Where this info coming from? I'm excited to hear the final specs of the 3ds. I really don't think it's going to be all that powerful (at least on par with a 3gs but not "better then wii" rumors we recently heard (if that info amounts to anything, it probably just means shaders). I though it was rumored to use PowerVR instead.
Engadget have a report on this. Apparently, it's going to be more powerful than a Wii, which wouldn't be too difficult ;-)
Which it's source is an IGN article. I really don't buy it. Like I said, at most it possibly means it will have shaders (gcn/wii does not have programmable shaders). That would be odd (and awesome in my opinion, nobody seems to love mips anymore). This also would mean they would have to include a full DS hw (arm9 core) in the system for BC. That's going to add to the cost.
if the processors aren't that different their might be efficient emulation paths to be considered. that said, I m more inclined towards Power VR judging by the mobile market. Arm Cortex-8 seems a favourite choice amongst smarphones coupled with a PVR SGR530-40 chip.
nVidia isnt cheap, they probably wanted too much for each chip and nintendo told them to go F themselves. My money is on the OMAP4, more specifically the OMAP4430 with 720 MHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 MPCore, PowerVR SGX 540 GPU, C64x, DSP and ISP Thats the closest you can get to a GC in portable terms. EDIT: heres the power of the SGX: 28 MPolys/s, 500Mpx/s@200MHz, Max Memory Band (GB/s) 4.2GB/s OpenGL 2.0 and up to DirectX 10.1 Shader Model 4.1 So in theory it could be twice as powerful as the GC, like between that generation and the current one. Considering there are DS emulators for PSP wouldnt it be possible to make software-BC on the 3DS?
I'm not sure it would go a Cortex A9. I'm betting on an A8 (even the new iphone uses an A8 & a lower gen SGX). This thing needs to be $200 (and nintendo tends to not sell things at a loss) Unless things changed, last I remember the only DS emu was simply a cheap port that ran on an interpreter (not recompiler). I've had this debate with the author of the GBA emu for PSP. He personally think's it's not possible. I think it's possible but only if you HLE the Arm7 (since devs can't write custom code for the arm7). Yet this is assuming the cpu is DS clock and not DSi.
And judging by how Fermi went... "Dude, look at those graphics!" "Dude, my hands melted!" "High five!" "No can do!"
AFAIK the A4 in the new iphone and ipad uses a SGX535 which is more than enough (actually those specs for the 540 need to be doubled since thats how powerful it is, more in line with a Xbox). Ditto in price, but then again nintendo has been going against apple recently, and if they can sell a Touch for $200 with the same SGX than the ipad and still turn a profit, that means nintendo can sell it for say $150 at cost. At that price point it would utterly destroy the PSP, and eat through the Touch's sales. Maybe nintendo will do a DSiware/virtual-console where you can download DS games that were specially modified to run with the 3DS. It would suck, but it would still be BC and hey a lot of people with N64 games still buys the VC versions.
