Emotion Engine 2??? 260 million + transistors?

[JayPatel]

Wow

 

[LordSandMan]

hehe, Sony getting ready to beat on MS?????

 

[Wuming]

sweeeeeet!

 

[Finality]

Yes you can tell its a lot of hot air.


<< wide 2,000-bit internal buses >>



Last I checked they where still struggling with 256 bit busses.

 

[Insane3D]

I would like to hear Ben Skywalker's opinion on this....Ben?

 

[JayPatel]

could be effective 2000 bits..much like matrox's ballyhhoed dual bus tech....dual 128 bit interfaces running effectively like 256. who knows....

 

[dawks]

The device contains 256-Mbit of on-chip embedded DRAM..

Seems like alot.. I'd figgure the transitor count would be much higher too.

 

[BurntKooshie]

That is a lot, but when you think about it, with 287.5 mill transistors, 256 million are being taken up by DRAM alone. Videochips uses cache's just like CPU's, though I don't know about them in detail. The previous chip had 42.7 mill transistors. If we discount any DRAM on the previous chip (I assume it had no DRAM), then this new chip actually has fewer transistors dedicated to the core. I assume this means that the current Graphics Synthesizer had onchip cache's which are larger than those employed by this newer version.

I'm skeptical of the 2,000 bit wide interface too....it's pretty standard to increase width in powers of two....Maybe they rounded down from 2,048? Anyway, that doesn't sound too far fetched, if we use *gasp* bitboys who claim that they are ready to scale to 1024bit wide interfaces when need be (they're &quot;at&quot; 512 now)....so I think it's feasible that a larger design team with more real experience could do something like that. Because the DRAM is onchip, the width can be wide without the same cost impact that external busses cause at the same width.

So if it is &quot;fake 2,048 width&quot;, then that'd be 1024 * 2 like matrox?

 

[miniMUNCH]

In a word...mis-represented specs. And with that fill-rate, they'll probably undershoot the market at the time of actual implementation. Current chip's in design for earily 2002 are aiming higher.

 

[JayPatel]

i dont think this chip is gonna be used for gaming...its probably gonna replace the 16 Emotion Engines and 16 graphics systhesizers that are being used in the CGI rendering workstation the GSCube..if true then this is gonna be a good piece of hardware....look at typical professional workstation graphics cards..theyve all got pathetic fillrates...but pump out awesome imagery

 

[BFG10K]

Those specs seem insanely high. Maybe this card will be released in 2 years time or something.

 

[LeeBear]

Sony already uses a 2560 bit wide DRAM bus on the graphics synthesizer of the Playstation 2, so the specs for the new chip has exactly the same bandwidth 48 GB/s as the current graphics synth. The only real difference I see is the increase in embedded DRAM from 32 Mbit to 256 Mbit, which I think will be tremendously beneficial because that was one of the week points of the PS2, lack of video memory.

-LeeBear

 

[Soccerman]

btw, WTF is with that rather uncommon number Sony gave for that memory bus width for the PSX2??

I mean 2560 isn't a normal computer number.. you have 1024, 2048, but not 2560..

it's funny though, they show that number off like it's something extra(they can make it that fast, because it's embedded DRAM), but it's really required quite badly in order to keep that system from choking to deat quickly, take a look at Firingsquads technical overview of the PSX2 to find out why I think this way..

 

[Fardringle]

Actually, 2560 is a somewhat logical step...1024*2=2048, 1024*2.5=2560...