Gents,
My two cents about graphics controllers:
I'm skeptical about the "five cos." claim. Graphics processors are reaching unlimited processing power now. I strongly question sony's choice of direct rambus memory as too expensive.
Several years ago #9 visual technology intro'd an 128 bit controller. This gave them huge parralell processing power internally. The problem became getting on/off chip. There are essentially several seprate memory spaces that get integrated into their video RAM, (VRAM). Z-buffer, texture mapping, and polygons, (could be off a little in my understanding).
The bandwidth to this VRAM was the bottleneck. Sony chose Rambus to give them something like 1.6Gbps throughput. This is hugely faster but will be expensive. The other state-of-the-art solution is to put the DRAM on the controller chip. Last year Micron technology bought Rendition, a RISC based controller co. The beauty to this solution is each of the memory spaces can be optimized to its purpose. i.e. it can be very wide and varying depth. The reason you couldn't do this with external memory is the i/o pins would put you into a huge, difficult and prohibitively expensive package.
Several cos. a pursuing this revolution and it is close at hand. Graphics and PC development houses have understood this for a long time. Processing power was disappearing as a bottleneck. The real trick must be to create a development platform for writing the games to take advantage of the fast textures and polygons... To manually write all this detail would be a show stopper.
Hopefully, gamefx's technology is a development engine...
Forgive my rambling and my pseudo-technical analysis. My question is why sony has to have some special processor when every PC is becoming near perfect... The answer has to do with the PC coming with a general purpose microcontroller and i/o that work with the graphics controller, (and the marketing benefit of proprietary technology). Sony needs to integrate these functions into their graphics engine. Hence LSI's announcement of having the i/o processor design win. All said and DONE, external Rambus, although fast, is the wrong approach.
Tired,
Steve |
