Chipmakers Winning in Video Games : Increased capabilities of games driving processor performance

Electronic News, August 9, 1999 by Gregory C. Garry

Fun and games has turned out to be serious business for semiconductor vendors as they pursue a video game console market valued at millions of units and billions of dollars.

And the games market continues to grow steadily, intensifying the demand for the feature-rich microprocessors that serve as the engines for the latest generation offerings from companies like Sony and Nintendo.

"Once you get a design win in something like a Sony PlayStation, you are selling millions of units that are going to one customer," said Jack Quinn, president of Micrologic Research, a Phoenix-based market research firm.

For example, the 1997 worldwide game console market of 22.5 million units grew to 24.3 million units in 1998 and is expected to climb to 26.2 million units in 1999, according to Semico Research, another Phoenix-based market research firm.

The revenue portion of the game console market is starting to plateau, however, as console-based games start to reach maturity. In 1993, for instance, worldwide game console revenues were $6.3 billion, declining to $4.9 billion in 1998 and expected to remain basically flat in 1999 at $4.8 billion. And the price of the embedded processor that goes into each game runs between $20 and $25, according to Semico.

What is fueling the demand for more sophisticated games and therefore more powerful processors?

"It's what I have at home, which is a nine-year-old moving at warp speed," said Tony Massimini, chief of technology at Semico.

In addition, with each successive generation of games, the graphics content is becoming much more intense and impressive, placing more emphasis on the underlying electronics support, according to Massimini.

"In terms of graphics power and processing, the games that kids are playing now on a PC, five years ago would have required a high-end workstation," he said, adding that in 1993, Nintendo was running its games on SGI workstations.

While console-based game products like the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo64 and the Sega DreamCast are the dominant form factors in the contemporary games scene, things will be different down the road, according to Semico's Massimini.

"The video games console as we know it today will evolve into something else," he said. "It will be a combination DVD player with a game and some sort of Internet capability."

Although he didn't provide a specific market share breakdown in terms of percentages, Massimini ranks the entire embedded world in the following order: Motorola's 68K processor family in first place; The MIPS processor family in second place; and the multisourced ARM family in third place, driven largely by the cell phone market segment.

MIPS has been particularly successful in the games market, supplying the processors for the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo64 since the early 1990s, although other vendors also have been pushing hard into the games market.

In fact, Nintendo's next-generation console will make use of the PowerPC processor, but Massimini believes that MIPS won't be adversely affected.

"They just keep on rolling. They've been concentrating on other things like handheld devices," he said.

Officials at MIPS Technologies, which achieved independence from SGI more than a year ago, point to the explosion in the popularity of 3D graphics in games as being a major growth driver for suppliers of processors.

"The hardware necessary to provide that 3D capability is driving a lot of the designs," said Mike Uhler, director of engineering for MIPS. Some of those designs are calling for wider data paths and higher frequencies but the mix of those elements is different depending on the design requirements of the particular game, he notes.

And there are other design changes that have taken place, separating the current crop of games from the next-generating offerings, according to Uhler. Current game designs don't require an extremely powerful CPU, with a fair amount of the processing capability being handled by a dedicated chip that performs the 3D graphics function, he explains.

But next-generation designs are making use of higher powered CPUs that can offload functions from dedicated chips, freeing those resources to perform other tasks, according to Uhler, who adds that the result has been higher quality audio and media performance.

Another trend has been in the direction of much higher integration, he said.

"There aren't that many discrete components in these boards any more," Uhler said.

With regard to the breadth of its fabrication and supply setup, MIPS remains unique in the processor world.

Approximately 10 years after its initial launch, MIPS retains semiconductor partnerships with NEC, Toshiba, LSI Logic, Integrated Device Technology, Phillips, NKK and Texas Instruments.

As far as process technology is concerned, the bulk of processors going in to the current crop of games is being fabricated in 0.25 micron but future designs will call for 0.18 micron, according to Uhler.

Despite the fact that console-based games make use of standard, wall-mounted power supplies, power consumption remains an issue for suppliers due primarily to cost considerations, according to Gideon Intrater, director of product marketing for MIPS Technologies