

ARM touts PlayStation 3 power in a mobile GPU - bane
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/11/arm-touts-playstation-3-power-in-a-mobile-gpu.ars

======
wallflower
To put this in perspective, the original iPhone had Sega Dreamcast level
graphics processing.

~~~
st3fan
Craaaaaaaazy taxi!

------
emehrkay
I miss the raw numbers of 'polygons per second.' Interesting that ps3 does
250-300, I've never read that anywhere, I guess it matters less and less over
time, but it is still interesting.

------
Avshalom
Five years from now companies will be bragging that their phones can go as
long as several minutes between charges,

~~~
wavephorm
If Koomey's Law holds then 5 years from now the batteries should last even
longer because of efficiency gains.

[http://www.economicsofinformation.com/2011/09/is-koomeys-
law...](http://www.economicsofinformation.com/2011/09/is-koomeys-law-
eclipsing-moores-law.html)

------
jfb
And? The PS3 design is what, seven years old at this point? I would be shocked
if some clever dick couldn't jam that many vector units onto a middling
processor and call it good, at this point.

The reason that, say, _Uncharted 3_ looks so great has very little to do with
any commonality with this ARM design and much more with sophisticated tooling
that is now available.

IOW: BFD.

~~~
ugh
Yeah, you are right. It’s totally not a big deal that tablets will soon be
able to compete head on with consoles. That totally doesn’t change anything at
all about the future of consoles.

There are new tablets every year. At the very least this might force Sony and
Microsoft to move faster.

~~~
aras_p
While I totally agree that the progress of mobile GPUs is amazing and
Sony/Microsoft should be scared... this comparison ("we have a GPU that's
almost as good in one particular area as PS3") is very much flawed.

The GPU in PS3 is probably it's weakest part. Most of games that push the
hardware end up using a ton of SPUs to do work that a GPU would normally do.
Image postprocessing, deferred lighting, skinning, vertex transformations etc.
It will take a while until the mobile chips can host the power of PS3's SPUs!

Another big point is memory bandwidth. Even if ARM's new GPU could achieve
these vertex transformation rates in theory, I'd bet in practice it wouldn't
because of much, _much_ more limited memory bandwidth on a mobile system
compared to a console. And bandwidth will not rise fast there, since memory
subsystem is one of larger energy consumers.

