According to wikipedia, the GPU in the XBox 360 puts out 240 GFLOPS. The CPU is harder to nail down, but it seems to have a peak around 115 GFLOPS.
The iPad 3 has a CPU that, from what I hear, has a peak capacity of 1.5 GFLOPS. The SGX 543MP2 in the new iPad 3 has 4 cores and does 6.4 GFLOPS per core, per 200 MHz. If we assume the 4 cores are clocks at 600 Mhz, that would mean the GPU output would be, in theory, 77.6 GFLOPS.
In short, whatever Carmack was thinking or testing, he sure wasn't hitting the peak performance of the Xbox - the console is still leagues ahead of the mobile CPUs and GPUs, and it's 7 years old.
I've seen that claim. There is a youtube video where linpack on iOS gets 800 MFLOPS. Linpack for android gets 70 Mflops for a comparably clocked ARM. My desktop gets 40 GFLOPS (hence the 1000x - or three orders of magnitude at least). My video cards are rated at over 1 TFLOP dpfp each. My laptop can do about 25 GFLOPS. Perhaps linpack for iOS is more representative of what the hardware can do, but it still doesn't hold a candle to a desktop/laptop.
That's because smart phones are basically 5 year old PC's with small screens.
Try 10 year old PCs. I have a Core 2 Quad here that's pretty much 5 years old and is still 5x faster than any phone in the geekbench data. Linpack is 1000x slower on any ARM than it is on a current x86 too.
Obviously the PC market as a whole can drop, while the enthusiast segment within it can grow. Notice how I stated $1000 per year, but the articles themselves didn't - I obviously mis-remembered that particular statistic. It pretty obvious there is a large enthusiast market - look at how newegg, ncix, memoryexpress, etc have all been expanding. The reason should be obvious: There is not replacement for enthusiast class PCs. Mobile devices aren't even in the same league performance-wise, and never will be, it's physics.. There also haven't been any AAA titles on mobile. Will there be? Who knows.
I'm still wondering why there are so many people that really want to see a segment they aren't a part of die off.
There seem to be plenty of S3's in their database that still beat the iP5. There are dual and quad core variants of the S3. Though it doesn't matter because it seems the S3 is actually still faster according to the current, real data on their site.
That is only if you distribute you game via microsoft's channels, and use their services like XBLA or GFWL. You are certainly free to develop in XNA and sell a game in another channel, such as Steam, or even off a website.
The upgrade treadmill is driven by the 50+ million and growing hardcore gamer and enthusiasts out there who spend $1k per year or more on their PC hobby. They're not going away. Desktop PCs are still going to be around for many years yet. It will likely to continue to get cheaper too.
Some of us also don't really mind microsoft, and actually like some of their stuff. I do like their dev tools myself. But atm MS's biggest positive feature is that it's not Apple.
XNA is for commercial indie game development. If you're a large company, I don't think you're disqualified. I guess MS makes it's money by successful games getting into the xbox store.
There's always C#+XNA+monogame for writing games. C# and mono targets all platforms.
Granted, none of these require VS, but at least there are solutions developers can turn to get their code everywhere. C# is a good language with good features. VS is a good IDE. Also people seem to think that phones will one day have the capabilities of the desktop for games. There's a lot of hardcore gamers out there, and you don't see them flocking to these little mobile devices. You never will, either, since current desktops are still 1000 times more powerful than current mobile devices in both CPU and GPU. The gamers that spend a lot of money on games and related stuff use desktops. They are a niche and always have been, and are growing. I'd rather release a title for them than hope to be the next angry birds in the very noisy mobile environment.
Express products are free, and VS 12 just came out. Also, you can write a game, for example in XNA and compile to android/iOS with monogame. C# is a decent language, and mono has a native compiler that generates good code. Also, Win8 is going to be $40 for the next several months. There's also that bizspark thing...
It's probably easier just to get VS to use a custom build step and call gcc/g++/clang/icc directly in an msys or cygwin installation than it would be to put the pragmas in. Not sure what the real issue is there. The IDE isn't really coupled to the compiler. Debugging is a different issue, but there seem to be some solutions for that.
You can if you use XNA because CodePlex has a porting framework called Monogame under active development that uses mono to target iOS. Obviously can also just write basic apps using the Mono framework too, even within VS.
Yes, porting to WP8 is a PITA from C++ or Obj-C, however those who have used C#+mono, HaXe, and eventually Flash will probably be fine.... sooner or later.
So most of the time, the processor is idle. The rest of the time, it's doing processing 1000x faster than an ARM CPU. Given that current mobile CPUs use somewhere around 60-70W under full load, this bodes well as the x86 processors are doing a lot more work for only about 10x the load power draw. When idle, the cpus draw far less.
Actually, I find the integrated GPU interesting - not for graphics, but for additional GPGPU power. Those things are fully OpenCL/DX11.1 compliant, so you can probably run some fluid simulation or n-body on them while at the same time doing some different crunching on the CPU, all being rendered extra pretty by a powerful discrete GPU.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet, just keep your vodka in the freezer and drink it straight.
According to wikipedia, the GPU in the XBox 360 puts out 240 GFLOPS. The CPU is harder to nail down, but it seems to have a peak around 115 GFLOPS.
The iPad 3 has a CPU that, from what I hear, has a peak capacity of 1.5 GFLOPS. The SGX 543MP2 in the new iPad 3 has 4 cores and does 6.4 GFLOPS per core, per 200 MHz. If we assume the 4 cores are clocks at 600 Mhz, that would mean the GPU output would be, in theory, 77.6 GFLOPS.
In short, whatever Carmack was thinking or testing, he sure wasn't hitting the peak performance of the Xbox - the console is still leagues ahead of the mobile CPUs and GPUs, and it's 7 years old.
I've seen that claim. There is a youtube video where linpack on iOS gets 800 MFLOPS. Linpack for android gets 70 Mflops for a comparably clocked ARM. My desktop gets 40 GFLOPS (hence the 1000x - or three orders of magnitude at least). My video cards are rated at over 1 TFLOP dpfp each. My laptop can do about 25 GFLOPS. Perhaps linpack for iOS is more representative of what the hardware can do, but it still doesn't hold a candle to a desktop/laptop.
That's because smart phones are basically 5 year old PC's with small screens.
Try 10 year old PCs. I have a Core 2 Quad here that's pretty much 5 years old and is still 5x faster than any phone in the geekbench data. Linpack is 1000x slower on any ARM than it is on a current x86 too.
Obviously the PC market as a whole can drop, while the enthusiast segment within it can grow. Notice how I stated $1000 per year, but the articles themselves didn't - I obviously mis-remembered that particular statistic. It pretty obvious there is a large enthusiast market - look at how newegg, ncix, memoryexpress, etc have all been expanding. The reason should be obvious: There is not replacement for enthusiast class PCs. Mobile devices aren't even in the same league performance-wise, and never will be, it's physics.. There also haven't been any AAA titles on mobile. Will there be? Who knows. I'm still wondering why there are so many people that really want to see a segment they aren't a part of die off.
Enthusiasts will command less relative market share, but their absolute market size will grow significantly
A repost with the absolute size.
Actually, it's not.
Higher clocks, yes, but just 2 cores. The S4 is a dual core chip.
There seem to be plenty of S3's in their database that still beat the iP5. There are dual and quad core variants of the S3. Though it doesn't matter because it seems the S3 is actually still faster according to the current, real data on their site.
That is only if you distribute you game via microsoft's channels, and use their services like XBLA or GFWL. You are certainly free to develop in XNA and sell a game in another channel, such as Steam, or even off a website.
The upgrade treadmill is driven by the 50+ million and growing hardcore gamer and enthusiasts out there who spend $1k per year or more on their PC hobby. They're not going away. Desktop PCs are still going to be around for many years yet. It will likely to continue to get cheaper too.
Some of us also don't really mind microsoft, and actually like some of their stuff. I do like their dev tools myself. But atm MS's biggest positive feature is that it's not Apple.
XNA is for commercial indie game development. If you're a large company, I don't think you're disqualified. I guess MS makes it's money by successful games getting into the xbox store.
Yes, .NET is propreitary. XNA, however, has been ported to mono (monogame). It's pretty trivial to get an XNA game compiled for Linux/OSX/Android/iOS.
There's always C#+XNA+monogame for writing games. C# and mono targets all platforms.
Granted, none of these require VS, but at least there are solutions developers can turn to get their code everywhere. C# is a good language with good features. VS is a good IDE. Also people seem to think that phones will one day have the capabilities of the desktop for games. There's a lot of hardcore gamers out there, and you don't see them flocking to these little mobile devices. You never will, either, since current desktops are still 1000 times more powerful than current mobile devices in both CPU and GPU. The gamers that spend a lot of money on games and related stuff use desktops. They are a niche and always have been, and are growing. I'd rather release a title for them than hope to be the next angry birds in the very noisy mobile environment.
No. You're FUCKED without compatibility.
You want a walled garden? That's iOS and Apple.
This sounds very contradictory to me...
XNA seems plenty alive on W8/WP8.
Express products are free, and VS 12 just came out. Also, you can write a game, for example in XNA and compile to android/iOS with monogame. C# is a decent language, and mono has a native compiler that generates good code. Also, Win8 is going to be $40 for the next several months. There's also that bizspark thing...
It's probably easier just to get VS to use a custom build step and call gcc/g++/clang/icc directly in an msys or cygwin installation than it would be to put the pragmas in. Not sure what the real issue is there. The IDE isn't really coupled to the compiler. Debugging is a different issue, but there seem to be some solutions for that.
Also, you can compile to Android, to answer your question properly.
You can if you use XNA because CodePlex has a porting framework called Monogame under active development that uses mono to target iOS. Obviously can also just write basic apps using the Mono framework too, even within VS.
Yes, porting to WP8 is a PITA from C++ or Obj-C, however those who have used C#+mono, HaXe, and eventually Flash will probably be fine.... sooner or later.
So most of the time, the processor is idle. The rest of the time, it's doing processing 1000x faster than an ARM CPU. Given that current mobile CPUs use somewhere around 60-70W under full load, this bodes well as the x86 processors are doing a lot more work for only about 10x the load power draw. When idle, the cpus draw far less.
Perhaps you're talking about medfield. I'm talking about i7's.
Actually, I find the integrated GPU interesting - not for graphics, but for additional GPGPU power. Those things are fully OpenCL/DX11.1 compliant, so you can probably run some fluid simulation or n-body on them while at the same time doing some different crunching on the CPU, all being rendered extra pretty by a powerful discrete GPU.