First off, I don't like Matt. Ever since he started his whole pity party because Nintendo is opting out of designing their Revolution console around HD televisions, I've come to realize that there are some very distinct differences in our outlook on gaming. He wants people to believe he's a Nintendo fan born and raised. This isn't true, I've seen through his veil, he's a corporate graphics whore and doesn't understand a lot about the technical aspects to boot. Want proof to back up my claim of him not being tech savvy you say?? Well I'm glad you asked because I have an excellent example cued up! Beware this is not light reading, pay attention.
Here's a quote from the article I linked:
"Insiders stress that Revolution runs on an extension of the Gekko and Flipper architectures that powered GameCube, which is why studios who worked on GCN will have no problem making the transition to the new machine, they say. IBM's "Broadway" CPU is clocked at 729MHz, according to updated Nintendo documentation. By comparison, GameCube's Gekko CPU ran at 485MHz. The original Xbox's CPU, admittedly a different architecture altogether, was clocked at 733MHz.
Meanwhile, Xbox 360 runs three symmetrical cores at 3.2GHz.
Clearly, numbers don't mean everything, but on paper Revolution's CPU falls performance-wise somewhere well beyond GameCube and just shy of the original Xbox. However, it's important to remember that the CPU is only one part of the equation."
What Matt is saying in that second paragraph not only is speculation based on speculation, it also seems to completely disregard some things that are known. Numbers can mean everything, but you need complete numbers and it can get extremely confusing when your trying to compare completely different architecture CPU's in completely different systems with different amounts of different kinds of RAM, and different graphics processors. To simplify things lets just concentrate on the CPUs alone. Matt says that the performance of the "Broadway" CPU is going to be faster than the GameCube, yet slower than the original Xbox. Now this would be a pretty elementary and correct analysis of the information he was given, if and only if all three chips in that comparison were the exact same architectures with the same amounts of L1 and L2 cache, but this is not the case.
The original Xbox used a Pentium III Celeron chip manufactured by Intel, the "Gekko" is a custom Power PC chip made by IBM, and the "Broadway" is said to be an extension of the PPC "Gekko". Based on the results of experience from the past generation the "Gekko" clocked at 485Mhz is slightly less powerful than the Celeron clocked at 733Mhz used in the original Xbox. Now let us make the pretty unfair assumption (in favor of Matt's judgment) that somehow after the years IBM and Nintendo have spent extending the "Gekko" to come up with the new "Broadway" CPU that they didn't manage to get anymore computing power per clock cycle out of it. If the new Nintendo/IBM CPU is the same power per clockspeed as the "Gekko" but is now clocked at 729Mhz, it should see a performance increase of 150%, which would surely place the power of the new Nintendo Revolution's CPU above that of the original Xbox.
We know that its much more likely that IBM spent their time wisely and made some significant optimizations in the CPU which will allow quite a bit more than 150% increase in power, how much you ask? Well it's impossible to tell, not even close to enough information.
Now for my thoughts on these rumored specs! When you look at the information that Matt has been provided with it seems that Nintendo nearly doubled everything they could, in terms of memory and clockspeeds. I choose to ignore the little bit of information he mentions about there being no improvements to the GPU's shader engine because it just doesn't make sense that they would have simply overclocked the GameCube's "Flipper" GPU and called it a day. I can buy a $30 Nvidia FX5200 video card with a better shader engine just because when the GameCube and Xbox originally came out shaders just hit the scene (without checking, I think that ATI had recently released the radeon 7500 and Nvidia was working with their 4xxx series).
If these specs are to be believed I think that this would mean that the Revolution will be about 3-4 times more powerful than the GameCube (interestingly enough I recall a quote from a VP of Nintendo of America saying nearly that). This doesn't sound like a big jump especially when you compare it to Sony's claims that the PS3 is 35 times more powerful than the PS2. But if you consider that the Revolution is being designed to be optimal for Standard Definition television sets, which has a max resolution of 640x480pixels compared to High Definition Televisions which range from 1280x720 to 1920x1080pixels the discrepancy of power seems much less important. The amount of pixels that need to be processed by the Revolution will be 33% of that necessary to display the lowest HDTV resolution.
This all just supports the rhetoric that Nintendo has been feeding the media for the past year or so. They aren't focusing on designing a supercomputer, they want to make a machine that will entice many people to play games by offering a very unique gaming experience at reasonable price. I am quite a bit dissappointed, but as I mentioned I have a fundamental difference from our pal Matty boy in the way I view the video game industry. Just because Nintendo's new video game system will be lacking in the eye candy department compared to Sony and M$ I will continue to stick it out with them, because it proves to me that they are more devoted to the game portion of "video gaming".
1 comment:
Very best site. Keep working. Will return in the near future.
»
Post a Comment