arm

Yesterday I reported about a new mobile chip from ARM that claimed to bring “Xbox360 to mobile devices”.  Well, I’ve done some more research and I think I know what they’re really saying.

The original articles (PCworld & MobileNewsDirect), contain some comments by Remi Pedersen, graphics product manager at ARM:

“Performance-wise, it runs like the original Xbox, but feature-wise it looks like an Xbox 360 title,”

But, let’s look at some hard numbers:

ChipPixels/sTriangles/sClock
New ARM Chip275Million16Million300Mhz
ATI Xenos “C1” (Xbox 360)4000Million500Million500Mhz
NVidia NV21 (Xbox)932Million29Million233Mhz


From this, it really does seem that the new ARM chip is closer to the NV21 used in the original XBox, so why the comparison to the XBox 360?  Well, the XBox 360 used some new technology from ATI such as shader-arrays instead of shader-pipelines, and multi-tile display rendering so that the multiple cores each rendered a separate segment of the display to improve framerates.  My guess is that’s what he’s claiming: Architecturally speaking, it’s got some of the same features used in the Xenos chip, but performance-wise it’s closer to the original XBox.

Guess that means it’s gonna be a while longer before we can play Halo2 on our iPhones.

References:

  • Xenos figures from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenos_%28graphics_chip%29
  • NV2A figures from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox#Technical_specifications