Evolution of CPUs & Memory in Video Game Consoles. Curtis Geiger & Matthew Meehan

Transcription

1 Evolution of CPUs & Memory in Video Game Consoles Curtis Geiger & Matthew Meehan

2 1 ST GENERATION Magnavox Odyssey first console, released 1972 No CPU or Memory entirely made up of transistors, resistors, and capacitors Pinouts from the game cards altered the configuration settings to set up other games Pong Created by Atari Incredibly popular arcade machine Also no CPU

3 2 ND GENERATION Atari 2600 released September 11 th, 1977 Popularized use of microprocessors & ROM cartridges CPU: MOS Technology MHz, 13 memory-address pins (cheaper version of 6502 that had 16 pins) Memory: 128B RAM, handles call stack & current state of game world Carts: 12 memory-address pins allowed for max size of 4KB Intellivision released 1980 by Mattel Electronics CPU: General Instruments CP1600 2MHz, eight 16-bit registers: general purpose (R0), data counters (R1-R3), looping (R4-R5), stack pointer (R6), and Program Counter (R7) Memory: 1456B RAM: 240x8-bit scratchpad memory, 352x16-bit system memory, and 512x8-bit graphics memory Carts: sizes between 4K-24KB (10-bit ROMs) Other consoles: Fairchild Channel F, Odyssey 2, Colecovision, Atari 5200

4 3 RD GENERATION Nintendo Famicom/NES released 1983 (Famicom JP) & 1985 (NES - NA) CPU: Ricoh 2A03 modified MOS Tech 6502 core 1.79MHz, 22 I/O registers for audio processing, memory access, & controller polling Memory 2KB on-board RAM, Picture Processing Unit (PPU) w/ 2KB VRAM, 256B Object Attribute Memory (OAM) for position, color, & tile indices of up to 64 on-screen sprites, & 28B palette RAM for background & sprite color Carts: separate RAM between 8K-1MB (most common b/t 128K-384KB) Sega Master System released 1985 (JP) & 1986 (NA) CPU: Zilog Z80A by NEC fully backwards-compatible with Intel MHz, 8-bit processor Memory: 8KB ROM, 8KB RAM, 16KB VRAM Carts: support for both Mega Cartridges, with up to 4MB game code storage, and Sega Cards, with up to 256KB storage Other consoles: Atari 7800, Atari XEGS

5 4 TH GENERATION Super Famicom/SNES released 1990 (SF JP) & 1991 (SNES NA) CPU: Ricoh 5A22 based on MOS Tech 6502 family Two address buses 24-bit Bus A, for general access, & 8-bit Bus B, for audio & picture 3.58MHz for access to Bus B & internal registers, 2.68M-3.58MHz for Bus A Memory: 16MB on-board RAM Carts: Capable of MB ROM-1MB RAM mapping. More commonly 4MB mapping. Games ranged from 256KB-6MB ROM size Sega Mega Drive/Genesis released 1988 (MD JP) & 1989 (GEN NA) CPU: Motorola (main), Zilog Z80 (sub-processor for sound & Sega Master System backwards-compatibility) MHz, 32-bit registers & internal data bus, 16-bit ALU & external data bus Memory: 72KB RAM, 64KB VRAM can display 61 out of 512 available colors at once Carts: 4MB max, with exception of carts made for Street Fighter II (5MB) Other consoles: TurboGrafx-16, Sega CD, NeoGeo

6 5 TH GENERATION Sony Playstation released 1994 (JP) & 1995 (NA) CPU: R3000 used MIPS 1 ISA. Smaller ISA than competitors due to smaller amount of instructions and limited addressing modes. Utilizes 5-stage pipelining to reach speeds of 1 instruction per cycle 33.87MHz Memory: 2MB RAM, 1MB VRAM No more cartridges popularized usage of CD-ROMs! 660MB max storage, 300KB/s throughput at double speed, 128KB data buffer Nintendo 64 released June 1996 (JP) & Sept 1996 (NA) CPU: NEC VR4300 cheaper derivative of MIPS Technology VR4300i, 24KB L1 Cache (16KB instructions, 8KB data) Memory: 4MB RDRAM (Rambus dynamic RAM proprietary) + 4MB Expansion Pak Carts: between 4M 64MB storage. Less storage & higher cost than CD-ROMs Other consoles: Sega Saturn, Nintendo Virtual Boy, 3DO, Atari Jaguar

7 6 TH GENERATION Sony Playstation 2 released March 2000 (JP) & Oct 2000 (NA) CPU: MIPS R5900 derivative of R5000, with more instructions included in ISA. CPU Core unit is a RISC processor based on both MIPS III & IV ISAs, as well as custom Sony ISA 299MHz, 128-bit SIMD functionality (perform one task on multiple data points) Memory: 32MB RDRAM (similar to N64), 4MB VRAM DVDs: single-layer DVD5 (4.7GB) & double-layer DVD9 (8.5GB) Nintendo Gamecube released Sept 2001 (JP) & Nov 2001 (NA) CPU: IBM PowerPC Gekko built from IBM s PPC 750XCe processor to work alongside Nintendo s Flipper graphics processor 486MHz, 32KB L1 cache, 256KB L2 cache Memory: 24MB (2x12) main RAM, 3MB VRAM, 16MB DRAM for audio & DVD drive minidvd: 1.5GB capacity Other consoles: Microsoft Xbox, Sega Dreamcast

8 7 TH GENERATION Nintendo Wii released 2006 (Worldwide) CPU: IBM PowerPC Broadway successor to Gekko, uses 20% less power and is 50% faster at 729MHz (up from ~486MHz) Memory: 88MB main memory, 3MB embedded GPU texture memory & framebuffer DVDs: single-layer (4.7GB) & double-layer (8.54GB) Sony Playstation 3 released 2006 (Worldwide) CPU: Cell microprocessor made by Sony, Toshiba, & IBM. Made of 3.2GHz Power Processing Element a PowerPC based, multithreaded core with 23 stage pipeline Memory: 256MB system DRAM & 256MB VRAM Blu-ray discs: 25GB per layer, double-layer (50GB) being most common Other console: Xbox 360

9 8 TH GENERATION Sony Playstation 4 released 2013 (NA) & 2014 (JP) CPU: Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) by AMD containing a CPU made of two quad-core AMD Jaguar processors (total of 8 cores) and a GPU unit that can theoretically produce results of 1.84 TFLOPS 1.6GHz, along with secondary chips used for uploading, downloading, & online play Memory: 8GB GDDR5 (main), 256MB DDR3 (background) Blu-ray: same as PS3 Nintendo Switch released March 3, 2017 (Worldwide) CPU: Octa-core (4xARM Cortex-A57, each with 80KB L1 cache & up to 2MB L2 cache; 4xARM Cortex-A53, each with up to 64KB L1 cache and up to 2MB L2 cache). Cores work in ARM s big.little architecture 1.02GHz Memory: 4GB Low-Power DDR, used for mobile computing Carts: 32GB capacity, growing to 64GB in 2019 Other consoles: Nintendo Wii U, Microsoft Xbox One