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ARM Claims PS3-Like Graphics On Upcoming Mobile GPU
l_bratch writes, quoting from the BBC, "'British computer chip designer ARM has unveiled its latest graphics processing unit (GPU) for mobile devices. The Mali-T658 offers up to ten times the performance of its predecessor." ARM claims that its latest GPU, which will be ready in around two years, will have graphics performance akin to the PlayStation 3. If this has acceptable power consumption for a mobile device, could we be seeing ultra-low power hardware in high-end PCs and consoles soon?"
In two years, PS3-like graphics will be insufficient for the desktop and console market, and we will be in the same situation.
Sure, PS3-like graphics... except the PS3 is doing it at 1280x720 or 1920x1080. This will be pushing probably 20-40%% of the pixels.. and doing so in 2 years, while the PS3 hardware is 5 years old (to the day).
So, no, I don't think that a chipset that will, in 2013, do 20% of the job that 2006 hardware does will be making its way into high-end PCs and consoles soon.
A lot more information here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5077/arms-malit658-gpu-in-2013-up-to-10x-faster-than-mali400
The PS3 is 5 years old and based on even older graphics tech. Beating that on mobile is cool, but not surprising. The PS3 never was impressive, graphically, to PC users. Who had better than HD resolutions for years. Some console games are still limited to 720P. Oh, and people had 3D on PC like, 8 years ago (or more.) Sucked then, sucks now.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
The current gen Mali drives graphics that look like they come out of a PS1. If you look at the graph in Anandtech article you'll see that they mean 10x faster than the low end Mali, not what we have in the GS2. So that would mean the next gen part might be able to be like a PS2, though I think that's wildly overestimating performance.
nVidia is commited to releasing a new Tegra chip every year. The Tegra 3, which is already out is 5x faster than Tegra 2 (which beats the Mali 400 which is at 1/10th the speed of the GPU ARM announced). So basically, by the time this ARM CPU is released .. Tegra 5 will be out .. and going by the roadmap of how fast Tegra 5 will be .. it will run at least 5x times faster than ARM's chip.
I hope ARM prices this cheap dirt cheap .. so that sub $200 (off contract) phones can have it.
In 2 years time the PS3 will be 7 years old.
The PS2 was 7 years old in 2007. Were PS2 level graphics acceptable for "high end PCs and consoles" in 2007?
No? Then why would PS3 level be acceptable in 2013?
There was a story on CNN a few weeks ago that said that while PC sales are slowly increasing in the entire world, it's very tilted, and they are falling dramatically in the US, Canad, and Europe. The increase is coming from the developing world being able to afford computers as they fall in price.
The culture shift from desktop computing to mobile is happening in part because mobiles are becoming powerful enough to do most of the tasks that desktops used to do. OK, you'll always get a few neckbeards to say "But the cell phone can't run AutoSuperCadShop 390322.55!" But that misses the point. That's not what 99.9% of consumers DO with their computers. They play some games, including 3D games, they check their facebooks, they look at some news headlines, and so on. All that works fine on a device that they can fit in their pocket. For those times a keyboard is needed, a bluetooth keyboard will do just fine. And for those times a larger screen is needed, a wireless connection to the screen will work fine.
I don't know why people can't see this shift happening right in front of their eyes. Even the sales data bears it out now: mobile computing is on the upswing, and in the western world, PC sales are falling. It's a nice world: Instead of needing to lug around a desktop or even a netbook, you'll have the capability of a (say) 2009 vintage desktop in your shirtpocket in 2014. A 2009 desktop is nothing to sneeze at, and meets the needs of 99% of the population just fine. The rest will become a more expensive niche, but will still exist in some way.
It's a Star Trek Future.
When we have handhelds as powerful as the PS3 (the Vita is getting there), we'll have much more powerful PCs and a new generation of consoles.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Five years ago tomorrow the PS3 made it's debut, did you think that in the mean time everyone just sat back and basked in the glory of its infinite capabilities? Two years from now (if that pans out) will be 7 years since the commercialization of the Cell chip, so seeing a miniature version that uses dramatically less power is pretty much par for the course. Desktop chips that have similar (or more specific) capabilities are already available in many products. Remember, the first PS3 drew an amazing 200 watts at full load, and within 2 years that was more than cut in half. This is just more progress, and *promised* progress at that. Hey ARM, why not just say you will have a flying car in 2 years?
we went from "ARM can barely handle nintendo emulation (single core/500mhz/125mhz gpu)" to "ARM is competing with PS3(4 cores, 1.5ghz, 300+mhz multicore gpu)". In *3* years.
Are you comparing emulating an NES to running native games? An emulator has to contend with the entire game engine being written in bytecode, and it has to process graphics a scanline at a time so that games' raster effects (parallax scrolling, fixed position status bars, Pole Position/Street Fighter/NBA Jam floor warping, etc.) still work. A native game running on a 3D GPU doesn't need the bytecode interpreter overhead, and it can render one object at a time because it doesn't need raster effects.
The computational cost of filling a 5, 7 or 10 inch screen for a mobile device with a photo-realistic image is far smaller than doing the same for a twenty foot tall movie screen.
Even if your mobile device gets plugged into an HDTV, it's still nowhere near the same problem that Hollywood faces creating output that will be shown in theaters with basketball court sized screens with the front row ten feet away.
could we be seeing ultra-low power hardware in high-end PCs and consoles soon?
I thought that was the entire point of the Wii. Because the "sensor bar" (IR position reference emitter banks) needed to sit by the TV, the console's case needed to be small. This meant Nintendo couldn't use a CPU and GPU with a high TDP, so it stuck with what is essentially a 50% overclocked GameCube. I guess Nintendo is trying the same tactic with the Wii U: take a roughly Xbox 360-class CPU and GPU and take advantage of six years of process shrinks to get the TDP down so it'll fit in the same size case.
good points but we are also talking about things in the single digits for power consumption. I agree, die shrinkage and advances in designs give lots of power savings. Still, having PS3 like graphics on a handheld will be nice.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Is it a double precision SIMD FPU?
Both Sony and Nintendo considered using it for their new consoles but the heat and power usage apparently made them turn away from it.
And Nintendo ended up using something just as hot and power-hungry for the 3DS. As I understand it, the reason Nintendo ditched Tegra for the 3DS had everything to do with the fact that Tegra wouldn't work with an ARM9 core (ARMv5), and Nintendo needed something cycle-accurate to the ARM946E in order to play DS and DSi games without glitches.
In two years, PS3-like graphics will be insufficient for the desktop and console market, and we will be in the same situation.
Never underestimate the low-end. Imagine a dongle with an HDMI plug on one end that just plugs into a TV set, but inside it has a chip that can do PS3-level graphics, WiFi for downloading games, Bluetooth for controllers, and enough flash to cache them.
Most HDMI ports can provide 150mA at 5V, which is minimal for this sort of application, but within sight in the next several years.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
mobile computing is about 5-10 years behind desktop computing
And it always will be, unless somebody devises as way to provide 15A of power to a mobile device, and a way to dissipate that sort of heat.
Now, we may eventually reach a state where it just doesn't matter - everybody will have enough computing power on their phone to raytrace a 4K HD stream in realtime and they will reach a natural equilibrium where it just doesn't make sense to make faster chips for desktop computers. Or, we might see such great Internet pervasiveness that everybody just has thin-clients and computes on a CPU farm, but until either of those things happen, desktops will be faster than mobile devices.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I don't know much about ARM GPUs, but if these turn out to be significantly lower-powered than their counterparts, couldn't multi-gpu ARM boards be put to great use for GPGPU applications?
I think this will make a huge difference in mobile gaming because of screen size. Assuming that this thing outputs to 720p like the Nexus Galaxy, I think this will be a big thing.
While the PS3 graphics are old and crappy compared to what a modern PC can do, don't forget about screen size. Seeing 720p on a 40 inch screen is a lot different than seeing 720p on a 5 inch screen. The best example of this is fonts that look fine at 5 inches will look like crap expanded to 40 inches. Artifacts and jaggedness on 40 inch are going to be pretty minimal on a 5 inch. We are talking about shrinking by almost a factor of 10. At some point the quality of the output will exceed our eyes ability to notice the difference.
Of course this will do nothing to improve what the chip can render in terms of complex environments, smoke etc. But at 5 inches it is not hard to have too much on the screen.
FCEU runs well on a 200mhz Pentium. Shouldn't a 500mhz ARM do better?
Not necessarily. Compatibility demands have increased since the Nesticle days and even since the FCE Ultra 0.98 days, and users are less willing to put up with known emulation glitches in specific games than they used to be. The "new PPU" engine in FCEUX is slower, but its behavior is more accurate to that of the NES than the old PPU, and some games demand this accuracy. For example, the Final Fantasy orb effect, text boxes in Marble Madness, and certain things in Sid Meier's Pirates are all done with cycle-timed mid-scanline writes to the PPU's I/O ports. The English version of Castlevania 3 and later Koei games use an IC called "MMC5" that's almost as complex as the coprocessors used in some Super NES games.
It can't be, the lights work.
The PS3's GPU is based off a 7800. Nowadays, that's not very good, and most PS3 games upscale to 1080p anyway instead of rendering it at 1080p.
The only thing which really matters for ARM GPUs is how good they are against the best their rivals can put out there. If Imagination Tech, NVIDIA or Qualcomm chips have better price, performance and power requirements, then few companies will use ARM over their current chip providers (which is the case today). As for these claims; they are entirely believable and nothing special. Their competitors are all claiming similar things, ARM are just making more noise about it.
That PS3 graphics suck compared to many others. But, it's better than current mobile video accelerators.
It sucks how much android software lingers in phone memory for no damn reason (I'm looking at you, Google Android bloatware P.O.S. Market app). Every day at least once I go into Android Assistant to shut down a bunch of software that doesn't need to be running. There's a lot I love about Android, but it has a ways to go before it's ready for hardcore gamers.
That's the CPU. The PS3's video hardware is a modified GeForce 7800.
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Quake III was released in 1999. Quake III was ported to windows mobile in 2005. So mobile games are still about 7 years behind. When Quake III came out it was the best game ever, however now the bar has moved and it isn't good enough. By the time this chip comes out we will have next gen consoles that will do shader based antialiasing and horizon based ambient occulsion in most games. PS3 graphics will be noticeably dated (just look at how many PS3 games use no anti-alaising or texture filtering and run at less than 720P).