Nintendo 3DS GPU Revealed 133
An anonymous reader writes "The GPU for the Nintendo 3DS has just been revealed, and it's not made by Nvidia, ATI, or even Imagination Technologies. Instead, Nintendo has signed up Japanese startup Digital Media Professionals (DMP) in a deal that sees the company's PICA200 chip churning out the 3-D visuals. For the first time in Nintendo's history, the 3DS will feature a GPU with programmable shaders, rather than a fixed-function pipeline, meaning the 3DS is more graphically versatile than the Wii. Among the PICA200's features are 2x anti-aliasing, per-pixel lighting, subdivision primitives, and soft shadows. As well as featuring DMP's own 'Maestro' extensions, the PICA200 also fully supports OpenGL ES 1.1. The architecture supports four programmable vertex units and up to four pixel pipelines."
Old news is Old. Also, specs. (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a pdf of the specs for PICA200.
http://www.dmprof.com/release/leaflet_PICA200_en.pdf [dmprof.com]
Re:Same old Nintendo strategy (Score:3, Informative)
Note that the article summary is wrong: there is no pixel shader support in the PICA200 device (and neither is in OpenGLES 1.1), although the chip supports several marketspeak 'extensions' that somewhat allows you to hack a few selected shader-like features into the rendering pipeline.
That is also the case for the Playstation 3, and you can not deny it has pixel shader support.
Re:Interesting but non-conclusive (Score:3, Informative)
1/2 the framerate or 1/2 resolution is a significant overhead. You're getting 1/2 the performance.
PICA200 Technology demo video (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I hate to sound paranoid... (Score:2, Informative)
the Cortex can run ARM9 code with a pretty simple trap for the privilege instructions due to the huge similarities between ARM9, ARM11 and Cortex.
Also the Tegra2 has an ARM7 hidden in it already.
The lower end Tegra2 is $18 and can play video for about 10 hours on a 1200mAh battery. the 2W of the AP20 (the most power hungry of the Tegra2) is the peak, not the average.
The modifications would really to kill areas of the silicon that won't be used and put it in a reduced pin count package to help lower cost. These are not significant for a company that pushes millions of units worldwide.
1. where do you get your "3 hours of battery life" number? 2. where do you get your $600 number? 3. are you a licensed nvidia partner, or are you more of an armchair technologist?