From: Jim Whitehead (ejw@cse.ucsc.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 29 2000 - 10:27:00 PST
It seems to me that custom game machines can be optimized for games in ways
that PCs cannot. For example, PC performance is severly limited by slow bus
speeds, and one of the reasons the bus speed is so slow is because it takes
the development of a new industry standard to increase the bus speed, so all
the cards, chipsets, motherboards, etc. work with it. A specialized game
machine can up its bus speed with impunity, since it doesn't have to worry
about compatibility.
- Jim
> Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> > A good gamer's PC will always outperform a dedicated game station,
> > albeit at a (much) higher price. Consider the release date (October
> > 2001 in the US). By that time a good gamer's machine will probably
> > have a CPU with ~2 GHz clock, 128 MBytes VRAM (possibly, some of it
> > embedded) and about half a gigabyte of 266 DDR SRAM.
> >
> Sony disagrees & is why they are launching their "Tool Creative
> Workstation"--a Linux
> based workstation based on the PSX architecture. Last time I posted
> this article I got hate mail from the CPU guys saying that there
> will never
> be a .01 micron fab of a chip in the next decade.
>
> "In the past, workstations and PCs had more power than
> home game consoles, so we could use them as development tools. But when
> the power [of Playstation 2] matches or exceeds their power, it becomes
> difficult to use them for development." Ken Kutaragi on the roadmap of
> the emotion engine and graphics synthesizer chips found in the EE Times.
>
> He should know what he's talking about, he has the benefit of a billion
> dollar investment in two new chip fab facilities.
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