News IBM's Revolution processor is done

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/11/28/ibm_broadway_revolution/

 

tbh i dont see this console being the most powerful thing spec wise, but giving it is being produced by a company who really knows what they are doing in this market i can see it being fairly revolutionary in terms of stuff like the controller and have some kick ass games!

You can tell it isn't really going after the same market as Sony and MS as these two companies have solely focused on the power of their machines while nintendo have just stood back and shown off some truely new and unique features.

Not sure if this post makes much sense, I've had a few pints already.. hopefully you'll all half get what i mean!

 

Why does it have to look so damn sexy!

<A88>

 

Don't get me wrong - I love Nintendo, but I don't think they're designing a system for the major demographic. People don't like change, and will probably see this as being way too gimmiky (just look at the DS).

Time will tell I suppose...

As for CPU/GPU power, I imagine it will be the lowest of the 3, which was something that never used to bother me, but since getting into h@rdcore PC gaming I can't even play Gamecube games now without shuddering at the lack of AA.

 

Really, I can't say I'm all that surprised. I suspected a dual-core CPU from the start. As far as power goes, Nintendo has NEVER gone to the paper war since they started making 3D consoles, as most of you should remember the rediculous comparisons we saw between the original Playstation and Nintendo64; in spite the fact that visually, the N64 was FAR more impressive than the PS, Sony and its fans never forgot their "360,000 polygons a second" figure, and how it compared to the figure Nintendo gave of "150,000 polygons a second." Never mind the fact that Sony's figure counted on you doing fully-lit, untextured geometry, while Nintendo's figure was derived from real-world benchmarks utilizing a full texture buffer, bilinear filtering, mip-mapping, active lighting, and possibly a few other tricks.

I see that they're going much the same way here; Nintendo obviously doesn't care about the paper war, but is instead focusing on what the users will actually see in the end. What we actually wind up with is still an open question; will they simply throw in enough that for 99% of the populace, you can't tell the difference? Or will they concentrate harder than that, releasing a modern-day equivalent of the Nintendo64 compared to the Playstation of Sony and Microsoft?

When it comes to the CPU, the main question here is what else is there to it, aside from the number of cores. We know that it's based off of the IBM PowerPC arcitecture, (at least, I think we do) which makes it just like the other two CPUs in that respect. However, the big question comes toward what Nintendo's done to trim costs off of the chip, and how else it differs from a straight PC-class CPU; those chips are simply too expensive to use in gaming consoles. Microsoft stripped down each of the symmetrical cores in the Xenon, crippling branch-prediction capabilities, among other things, and provided their own proprietary instruction set in order to squeeze the most out of the availible silicon. Regardless, each of the cores on the Xenon have far fewer transistors used, and hence a lot fewer components, than what you'd see in a multi-core PC chip from AMD or Intel, or even from a conventional dual-core PowerPC 970FX, which are used in the latest PowerMac G5 workstations. Lastly, unlike conventional multi-core CPUs, the Xenon utilizes a shared L2 cache. This part of the CPU takes up a lot of die space and transistors, contributing to cost, as well as power consumption (power brick size) and heat production. (machine stability, cooling and case size)

In Nintendo's case, we must ask the same questions; will they cut costs by stripping the cores down? What impact would it have on real-world performance? As for the cache, what will Nintendo do there? Will we again see a shared L2 cache design, or will there be a dedicated one for each core? In either case, how much will there be? There are also countless other questions I could ask, completely ignoring the clock speed, though that's important given that we must consider Nintendo IS working with a case design that's hardly any larger than the drive used for the discs; it doesn't offer many cooling options, and it might not go over too well if the machine's case becomes too hot to touch after running. In the end, our quest for knowledge is far from over here.

[edit]Oh, and one last not I forgot; we STILL haven't a clue on what the GPU will be. Just like we have hardly any useful information on the R500 Xenos. Keep in mind that while ATi makes claims that the GPU is far more powerful than anything on the PC market, keep in mind that this is a company that makes graphics processors here; their word cannot be trusted. Developers that have been closely working on PC/Xbox 360 titles seem to report information that the power of the Xenos is indeed mortal, and actually rather limited, though impressive nonetheless. (it seems to wind up in the neighborhood of an ATi X800 card, though with all the features of the X1800 series)

 

nintendo will cater for the true gamers among us who rember our roots wern't fps. A genre that has been beaten to death, bring us new and fun games nintendo..

 

I've normally sworn off actually buying consoles because I simply cannot afford the price tag to get them all, (I still do and intentend to continue to play consoles withs friends, it's just that it's always thier machine, not mine) but Nintendo's promise of emulating ALL previous Nintendo-playable games on the machine really got to me, and might make me willing to shell out money for this. Coming with a starting library of some umpteen-thousand games from the NES, SNES, N64, as well as the Game Cube, certainly doesn't hurt. Also, I found it ironic that even at it's lowest form, the Revolution is the only console that comes with built-in permanent storage right off; you need to pay for the "Premium Package" (non-crippled is more like it) to get that nifty clip-on hard drive, and it seems that the Playstation 3 will go a similar route.

 

The Revolution is the only console that interests me. Nintendo are doing something different.

I just hope that their online stuff is as good (if not better) than Xbox's Live service, which is now very good (apparently!).

 

Indeed, I have high hopes for this console, just like I did for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 before Microsoft and Sony gave out the full sheet of features on each machine. I think the biggest question for the console comes from the RAM it will use; all that's known is that they are going back to using 1T-SRAM, which supposedly provides a form of SRAM that's only slightly more costly than DRAM. Performance-wise, it tends to beat even the latest DRAM types, including GDDR3 and XDR. It's now more of a question of how much Nintendo will provide; they have a history of going for quality over quantity, and in some ways, I think it's hurt them; until the Xbox 360, no non-Nintendo console builder had memory that provided performance even close to what was brought by the 500MHz RDRAM - it was just a problem that it only shipped with a paltry 4MB of it. A similar scene was found with the Game Cube; at 40MB total with an addtional 3MB of dedicated texture and framebuffer cache, it came above the 32MB offered by the PS2. However, history has shown that even the Xbox's 64MB of RAM wasn't enough to prevent it from being the crippling factor. (hence why Microsoft, for the current generation, opted to take the "high road" instead of using only 256MB of GDDR3 in the Xbox 360, as much as it's cost them)

Though Nintendo has been VERY impressive on preventing any form of leak from getting out, there have been rumors to be found in spades. One from Engaget suggested that the magic number for the Revolution was 384MB, split 256-128. Unfortunately, we have no insight into the minds at Nintendo, so we can't tell how much they've learned. For the sake of the console itself, I'd like to see it come packed with a large ammount of RAM; possibly a start at 640MB, or better yet, 768MB; Both Sony and Microsoft have set the texture buffer bar at 256MB, so Nintendo really has no need to overshoot it, but every reason to match it; once it has that, it could have a lot of options for the system RAM.

 

Well we know the Rev won't be as powerful as the other 2, but what it lacks in brute force it more than makes up for with it's other features: price, size, noise, unique controller etc.

It may be very small but then again the Xbox is at least 4 times the size of a Gamecube and if it wasn't for the smaller amount of RAM in a Gamecube it would be more powerful.

 

look at the DS, you say? i'm looking at it....i'm seeing, 2-1 outselling the PSP in japan, and pretty much head to head in other territories, and the only decent handheld internet gaming service out there right now.

gimmick? oh no. it's freakin brilliant.

 

Nintendo will save money by not bundling a nuclear power station.

And if it really is fully backwards compatible with gc and they start chucking out (S)NES games they're onto a winner.

Anyway, there's some interesting speculation/discussion here; http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/revolution.ars/1

 

Yeah well.....

It doesn't look powerfull because of it's size and all but..... They could strap it with a X1800XT Go!

I personally, want to see this bully the X-Crotch 360 into the ground performance wise.... Don't you?

You can buy a top of the line console for 400$. Or you could pay 599 or 749 for JUST a top end video card. Wheres the value>? Kan I get an A-men!!

 

Again, it isn't helpful to most discussion that Nintendo has been amazingly tight-lipped on their system; it's apparently slated for released in both the 2006 calendar year and Nintendo's 2006 fiscal year, making it a range between March and perhaps the end of November. That means that at most, there might be a little more than a year left.

Perhaps this is the most troubling in sections where we have just a tidbit of information availible, and it's taken to be all. Namely, the connectivity and media formats. Listed in the abovementioned ArsTechnica article, the Revolution supposedly will use standard DVD discs, and support 802.11b Wi-Fi. (low bandwidth, high range) However, I do think it's quite possible there will be more. As for the disc drive, remember that the same drive will also be able to read the Game Cube's proprietary 10-layer disc, (some 150MB per layer for a total of 1.5GB) so it's possible that the Revolution may also support some 5.25" version of that mini-disc, which could potentially be a 10-layer DVD, offering capacities nearly on a par with Blu-Ray. Then again, possibly not; Nintendo has been known for being very space-efficient with their own games, (Super Mario 64, if you recall, fit into 8MB) and history has shown that given a choice between a cheaper generic disc format and a proprietary, yet often superior, format, companies will choose the cheaper format. Hence, I would see if the Revolution supports standard dual-layer DVDs, I'd imagine almost all developers will simply use that format, given that producing such discs is a dirt-cheap proprosition.

As for the Wi-Fi support, it was confirmed that Nintendo has partnered with the world's largest and most advanced maker of Wi-Fi chipsets to provide the networking capabilities for the console; their chipsets are behind leading Wi-Fi products from companies like LinkSys. A lot of rumors have circulated on the potential that aside from 802.11b, (the standard used by the DS) it could support newer formats, and possibly even yet-to-be-released ones; new standards are difficult to implement, and given their uniformity, this is perhaps the one place where consoles actually have an edge. After all, what gamer's interest is NOT piqued when they hear that the next letter in the Wi-Fi alphabet after a, b, and g is n, and not something else? The only logic I could see is that the fourth letter would have to be d for "delta," given that "gamma" is the third letter in the greek alphabet. There's no explanation for "n."

Nintendo has truly mastered the art of "driving people crazy with not enough information."

Just remember that the "top end" video card will always come out to beat the gaming console. Primarily because a key trick to keeping even the more expensive consoles from being so expensive is to skimp where you can. You definitely get a lot more power for your money, but you never can get more power than those who can dump the most money. Also, "Go" is nVidia's mobile suffix; it's "mobility" as a prefix for mobile Radeons.

Like with the other consoles, though, the GPU is THE "big if." The Xbox 360 is already out there and in use, but we still don't fully understand the Xenos. Even I am still quite a ways from coming even near 95% certain of what it can do, though I'm still pretty confident in my earlier guess. (that in real-world rendering tests, it stacks up to an upper-range 12-pipeline card like the Radeon X800GTO, but with at least all the features of the X1k series)

A high clock speed could be very likely for the Hollywood GPU, especially if Nintendo waits for ATi to shift to the 75nm interim process.(GPU makers are delayed to moving to new processes by about a year or so, and use interim processes in the meantime; the 110nm GeForce 7800GTX is a prime example) After all, if you can still get good yields in your fabrication process, raising the clock speed is an effectively free way for makers to get more performance out of their chips. Of course, yield quality are always a big problem here, especially for game consoles, where there's no "lower-end edition" to use all those chips that didn't quite make the grade. However, a smaller manufacturing process would definitely play a key role in improving yields; the 75nm process provides chips roughly 70% of the size of the 90nm process that are still equal, which would help on all fronts Nintendo's pushing for. The 90nm R520 can already comfortably push speeds of 625MHz, with virtually all chips able to go above 500MHz, so perhaps a slightly cleaned-up GPU moved to 75nm could mabye consistently go over 600MHz, or possibly 700MHz and beyond.

The same could go for the Broadway CPU. Microsoft and Sony have cut some corners, and dumped a lot of money in developing their CPUs, and to fit them onto a 90nm process die. A shift to the 65 nm process exactly halves the size of the die needed for the same processor; with that size, Nintendo, using a two-core, 2MB L2 cache model, which will pretty cleanly fill a 90nm die, could be made on a half-size 65nm die, hence providing big cuts to power usage, price, heat production, and overall be superior. And Nintendo would, unlike Sony and Microsoft, not have to rely on cutting out some features from the processing elements at all, allowing each core to be notably more powerful, per clock cycle, than the competing chips, as well as potentially allowing for high clock speeds. Personally, I'm thinking that this is also what Sony is holding out for; that the 65nm process might be provided to revise the giant Cell processor, which I alreayd understand currently has very poor yields, making function at the originally intended specifications impossible; a 4.6GHz clock speed as originally advertised nearly a year ago would mean some 200 watts of power consumption, and an average core temperature of around the boiling point; it would possibly even melt the PCB it was attached to. A move to a smaller fabrication process would be a good thing here.

 

As another note that I forgot to mention in the original post, it also seems, looking at the RAM supply; although I cannot quite confirm the reliability of the claims, it seems that the Revolution may use 1T-SRAM from MoSys, just like the Game Cube did. It seems to at least be mentioned at Wikipedia and IGN. Hence the article from ArsTechnica would be incorrect in assuming that it would use XDR-RDRAM. 1T-SRAM, like other types of SRAM, is known for its extremely low power consumption, as well as exception performance, which can surpass GDDR3 and XDR in bandwidth.

 

I love that Nintendo was so willing with the Revolution to go back to their roots. It stands a huge chance to be the ONLY console I buy out of this generation. Both Sony and MS have gotten to the point that their best games are computer games, and many are released on the PC market.

So, I will definitely own this. Whether I buy the PS3 or not depends on its eventual price and Squaresoft. For all my computer's awesome specs (not really, but let's pretend), I still enjoy Megaman and Final Fanasy VI the most.

 

Meh, it's all about the games. No doubt one of these will eventually make its way into my living room to join my tiny electronic army. And someone who comes right out and says that it's becoming painful to play games without AA has made their position pretty clear.

I'm more amused by the fact that everyone in this generation is going for some sort of multiple processor technology. When Sega did this with the Saturn way back when, they did it without any background, and without what we now know as the appropriate support systems an algorithms. It was doomed to be wasted (and ultimately -- with hindsight -- to fail) because it was a poor implementation of a concept years ahead of its time. But when Saturn went down, everyone was standing around saying what a stupid idea multiple processors was for a commercial device, and that no-one in their right minds would ever, EVER do such a thing. EVER.

Ha ha ha...

Nezuji

 

Well, if memory serves me correctly, the SNES used a trio of processors as well. I don't recall how they had them set up, but in that case, I do think that Nintendo actually had a form of multi-threading there. Even though, I think, it ammounted to merely splitting different types of calculations among them, so the load was never really balanced. Nonetheless, a trio of 16-bit 7MHz processors managed to out-perform the 15MHz, 16-bit Motorola 68000 powering the Sega Genesis.

As for the Sega Saturn, the unfortunate part about its multi-processor setup was that included in those processors were what was arguably the world's first real-time 3D acelerator. Of course, it hardly had any of the features you would expect, but it was quite possibly the first ever chip to be dedicated to renderign polygons. After that, IO believe it wasn't until the "Reality Signal Processor" came for the N64, finished a few months before the first true-3D 3dfx Voodoo and ATi Rage GPUs came for the PC, that we saw true, dedicated GPUs.

 

Gimmiky?
Yeah. Sure. Lets all go & play rehashes of PS2 games on our PSPs then!

Some GC games use AA. Metroid Prime2 does for one.



Its amusing to see all you people saying 'well we know for a fact that the Revolution wont be as powerfull as the others', when you DONT KNOW FOR A FACT. No-one knows. Thats the thing.
For all we know, the Revolution could be 100000x more powerfull than either console. Or it could be significantly slower than both. Or the same speed.
Thats the thing, nothing is fact regarding the Revolutions specs, so why are you all making asumptions based on bias's towards & against certain companies?

 

But, at the end of the day it is gimmiky...
It's an alternative control method, that's never been tried before (on this scale) - I just feel that many 'classic' gamers will see the control pad as a bit of a strange way to play.
I for one won't be buing a Revolution (but my Nintendo-fanboy housemate probably will) - this is nothing to do with the actual machine, it's just that I don't buy consoles anymore.

I don't see the point in buying a 360 or a PS3 either seeing that in order to get the most out of the (graphically) you need a HD TV (which is something I'm not planning on buying) - if I lived in the US (or any other cheaper country) then yeah, a HD TV & 360 would be top of my 'to buy' list. However, as I'm stuck in this dump of a country, there's no way I'm shelling out stupid amounts of money for a product that has no real use atm (what with the lack of HD broadcasts).

Never played it so I can't comment.