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Microsoft beats Intel, AMD to market with CPU/GPU combo chip
- dman 16y agoFun excerpt - "It would have been easier and more natural to just connect the CPU and GPU with a high-bandwidth, low-latency internal connection, but that would have made the new SoC faster in some respects than the older systems, and that's not allowed."
- jdc 16y ago"Given the unique requirement of consoles -- the system must perform exactly like the original Xbox 360"
- dman 16y agoI just found it amusing as a design spec requirement. Usually newer systems have to go faster and do more things. Looks like they went out of their way to develop an on chip fsb like interface to slow things down.
- _delirium 16y agoYeah, it's an interesting design challenge. It seems like "design a SoC that performs exactly like discrete chips connected by a bus" is a task that'd have a lot of sneaky pitfalls. Partly depends on how close "exactly" has to be.
- jdc 16y agoThough I'm far from an expert, I would think they could even out performance in software to some extent.
- anigbrowl 16y agoWell, figure that game publishers will have some of their animation/game timing routines keyed to the specifications of the original model. If the new one has more juice and programmers start taking advantage of it, Microsoft would probably get the blame for those titles' failure to run well on the older models. I was actually surprised at how smoothly Sony managed to phase out the ps/2 backward compatibility (to lower costs) from the PS3 after the first year or two. i guess it helps that you can pick up the older console for something ridiculous like $75 if there's some classic old title you can't give up. Incidentally, word is that development has already begun on PS4 games, so you know what to ask Santa for in 2012.
- jacquesm 16y ago> figure that game publishers will have some of their animation/game timing routines keyed to the specifications of the original model. Any game programmer worth his salt will stay away from that though. Platforms change over time and the raw speed of a platform should not be something you tie your animations to. That will already backfire when there's more or less active objects in the game. A more common approach is to tie the animation to the display frame rate by locking to the vertical refresh.
- andrewf 16y agoEven if people think they've done everything right in theory, the code will never have run (let alone gone through QA) on models with different timing, and publishers wouldn't be keen on having to go back and fix flaws. Going back some years, AFAIK, you didn't necessarily have developers or build infrastructure for a title that shipped a few months ago. I don't know whether online gaming and the need to patch bugs/vulnerabilities has changed this.
- dman 16y agoI buy my consoles when theyre being phased out. The hardware is cheap and more importantly the catalog for the console actually exists and is usually significantly discounted too. No point buying a console early on when there are barely any games out for it. So in 2012 I will probably pick up a PS3 for ~$129.