Ideas: The new Amiga. Yes, it's inevitable!

[Hammer]

Modern graphics cards are designed to be optimal for typical 32-bit floating point (matrices and such) math.

ATI Radeon HD 38x0/48x0 and NV GeForce GT2x0 can do 64bit floating point math.

The Amiga graphics chips (preferably on a card) could optimize for real-time ray-tracing. It's not a fantasy by any means; it's already being done on the PC, but it's limited and requires massive hardware.

There's no need for "massive hardware" i.e. $199USD Radeon HD 4870 would do the trick. Soon to be released Radeon HD 48x0(RV770 LE) estimated to be ~$150 USD.

Refer to http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/
"Watch out, Larrabee: Radeon 4800 supports a 100% ray-traced pipeline".

Cheaper Radeon HD 46x0 has ~320 stream processors i.e. similar Radeon HD 38x0(RV670).

Realtime raytracing for Transformers movie trailers was done on Radeon HD 2900XT(R600).

[Hammer]

1: One of the above posters is right, the PS3 is somehow like a modern Amiga, it would just need its own OS. Lots of custom stuff in there, and using the CELL chip instead of a generic x86 or windows approach, and it’s a powerhouse leading in front of the other consoles (just my opinion )

That CELL chip fixes issues with RSX GPU (NV G7x) i.e. lack of Early-Z test, limited vertex shader resource, lack of concurrent operations pixel shader and textures. These are issues for the G7x GPUs.

NV G7x's issues was fixed in NV G8x GPU i.e. includes Early-Z, concurrent operations for shaders and textures,
maximise shader resource (unified shaders).

Like NV G8x GPUs, issues from G7x is not applicable for Xbox360’s GPU(Xenos).

[Hammer]

There's a SPARC based laptop from http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/products/notebooks.asp

[Hammer]

alexh wrote:

Steril707 wrote:
That's why i compared the PS3 of today to the Amiga of my childhood.

Always getting poor second rate ports of Xbox 360 titles which never use any of the PS3's custom hardware?

Just like the early Amiga days getting crappy Atari ST ports. Yeah I can see your point.

Unlike Atari ST, Xbox 360 includes a competent GPU design.

Lets hope as time goes on the programmers embrace the PS3 and actually use some of it's features.

On same token, PS3 RSX GPU is missing features from XBOX360's Xenos GPU e.g. tessellation unit, global illumination unit. These functional units reduce the work load on the available shader resource.

CELL's 6 SPUs can be brought over and fix RSX issues.
For example,
http://research.scea.com/ps3_deferred_shading.pdf
Unreal3(e.g. UT3) engine uses deferred shading btw.

Since PS3's RSX GPU is based on G7x family, refer to
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_37100.html
Refer to Page 30, Figure 22. Refer to above Sony link as a fix i.e. doing pixel shader work on 5 SPUs.

Notice the design issues with G7x GPU in relation to concurrent pixel shader and texture operations. By default, G7x’s pixel shader performance is reduced. This NVIDIA document shows the design issues with G7x GPU when compared to G8x GPU e.g. Early-Z, shader branch, vertex instancing, available vertex resource and 'etc'.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3128&p=3
Notice Geforce 7950 lost against Geforce 8600GTS in UT3.
RSX basically is an 8 ROP version G71 i.e. cut down version.

Again, 6 SPUs can be brought over and "fix" G7x's design issues e.g. vertex shader, pixel shader, tessellation, global illumination, Early-Z cull and 'etc'.  

X360's Xenos GPU doesn’t have same design issues as G7x.

It would be unwise to compare X360 vs PS3 as Amiga(GPU centric) vs Atari ST (CPU centric)