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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
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.
The Tegra 2's GPU is NOT that hot.
Hell it can't even play H.264 Main/High profile video at 720p. The Mali-400 has no problem with this.
(I own a Tegra2 device and an Exynos device with a Mali-400 - in almost any workload, the Exynos utterly dominates the Tegra2 despite the CPU only being clocked 20% higher.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Doesn't Tegra have major heat issues that stop it from being in anything smaller than tablets?
Both Sony and Nintendo considered using it for their new consoles but the heat and power usage apparently made them turn away from it.
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.
4K is only four times the pixels as standard 1080p video. There is still no way for realtime rendering of Pixar-like stuff in the near future, be it on mobiles or desktops.
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!
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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!
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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?
The more important limitation is not human perception, it's cost. Remember the models in Quake? Remember the mods? A fairly competent 3D artist could knock out something like the Quake guy in a day or two. Now compare that to a modern game. A single tree in a modern FPS has more complexity than every model on a Quake level combined. That all translates to vastly more artist time, which translates to greater expense. For a Pixar film, you can spend a huge amount developing and texturing every model, but for a game the upper limit is a lot lower.
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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.