Soundwave said:
OdinHades said:
Tacking together three GPUs will not give you three times the horsepower of a single chip. Besides that, that's asking for some serious complicated development. Not exactly the way to gain third party interest. Micro stutter is a massive problem with such setups. I don't see any possible scenario with more than one GPU. It is expensive as hell and brings along one shitload of problems. It is really only an option for Power PC users who know exactly what they are doing. Otherwise, the results are not what your average console buyer would expect. Especially in combination with bad TVs, don't get me started.
That said, what about the CPU? The PowerVR GT7900 is only a GPU and is most likely to be found in the next iPad. While the PowerVR chips work in theory with x86, the results are horrible to this day (at least with earlier chips, I didn't see any GT7900 tests in this regard.) So Nintendo would almost have to got with ARM (or by some miracle develop a perfect PowerVR x86 driver themselves) which would be also bad for third parties. I mean it could be that Nintendo just doesn't care about third party anymore, sure. But that would contradict rumours of third parties who got shown NX behind closed doors and stuff like that. If Nintendo would care so little, they wouldn't be making such an effort.
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ARM would likely be the CPU. Third parties are familar with it too, Nintendo has been using ARM for like 15 years now, and they seem to beat everyone onpower consumption to performance ratio by a country mile. Also they are cheap.
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Nintendo is using IBM, not ARM. There is an ARM chip in the Wii U, but it ain't the main processor, it's just used in the main menu and during standby as the archaic IBM processor doesn't know any C-States (power down features when not used extensively)
ARM CPUs only beat other designs in very low power designs, which it ha made it's own niche. Anything which needs more power, including Consoles, are more problematic for ARM Chips as their power consumption scales very badly with increased clock rates. Also the reason why ARM chips hit a wall at around 2Ghz which they struggle to pass for some years now.
ARM hips are cheaper due to lowered complexity and instructions, but it bites back when those features are needed (or could be needed) as suffer from much lower performance in these cases. So the low price is a bit of a tradeoff.
