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Xbox 360 GPU A Vector Co-Processor?
Anyone Seen Thomas? writes "While Beyond3D's article on the ATI C1 (XENOS) graphics processor in the XBOX 360 gives you all you need to know about ATI's next generation hardware in terms of generating screen pixels, it also gives a big clue as to how it'll be useful for general purpose vector programming. XENOS is able to write data out of its unified memory architecture into system memory, and read it back again later. So with a large pool of powerful vector hardware available, does anyone fancy the idea of having a generalised , high-performance vector processor in their PC?. Read about that and the rest of XENOS." From the article: "Since XBOX 360's announcement and ATI's unleashing from the non disclosure agreements we've had the chance to not just chat with Robert Feldstein, VP of Engineering, but also Joe Cox, Director of Engineering overseeing the XBOX graphics design team, and two lead architects of the graphics processor, Clay Taylor and Mark Fowler. Here we hope to accurately impart a slightly deeper understanding of the XBOX 360 graphics processor, how it sits within the system, understand more about its operation as well as give some insights into the capabilities of the processor."
Not like Sony's current stance of producing nothing of substance, whilst slagging off the competition.
The only problem is that if the GPU has to use the same bus as the CPU in which case they'll have to compete with each other, potentially leading to bottlenecks and/or messy bus arbitration. Hopefully Microsoft will give the GPU direct access to the memory.
Performance-wise, it wouldn't be quite as good as having built-in memory on the GPU, but it will be a lot cheaper and have access to a lot of memory since the Xbox 360 is supposed to have 512 Mb of RAM.
Kind of funny how both ATI and Nvidea are pushed more by console graphics developement now days than anything else. At least something is fueling better technologies.
Does anyone else think Gran Turismo 4 looks actually better than Forza sports? Point being, the console world is always 50% hardware, 50% software.
I know that both ATI/Microsoft and Nvidia/Sony really want to 'hype' their technologies but is anyone out there actually delusional enough to think that any of the upcomming systems ( XBox 360/PS3/Revolution) will actually produce graphics that are dramatically different from any of the other systems?
To a certain extent I'm personally expecting very little in the way of technical progress in graphics and a far greater focus on artistic considerations. Let's face it, we're hitting a point where using 'brute-force' and dramatically increasing the geometry in your objects is not what will produce a better looking game; what will make a difference is well designed objects and a more populated environment.
Now, more technical power is needed to obtain these more populated environments and can help with designing better objects but there is a limitation on what is currently needed. I expect that, for the most part, if you could produce 4 times the geometry of the XBox (twice the geometry per object and twice as many objects on screen) and you can have every pixel calculated by a shader (which is aproximatley 4 times as complicated as one that can be run on the XBox) you will be meeting the requirements of almost every game made in the next generation. I expect that every one of the upcomming consoles surpasses these specifications.
At least according to the presentation at last year's Austin GDC. The PS3 was rumored to have 4 at this same presentation; Sony was putting a lot of stock and effort into making general purpose dedicated VPUs in all their hardware, does anyone know if they succeeded?
> The GPU also functions as the main memory controller
Cool.
What's next? A floppy controller in charge of CPU to CPU communications?
From TFA:
However, possibly one of the most immediate (without WGF2.0 for Windows being here) application for unified shaders is actually outside of the PC space and in mobile phone 3D graphics engines. Presently ATI are yet to produce a fully shader capable "Imageon" graphics processor for the handheld markets and are not expected to until 2006, however with the onus on minimal power utilisation in minimal die size in the handset space anything that mitigates wastage is going to be a welcome element, and with slightly less rigid specification targets to meet in the handheld arena a unified shader architecture may be the ideal approach when, inevitably, ATI choose to create shader enabled handset parts.
So does this mean that apple can rewrite vecLib to take advantage of future vector processors? With a fast enough interconnect (PCIe?) this would be a viable replacement for altivec.
"My life is a joke that no one gets"
Can someone explain to me what a vector processor is and what is it good for?
#####Free and Open Source Game Directory#####
Parent is a troll.
GT4 cars don't even have drivers.
Did you even read the article?
"Xenos's particular range of features are going into a closed box environment, hence the API can be tailored to expose all of the features of the chip, however on the PC space graphics processors really need to be tailored to the capabilities of the current DirectX release. This is where Xenos has an issue in that its features and capabilities are clearly beyond the current Shader Model 3.0 DirectX9 specification while it lacks features that are expected to be a requirement for WGF2.0"
It is not supporting "directX 10" assumed features that don't make sense in a console. Thats what it says. The idiot parent is making it look like MS is abandoning directX on xbox360.
Bad Troll
So, when the XBox uses PC parts people complain that it's just a PC, when it uses custom parts meant for embedded devices (e.g. consoles) everybody complains that MS is using cheap parts? What do you want, a 500$ chip? Would you pay 1000$ for a console?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Yea, occasionally I'd like one, but I'd rather it didn't take away from what my graphics card can do, wouldn't I ?
Like, maybe I'd like to have a generalized DSP chip like the one in my NeXT machine here, or one of these specialized DSP boards ?
But if you want a GPU that's targeted to supporting DirectX, I don't know if using it for a DSP is really the right idea. Maybe it is. Or maybe Intel's own vector processing capabilities could improve. Or maybe you could get an extra board and actually make use of those empty, fast PCI slots. Your call. TFA does a good job of pointing out that GPUs aren't exactly 'general purpose', and that's why the article contains :
So, what's the story even talking about here? Something that's possible except for Microsoft? Or something that's possible, in a completely different form? What's the point they're trying for?
XBOX 1 GPU was GeForce 3.5 chip for PC and was more powerful. Its only drawback was the cost.
What we want? To bitch about Microsoft.
Nobody is complaining that the parts are cheap. They're making the point that Microsofts consoles video card is using API software FAR removed from Microsofts proprietary DirectX stuff, which was originally created to be a unifying graphics architecture....