Pandora Press Reviews

[WizardStan]

Looks like a turd to me!

Who wants to bet this guy didn't even read the article?

If that's what his turds look like, he should probably really see a doctor. Gives new meaning to the term "shitting bricks". Except the Pandora is unbrickable

 

[juniorm33]

There's currently a media reports thread, or does this one serve a different purpose?


Edit
Sorry if it does as I've not read any of the thread.

 

[gruso]

Duddyroar didn't know about that thread, so he just posted his two in here. It could probably be merged at some point.

 

[juniorm33]

Cool Gurso, just wasn't sure as I hadn't read the thread, and never had/or will have time to at moment. (hopefully it never sounded rude )
I've already updated the media thread linking to this thread and his article.

 

[mali]

Duddyroar didn't know about that thread, so he just posted his two in here. It could probably be merged at some point.

Hehe, I'd actually prefer not to merge and instead suggest to post new in Media Reports. That dev bickering is not worth to be conserved and I don't know if I manage to move over a single first post. There seems to be something broken as it popped up an error the last time when I tried to move copyright discussion stuff.

edit:

I've already updated the media thread linking to this thread and his article.

Good to know

 

[Duddyroar]

I'm cool with the reviews being added to the other thread and this one being closed. Sorry, I didn't see the other thread!

Could someone add the Electric Pig review to that thread too, when they have chance?

 

[ari64]

For the vast majority of people the apps that will cause the most interest are the emulators. The Pandora is – hypothetically at least - capable of emulating every machine from the 128-bit Sega Dreamcast backwards.

What part of the Dreamcast was 128-bit?

 

[Exophase]

What part of the Dreamcast was 128-bit?

It had a few 4-way floating point SIMD operations for geometry processing, mainly a very fast dot product. Some aspect of the GPU might have been 128-bit as well. But you probably already knew this and we can probably both agree that the bit ratings marketing vendors gave their products were at best very inconsistent, at worst totally falsified. People rag on TurboGrafx-16 for not having a 16-bit CPU, but you could make a fairly compelling argument that SNES didn't either.

Fortunately Dreamcast was the last console to really openly claim bit-ness, and it was pretty subdued (and technically they only said "128-bit graphics", IIRC). Fanboys occasionally like to call newer systems 128-bit or 256-bit, but they just have this ridiculous idea that it doubles every generation. CPU bit-width, by any sane definition, wasn't a really great metric for game quality and really stopped being relevant after 32-bit. It's just too bad we got Jaguar, with its "do the math" campaigns at the forefront of their advertising strategy, and N64, which chose a 64-bit CPU solely for marketing purposes (IMO anyway, if you ask me the 64-bit capabilities were a waste of silicon, especially if the ALU was at all optimized for it)

 

[ari64]

What part of the Dreamcast was 128-bit?

It had a few 4-way floating point SIMD operations for geometry processing, mainly a very fast dot product. Some aspect of the GPU might have been 128-bit as well. But you probably already knew this and we can probably both agree that the bit ratings marketing vendors gave their products were at best very inconsistent, at worst totally falsified. People rag on TurboGrafx-16 for not having a 16-bit CPU, but you could make a fairly compelling argument that SNES didn't either.

If SIMD counts, then SSE2 is 128-bit also. SNES actually did have 16-bit registers, but an 8-bit data bus, so loading a 16-bit value took 2 cycles.

Fortunately Dreamcast was the last console to really openly claim bit-ness, and it was pretty subdued (and technically they only said "128-bit graphics", IIRC). Fanboys occasionally like to call newer systems 128-bit or 256-bit, but they just have this ridiculous idea that it doubles every generation. CPU bit-width, by any sane definition, wasn't a really great metric for game quality and really stopped being relevant after 32-bit. It's just too bad we got Jaguar, with its "do the math" campaigns at the forefront of their advertising strategy, and N64, which chose a 64-bit CPU solely for marketing purposes (IMO anyway, if you ask me the 64-bit capabilities were a waste of silicon, especially if the ALU was at all optimized for it)

Plenty of N64 games actually use the 64-bit instructions, though not all. I don't know if it would have been better to use the die area for something else. They could have gone with a larger L1 cache, I suppose.

 

[WizardStan]

People rag on TurboGrafx-16 for not having a 16-bit CPU, but you could make a fairly compelling argument that SNES didn't either.

The Intellivision was. I have nothing further to add to the conversation. I'll go stand in the corner and let the adults do the talking now

 

[SomeGuy99]

I have distinct memories of conversations which went something like the following:

"64bit! Woah! The Jaguar must be so awesome."

 

[trix]

I have distinct memories of conversations which went something like the following:

"64bit! Woah! The Jaguar must be so awesome."

lol as a kid I thought the same thing and got a Jaguar, then I decided the controllers had way too many buttons for anything except phone calls and took it back.

Worst. Controller. Ever.


- trix

 

[Exophase]

If SIMD counts, then SSE2 is 128-bit also. SNES actually did have 16-bit registers, but an 8-bit data bus, so loading a 16-bit value took 2 cycles.

Some people do use the SIMD to consider XBox 128-bit. But no one in their right mind considers Pentium 3 PCs to be 128-bit. It's just marketing no matter how you look at it, and I answered your question regarding what in Dreamcast is 128-bit.

Of course I know SNES has 16-bit registers, I hope you don't think I'm making comments like this without knowing anything about the architecture. Likewise, Genesis has 32-bit registers and 32-bit operations and no one considers it 32-bit. z80 also has 16-bit register pairs and a small number of 16-bit operations, and no one considers the plethora of z80 systems to be 16-bit.

I know ALU width is the deciding factor for why people consider SNES 16-bit and Genesis not 32-bit. However, if you think about it, SNES gains nothing by having a full 16-bit ALU, and may not even have one. Because of the accumulator based architecture all binary ALU operations require at least two bus accesses for the second operand, either in the form of an immediate from the instruction stream or from a memory load. So while performing these operations it makes more sense to stage them into two 8-bit ALU ops. Full 16-bit is only necessary for unary operations like inc, dec, and shifts, which don't strictly need to go through an ALU. So SNES's architecture isn't much differentiated from an 8-bit CPU with 16-bit macros. Macros are more efficient than no macros, but then Genesis has full 32-bit macro operations.

Plenty of N64 games actually use the 64-bit instructions, though not all. I don't know if it would have been better to use the die area for something else. They could have gone with a larger L1 cache, I suppose.

So because they're used it means they're necessarily useful? The same argument applies to doubles. How often do you think double precision is really necessary? A lot of people probably used them just because they can. Both are a waste of die space, IMO, and you can see that most other consoles have opted for 32-bit and single precision instead (for instance PSP which is also MIPS). PS2's CPU is 64-bit, but it has integer SIMD so the bulk of the execution resources for 64-bit aren't wasted.

Rather than L1 size (not sure how if there'd be room for that now) they should have gone with some L1 associativity, IMO. Direct mapped is pretty problematic, and by those cache sizes CPUs had long since abandoned it. The bump from direct to 2-way tends to make a really big difference.