Tendo City

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050923-5344.html

Quote:You've all seen the curious Nintendo Revolution controller, but what about the Revolution console itself? No official information has been released, and we don't really expect to see it soon, but it's Friday, so a little rumor-mongering is in order.

A Factor 5 employee who goes by the name "Han Solo" claims to know the Revolution's specs, and has leaked them (middle of page 3). Why listen to some guy trapped in 1977? Señor Solo, as I'm sure he's known to his Spanish-speaking friends, proved worth listening to when he nearly nailed the Xbox 360 stats before the official details came out. That said, we can't treat this as reliable information, but it may prove to be good fodder for a Friday evening console war. Or maybe, just maybe, Nintento and Sony fans will join hands and sing songs about the merits of a market with more than one player.

If you're the kind of person who hates rumors, then... why are you still reading? OK, with that out of the way, here we go.

The brains of the console are rumored to be a single dual-threaded IBM "custom" PowerPC 2.5 GHz CPU, with 256 KB L1 cache and 1 MB of L2 cache (L3 cache is rumored). The system will also sport a Physical Processing Chip (PPU) with 32MB of dedicated RAM, while the CPU itself will saddled up next to 512MB of system RAM. The custom ATI GPU solution is rumored to consist of a RN520 600MHz core, backed with 256MB of RAM and "32 parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines." While the output will theoretically be capable of putting out 1080p resolution (higher even, at 2048x1268), Solo says that HD support has not yet been decided (which fits with Nintendo's own comments).

I'm not particularly inclined to deeply assess how such a configuration would stack up to the Xbox 360 or the PS3, but Solo wrote that he thinks it "would be on par with Xbox360, though PS3 could have an edge in the CPU area. In the GPU area the Revolution beats PS3, and technically would match Xbox 360."

Nintendo may have the right idea. As publishers demand more and more games go cross-platform, a single-core system that's easy on developers may be the best way to ensure plenty of cross-platform support, without burning too much money on console architecture that may only be used for exclusive games. While we expect to see exclusive titles for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, most titles will be cross-platform, and will not necessarily take advantage of the multi-core optimizations for the Xbox 360, or Sony's Cell architecture. Keep in mind that Gabe Newell recently said that the Xbox's CPU performs like a 1.7GHz P3 on unoptimized code.

Perhaps I was preparing myself for a letdown, or something truly abysmal, but these specs don't look too shabby to me. Of course, specs alone can't define how fun a console is or how developer-friendly the various tools will be. However, for a company that seems to really want to downplay polygon counts as a way to measure a console, these specs aren't exactly anything to apologize for.

Hannibal has a few things to say with regards to the assessment made by Solo, so stop by Carthage, part of our new Staff.Ars section, for additional comments later today.

http://arstechnica.com/staff/carthage.ar.../9/23/1348

Quote:Hardware: On the (possibly) leaked Revolution specs

I'm just going to go through these specs selectively a little at a time and comment on them. I'm also just going to pretend for the moment that these are the actual specs, which they may very well not be. If they turn out to be made-up specs, then we'll all have a good laugh at whoever posted them originally and move on with our lives. Finally, please forgive any incoherence on my part, because I'm still recovering from the flu and I'm also a bit distracted (see below).

1 IBM Custom PowerPC 2.5 GHz with 256 KB L1 cache and 1 MB of L2 cache (an L3 cache is rumored). It’s Dual Threaded.

256KB is a very large L1 cache by most standards, and I think there are probably some peculiar things going on with it that will be revealed in time. For instance, assumption is that it's not symmetric, but that more of the L1 is I-cache than D-cache. This fits with what IBM did on the 970 (64K I-cache/32K D-cache), and it makes sense in a console setting where the D-cache is polluted very rapidly by streaming data. As for other peculiarities, all of the IBM-designed console chips do odd an innovative things with cache memory (i.e. the SPE's "local store," and the Xenon's cache locking mechanism), so I would expect this to be the case also with Revolution.

As for the basic architecture of Revolution, I've said previously in forum comments that I think it will be the same architecture as the PPE on both the Xenon and the PS3. If the above specs are correct, however, then this assumption is incorrect. The PPE is fairly deeply pipelined, with is why Cell and Xenon will debut at 3.2GHz. Running the PPE at 2.5GHz would be suicidal, I think, because performance just wouldn't be that great. So that 2.5GHz number suggests something else, and it's pretty obvious what that "something else" would be.

Here's something that I've heard: when they were going back and forth with IBM over The Switch, Apple was offered the Revolution chip for use in their portables. This tidbit makes a lot of sense if the Revolution chip is a modified 970.

The theory that this is a modified 970 (with hyperthreading + a specialized L1) makes even more sense when you think about the Revolution's form factor. You could probably fit the current low-power 970FX comfortably into the Revolution's form factor at 2.5GHz. If you couple this with another block of specialized hardware (whatever this PPU thing is), either on the same die or in the same package, then the Revolution looks pretty nice from gamer's standpoint. Just as importantly, from a developer's standpoint this makes the Revolution your favorite next-gen console. In contrast to the exotic Xenon and Cell parts, the 970 is a fairly conventional CPU architecture that doesn't rely too heavily on multithreading for performance increases. This means that it will be much easier to develop for than either Microsoft's or Sony's consoles.

512 MB of 700 MHz 1T-SRAM

This is a lot of very, very fast and relatively expensive system memory. If that number is real, then this console is no joke. This would also guarantee that there are some unusual things going on with the aforementioned 256KB cache. If you're going to do a memory hierarchy that's this customized for low-latency graphics operation, then that means that developers will have a lot of fine-grained control over how each level is used. You don't want developers to waste any effort or performance by working around what they expect the cache to do automatically (as is normally the case nowadays), so you'll do like the Xenon and the Cell and give them a high level of control over the entire memory hierarchy from the cache down.

The big unknown here is this PPU thing. Is it just a bank of additional off-chip SIMD hardware, or is it something else?

In all, this changes my perspective on the Revolution. When originally heard of the device's form factor, I was pretty down on its performance possibilities because I assumed that it would be going with the Cell/Xenon PPU as a CPU. However, the recent release of a laptop-worthy 970 and the possibility that some derivative of that will go into the Revolution changes the picture and makes the chip look more competitive performance-wise. It also makes it more developer-friendly, and that counts for quite a bit right now.

As far as Revolution's performance relative to the other two consoles, if the specs are true and what I've said above about the architecture is correct, then it's not at all far-fetched to say that it will initially perform on-par with the Xbox 360 and better than the PS3, despite having less hardware to go around. This is because the developer learning curve, and hence the game performance curve, will be less steep and will level off quickly. I'd expect the other two consoles to surpass it eventually, though. You can't break the laws of physics, and you can't get something for nothing: the MS and Sony consoles will be have more execution hardware and draw more power, so when (or if) developers learn to take advantage of all that hardware then the Revolution will lose its edge.

So those are my initial thoughts, and they're subject to change. In fact, I'm someone who usually takes a long time to form a stable opinion so don't hold me too tightly to anything I say here in the journal. (This is the "rough draft" of my news and article coverage on the main site, remember.) If I think of something else to say or get more information, I'll post it later.

Could be...

The only thing Nintendo has officially said is a rough number lower than the competition's rough numbers. It was a number meant to say how many times more powerful it was than their old system. Nintendo has always been conservitive when giving numbers that don't have much meaning, much more so than the competition. So, it's to be expected they would be on even footing with the competition. I will say this, if Nintendo's console is less powerful, all that means is the 3rd party games will all be limited by Nintendo's system instead of Sony's (assuming this isn't something that would actually dissuade 3rd parties).

Anyway, all very interesting, and the source is apparently one who has given accurate information before. Nothing more to say about it than that.

I will say nothing more has been mentioned about the writable storage medium or possible USB support. I'm interested in that. Combined, both things would mean Nintendo might get a dull MMORPG for people to swarm on the console over.

Yes, the big questions, I think, aren't the power of the system -- it'll be what it is -- but the storage medium used (will games come on DVDs, or some special think that holds less (a BAD IDEA!), primarially. Availability of additional hard storage (a hard drive would be very nice...) is also an important question, though it doesn't look likely. Memory cards are one thing, but the costs for getting much space out of those things is high, higher than the price of a harddrive... and there are a lot more uses for such things than MMORPGs. :)

I know :D, I was just picking the worst possible example I could think of.

As for the game's media. It seems fairly clear from the physical size that it would be able to hold something pretty much the same as a DVD. The question is if they are going up to something like blueray.

I'm just worried that Nintendo, in its (noble) search for a non-piratable format (or rather, a format that minimizes piracy), will make something like the Gamecube disks -- not in size, but in "its a special format" -- that won't hold as much as a DVD can, much less a Blu-Ray... and that would be bad. Developers want more space.

What would cause the space to suddely shrink like that? When the disks are this size, basically all they could do is alter the wavelength of light the laser and disk uses. Infrared is CD, anything shifted further down would either make it less than CD capacity or just plain not work. DVDs use red light, anything shifted higher would allow for higher capacity (for example, blue ray) or just not work. Any encription scheme wouldn't do a thing. They could have a standard TOC that says the disk has this much data and doesn't even map out all the actual data, but that's been done before and it can be overcome.

So, any exclusive format they use, I really can't see how it would reduce the capacity.

Nintendo never said that it's power would be less than that of their competitors, what they said was it will be "2-3 times more powerful than the GC" which can mean a lot of things. People took it to mean that the Rev will be underpowered. Compare MGS3 on the PS2 and MGS4 on the PS3, there is a noticeable difference of course but is it really 10X better?

No.

Quote:So, any exclusive format they use, I really can't see how it would reduce the capacity.

I hope this is so...

Didn't they say something about using regular DVDs?

I posted these specs weeks ago and LL said they seemed over the top and unrealistic.