. The GT7900 could sport 32, with presumed support for at least dual-channel LPDDR4.
Quad-channel memory configurations (if they exist) could actually give this chip enough klout to rightly call itself a competitor for last-generation consoles, if it was equipped in a set-top box with a significant thermal envelope. Imagination is also looking to push the boundaries of gaming in other ways — last year the company unveiled an architecture that would incorporate a ray tracing hardware block directly into a GPU core."
For its part, Imagination Technology anticipates the GT7900 to land in micro-servers, full-size notebooks, and game consoles. It’s an impressive potential resume, but we’ll see if the ecosystem exists to support such lofty goals. If I had to guess, I’d wager this first chip is the proof-of-concept that will demonstrate the company can compete outside its traditional smartphone and tablet markets. Future cores, possibly built with support for Samsung’s nascent Wide I/O standard, will be more likely to succeed. |
Yeah another quote:
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/gaming/consoles/this-is-what-the-ps4-and-xbox-one-should-really-be-afraid-of-1286117
What we will tell you is what all of this means: Imagination's new GPUs are good news for affordable gaming and potentially bad news for the PS4 and Xbox One.
As Imagination's Alexandru Voica told TechRadar, the new GPUs have the potential "to offer the performance of the current-gen consoles, but at a lower price point."
There was a rumor a while ago that Nintendo was accepting hardware pitches from both AMD and PowerVR (Imagination). I'm starting to think maybe they should ditch AMD for PowerVR. These guys make the iPhone GPUs, and they make them at massive volume.
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I don't see why they couldn't partner with both. AMD could supplement the CPU's and PowerVR the GPU's. Intel already showed that PowerVR could work with the X86 architecture when they released Intel Atom processors with PowerVR chipsets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28system_on_chip%29
I'm sure an AMD low-end APU (Kabini for Home Platform and Temash for handheld?) + PowerVR Chipset would support enough graphical horsepower, while maintaining an X86 architecture very similar to that found in XBO and PS4 for easy portability. By then, AMD should have some pretty veratile APU's for the power requirements necessary.
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I don't think it would be worth it. PowerVR is already giving you 800 GFLOP performance in under 10 watts, there's no point in having AMD tag along.
x86 is nice, but it's not the be all, end all. Every major development house and even most indie studios are familiar with the PowerVR architecture because it's in every iPhone and iPad, so Nintendo would have no problem getting developer support for it.
Unless AMD can give you a better price, I say ditch 'em. I don't even think they can beat PowerVR for price, PowerVR works in massive volumes, not even just dinky little PS4 shipments, they have to supply Apple's product chain, which is 10x more any game console. So they likely can give Nintendo the best price and have no problem with things like yields.
