There is a lot of misinformation floating around in this thread that I would like to rectify. There are a lot of things you guys are overlooking when considering Nintendo's future prospects. For one, it needs to be pointed out that it simply isn't enough to throw money at a problem and pray for a good outcome. Another is that all of you need to more closely scrutinize each company on a turn-by-turn basis. Just making electronics/graphics chips/computer chips does not mean they belong (or even want to belong) in the console industry.
In other words, CRAY? Fujitsu? Why!?!?
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)Dark-LInk(:
i think they should ally AN AMERICAN COMPANY(WEIRD) the great NVIDIA! then theyl have the best GRAPHICS for sure! what do ya think?
nVIDIA doesn't really seem to produce the type of GPU Nintendo will be looking for. Sure, Nintendo wants something competitive, but it also needs something cheap to mass-produce and cool. The Gamecube would be more like the Gamecooler if it had a big NV40 under the hood. Sure, nVIDIA could switch gears, but ATi seems to have a good handle on the type of technology Nintendo will want to employ.
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Darc Requiem:
As far as the CPU goes, since Sony has allied with IBM, I think Nintendo should look into Motorola. Motorola and IBM has partnered for the PowerPC standard for Mac's and when it comes to floating point calculations Motorola built PowerPCs with there AltiVec technology actually outperform IBM built PowerPC's.
IBM, Motorola, and Apple all have rights to the PowerPC instruction set. Furthermore, they all have the ability to use AltivVec technology. Be careful: Altivec is simply Apple's name for the SIMD instruction set. All three major players in the now debunk AIM consortium (Motorola, IBM, Apple) can use it anyway they want. IBM is currently producing a POWER4 derivative for the desktop market that actually uses Altivec too.
And if you think x86 chips don't have SIMD units... well... look at 3D Now! and SSE2 people.
Now, moving along, Motorola has been nothing but asstacular in the CPU field for years. It's a company that has, for a very long time, been near to cashing out of the CPU industry entirely. Look at the state of Apple hardware and you'll see exactly why Motorola isn't a good bet for high-powered CPUs. Altivec is the only thing the G4 has going for it. IBM has had much more success at scaling up its own G3 processors, as well as producing PowerPC chips with more bandwidth. A G4s _only_ advantage is when Altivec comes into play, and I imagine the only reason Apple has stuck with the G4 is because they put their eggs into the Altivec basket (for a variety of reasons). Otherwise, they would have jumped ship for higher clockspeed G3s from IBM.
Motorola has still yet to make the jump to a CPU capable of handling the increased bandwidth available with DDR memory. They have struggled with the move to a .13 die process when the rest of the market is gearing up for .09. Do we want them producing a chip for a game console? Motorola's market is small and embedded (as in, embedded chips) where power consumption and heat dissipation are far more serious issues than performance.
Not that Nintendo isn't also very, very concerned about heat and power.
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AMD chips are faster than Intel chips at the same clock speed but they aren't close to the speed of IBM and Motorola's Power PC chips.
Clock for clock? Clock for clock goes out the damn window when Intel is pimping twice as many clocks as its nearest competitor (hypothetical, not literally). What you are talking about is IPC (Instructions Per Cycle), and IBM and Motorola, despite popular belief, are not that far ahead of AMD. Intel isn't in the game, quite simply, because the P4 isn't designed to play the IPC game.. it's designed to play the scaling game. It's all about trade-offs, and being efficient as possible is not always the best way to go.
I mean, I bet even Nintendo could make a manufacture a really efficient 100 MHz processor... doesn't mean its usable in a console. A 2.0 GHz Athlon is going to beat a 1.4 GHz G4 no matter what way you look at it. Of course, in the console industry, really fast CPUs really aren't all that, so something with a high IPC, low heat requirements, low energy needs, and reasonable clock is probably what Nintendo is looking for.
Which will probably keep them in the PowerPC arena, though Intel is doing some interesting things. Look at their Centrino line of mobile chips for a good example.
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- CUBE:
ATi and NEC but not IBM anymore they are traitors it's better to have individual companies work on individual components and focus all their strengths to that like the ATI Flipper and IBM Gekko
Traitors? IBM is a large company... a billion dollar business unto itself. So large, in fact, that it actually competes WITH ITSELF in certain markets. Saying they are traitors is a bit much. They can do well for both Sony and Nintendo without hurting either of them in any way just to advance the other.
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)Dark-LInk(:
they should stick with IBM but pay them MORE millions to make the "GEKKO 2" 10x faster!!(and of course abit stronger then the PS3 "CELL")
ALSO they should get NVIDIA and pay them ALOT OF CASH to make a GRAPHICS chip at least 3x better then the GEFORCE4 ti 4200!then N wil have a very strong console!
And they would also be bankrupt. Being frugal can pay just as well as throwing money hand over fist at your next generation console. Look at some of the advantages of the Gamecube over the XBox. A lot of that is because Nintendo knows quite well that processing power and money does not mean market dominance. Remember? They learned that lesson the hard way.
Nintendo also couldn't afford to get in a money war with Microsoft. They would lose. Microsoft has over $30 billion in the bank. Nintendo is lucky to have 1/30 of that. Microsoft can afford to pay big, spend big, and lose big when Nintendo can't. It's all about the long term, and Microsoft's plan is to entrench themselves now at high cost so they can rake in even higher amounts later.
It's been their strategy all along and has been successful in every market they've ever tried to enter. (MSN, for example, and the browser wars. Not to mention productivity software and the desktop market.)
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rodtod:
what about Silicon Graphics? just a thought...I mean they did revolutionize the digital industry.
Silicon Graphics doesn't have the resources or the will to take on such a project these days. They're struggling to stay alive on Intel hardware and have pretty much given up chip production. They're no longer a contender.
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manunited4eva22:
The cell is taking up a lot of the team that has worked on the powerpc architecture I am sure, so you would be working with an already limited core of developers. IBM will probablly not be the next nintendo CPU
The team that has worked on the PowerPC architecture is still busily working on the PowerPC architecture. IBM is doing some really interesting things, such as ramping up a POWER4 derivative for the desktop market and producing the new POWER5 core that will release processors across several market segments (server, desktop, etc.) For IBM, PowerPC is just getting competitive, and it would make no sense for them to take away from their existing teams to throw developers on Cell.
Making a cheap PowerPC chip for Nintendo, however, would take very little in R&D but bring in a great deal of cash. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a scaled-down POWER4 or POWER5-based chip in Nintendo's next console. It worked quite well with the G3 after all. Hopefully power and heat issues will not be a problem by that point in time. People who tout the POWER4 often don't realize or just plain forget that it was never intended for the desktop to start with. It has extremely high heat output and power requirements while having a relatively low clock frequency--it is intended for the server space where these issues don't matter. It crunches numbers.
Things are changing though. Also, Nintendo won't need to spend the likes of what Sony is spending. They want their hardware to do very, very different things, and Sony is willing to invest heavily for a specialized chip that does everything it needs it to do. Nintendo no longer has that "everything and the kitchen sink" mentality.
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MikeHrusecky:
Moto could theoretically pick up where IBM left off on the Gekko more or less.
I don't think Motorola would, to be honest. They just don't have the fab in place to produce the type of high performance, high bandwidth chip (relatively speaking to their current offerings) that Nintendo would desire in the large quantities Nintendo would demand. IBM does. They just built a new fab geared towards the .09 process--something to watch.
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Christberg:
I could be wrong about that, but I remember reading a press release to that effect ages (as in years) ago. It'd be pretty hard for me to dig up, but at the least I'm pretty damn sure IBM has a very large amount of Motorola stock at the very least.
If they did they sold it. IBM most definitely does not own Motorola nor does it have much say in how the company is run. Otherwise, Motorola wouldn't be the dog it is now. As a company, the late-90s tech boom just wasn't there for Moto. They bled cash like a cow at a slaughterhouse. They're only now digging themselves out of the mess they were in.
Relations between IBM and Motorola cooled considerably after the AIM consortium fell apart. It seems like relations between Motorola and Apple are heading the same way, as rumor-has-it that Apple is looking to IBM for its high-end chips instead of Motorola's much anticipated but ever-late "G5". It's amazing that the PowerPC instruction set has kept from splintering between the two companies this long, but it's reassuring to see that both IBM and Motorola take efforts to keep PowerPC consolidated in their processors.
Topic: what partner should Nintendo get for builting the gc2 Processor? (Read 26433 times)
