iPhone goes Quad-Core?

[Zandog]

http://startupmeme.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/iphone-gaming.jpg
One of the most interesting rumors I’ve been tracking here at Macworld Expo in San Francisco surrounds the mysterious four-core iPhone. While the current iPhone has (roughly) the processing power of the Sony PSP, an upgraded four core iPhone would slaughter pretty much every portable gaming platform on the market. The other part of the story is firmware 3.0, which is said to be required on the iPhone “quad.”

Imagination Technologies will announce the PowerVR SGX543 at CES tomorrow (TGDaily), it’s the firm’s first multi-core capable GPU technology and Apple could have access to it.

Judging how well games like Brothers In Arms - Hour of Heroes and Armageddon Squadron look and play on the current iPhone I think that Nintendo and Sony are probably quite worried about about the next iPhone hardware platform.

Or are they?

Source (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=2745)

[Altrez]

I hope it happens.. Its times like this that I am so glad I picked the iDevices to develop for :)

-Altrez

[Frand]

I'd rank this rumor under the "pretty ridiculous" column.

The requirements for additional memory bandwidth to feed a multi-core CPU and a matching GPU, and the resulting power drain on a device that's already struggling with its battery life make this highly unlikely.

Maybe the tech could be used in the rumored 9" iPod or a device of similar class, but for a phone that tech sounds overkill to say the least.

[applesauce25r624]

it'll be cool and all, but i won't be willing to buy the 3rd gen ipod touch

99% of the games that i play don't require mega processing power

[1337brian]

I for one welcome our new quad core overlords... ;)
Seriously though, it would be a big drain on the battery I'd imagine, but I don't mind and the thought of a firmware 3.0 makes my pants feel happy...

[wildmatt]

i'd rank this rumor under the "pretty ridiculous" column.

The requirements for additional memory bandwidth to feed a multi-core cpu and a matching gpu, and the resulting power drain on a device that's already struggling with its battery life make this highly unlikely.

Maybe the tech could be used in the rumored 9" ipod or a device of similar class, but for a phone that tech sounds overkill to say the least.

qft!

[yourofl10]

im all for it :) its just better :)

[AppStoreGamer]

Good luck with that one....especially since APPLE COMPUTERS don't even have quad-cores in them (except for the Mac Pro)

It would be cool to see even a dual core in the new iphones (although somewhat useless because you can't multi-task and it would drain the battery)

My guess is that Apple will be improving the CUP and RAM in their iPhones and iPod Touches slowly and won't tell anybody about it. This is already happening with the iPod Touch 2G!

Plus, you'd have all the iphones and ipods obsolete basically if apple immediately jumps to a much higher CUP or RAM amount...and I can't see apple doing that from a business stand-point (even if it would be cool).

[PoV]

The talked about switch from PowerVR MBX to SGX would make all the difference for me. The CPU I barely tax as is, and I'm not even using SIMD instructions yet. A mere doubling or tripling of the fill rate would do wonders.

[Frand]

Could we stop with the nonsense of MBX being 'more powerful' than the PSP? Was Dreamcast 'more powerful' than PS2?

[Herp]

I'd rank this rumor under the "pretty ridiculous" column.

The requirements for additional memory bandwidth to feed a multi-core CPU and a matching GPU, and the resulting power drain on a device that's already struggling with its battery life make this highly unlikely.

Maybe the tech could be used in the rumored 9" iPod or a device of similar class, but for a phone that tech sounds overkill to say the least.

I'm with you on this. :)

[Frand]

@spiffyone

We already discussed this topic in the iPhone vs. PSP thread, in which I wrote rather extensively (http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=37959&postcount=57) the reasons why expecting miracles from an MBX in the iPhone is questionable.

Not only that, but repeating rose-tinted statements of iPhone's alleged superiority creates false expectations on the consumers' side which is a disservice to the platform and hurts the developers.

[PoV]

Yeah, really the only "effect" we have over the PSP is normal maps, plus we have more screen to fill. You can bring the iPhone to it's knees with a few full-screen layers of alpha ops. Not a 2D powerhouse the MBX.

[Frand]

The Hidden Surface Algorithm

Now this is the really interesting part of PVRSG. This part will actually determine what polygon is determining the color of a certain pixel, here PVRSG will determine what is visible and what not. The saving of bandwidth is done here.

The saving of bandwidth is done here....

So TBDR, with HSR, with PVRTC = effectively limiting the hit vis a vis bandwidth. Bandwidth is limited; I know that. That's an issue with the devices. But the MBX-lite makes more effective (key word) use of said bandwidth than Sony's PSP GPU does in that system. That's what I'm getting at. No one said it reduces the need for bandwidth; rather, I clearly stated that it effectively and efficiently uses the limited bandwidth by avoiding such large hits.


If you read my reply again, I pointed out that MBX actually consumes more of the available memory bandwidth on the iPhone than a traditional solution would.

In a traditional solution, you send the polygon data over the system bus to the dedicated graphics card once per frame, and the polys are rendered as soon as they're sent. The graphics card has ample bandwidth to read textures from its local memory, and write the resulting frames into a frame buffer (also in local memory). Bandwidth is "lost" because pretty much all polys in the view frustum get rendered, no matter if visible or not.

MBX in a discrete solution would be more efficient than a traditional system because hidden polys are not rendered, overdraw is reduced and therefore similar performance could theoretically be achieved with cheaper hardware (slower memory or narrower data buses).

However, MBX in the iPhone is not a discrete solution, instead everything goes through the system bus:

a) Writing the scene buffer for sorting(note, all polys in the scene written to a buffer per frame)
b) Texture reads
c) Tile buffers to be rendered
d) Frame buffer writes
e) Audio data
f) All other game data

Again, the hidden surface removal is a good compromise and results in nice performance from a (relatively) low fill-rate device. But on top of fill-rate constraints that limit the use of transparency, there's also the bandwidth budget that must be balanced between all scene data. Therefore your frame-rate will suffer if you, for example, use too detailed textures or have too high bit-rate in your MP3 music.

And as a sore spot, MBX really would shine with anti-aliasing. However, for reasons undisclosed, iPhone does not support the AA functionality of the MBX.