Game chips drive technology

Electronic News, Jan 19, 1998 by Jim DeTar

Mountain View, Calif.Embedded applications used to mean you would find lower performance processors inside, the hand-me-downs from the workstation and PC markets. For example, back when Donkey Kong and Pacman were the most advanced games around, just about any old processor could run the system.

Today's home game machines however--like other emerging consumer applications such as digital video disc (DVD) players--are increasingly sophisticated. They include detailed 3-D rendering and stereo 3-D audio. As a result, game machines have emerged as both technology and volume unit drivers for embedded processors.

Two chip vendors, Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI)'s MIPS subsidiary and Hitachi, between them control most of the market for game processors. MIPS sells its 32- and 64-bit RISC processors to two of the big three game machine companies: Nintendo, which last year took the market by storm with its Nintendo-64 system based on the 64-bit MIPS RISC architecture, and Sony Playstation.

Hitachi is partners with the third of the trio, Sega Saturn, which currently uses two 30MHz, 32-bit Hitachi SH-2s. Hitachi is currently rolling out a higher performance, dual-bus version of its SH architecture though, the SH-4, a two-issue superscalar RISC MPU with 64-bit external data bus and on-chip floating point hardware.

Clarion was among the most recent companies to sign up for Hitachi's SH architecture, announcing at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that it will use the SH-3 in Microsoft Windows CE-based auto PC and palm PC platforms.

What Used To Be

Derek Meyer, SGI/MIPS director of international marketing and sales, com- mented, "It used to be that embedded applications used aftermarket technology, older generation technology or lower performance versions designed for other applications.

"What has happened is the use of microprocessors in consumer applications has changed rather significantly, from simply providing system control like a 4- and 8-bit microcontroller to actually doing the processing itself, things like video and graphics and even signal processing."

The competition between MIPS and Hitachi has been fierce in recent years, paralleling the battle by the game systems developers for the eyeballs of game players. MIPS had a head start in terms of technology, having introduced 64-bit processors in the early '90s. However, Hitachi chased and nearly caught up with MIPS in terms of volume shipments in 1996 when the Sega Saturn was the hottest game on the market. For 1996, MIPS partners shipped 19.2 million units for a market share of 32.8 percent, and Hitachi shipped 18.3 million units for a market share of 31.3 percent.

That was a tremendous feat for Hitachi considering the competition. MIPS designs various versions of its architecture and licenses them to its partners which include: NEC, Integrated Device Technology (IDT), LSI Logic, Toshiba, QED, Philips Semiconductors and NKK. Mr. Meyer said, after a hiatus during which it wanted to keep the number of MIPS licensees down, the company is con- sidering adding additional MIPS partners.

Last year, according to projections from market researcher Andrew Allison, publisher of the Allison Report, the MIPS camp pulled away from Hitachi, left it standing still in fact as MIPS shipped an estimated 44 million units, for a 48.5 percent market share, while Hitachi shipped an estimated 20.6 million units, which equals a 22.7 percent market share. The question arises, did Hitachi/Sega miss an opportunity by not advancing the technology quickly enough to stay ahead of the competition.

Performance Level Critical

Mr. Meyer's counterpart at Hitachi, Ryuichi Izawa, product manager in Hitachi Semiconductor America's marketing and sales division, concurs with Mr. Meyer that performance is a critical element in gaming. "In the game world, high performance is becoming much more needed for things like interactive 3-D game machines. For example, with (games on) the Internet terminal that use 3-D, high performance becomes needed. That requirement for higher and higher per- formance becomes a necessity."

Ali Sebt, marketing manager for Hitachi's Systems Solutions Group, is straightforward in his assessment. "Games are a technology driver. From a pro- cess perspective, memory drives our process.

Memory is always one generation ahead of logic implementation. From an applications perspective, the PC and embedded markets, graphics seems to be the driver in terms of driving applications."

Today's game machines are actually ahead of advanced PCs in their use of memory. For example, Nintendo machines use a Rambus memory--albeit a watered-down version of Rambus--the same memory that Intel has given tentative endorsement too and which will probably appear in systems using the next-generation Merced microprocessor being co-developed by Intel and Hewlett-Packard for introduction within the next two years.

"There is no Rambus in a PC today. They use EDO RAM," for graphics applica- tions, Mr. Meyer noted. "In the future it looks like Intel may standardize on Rambus when Merced is announced at 800 MHz, with a 16-bit bus." The Rambus in today's games, however, isn't the same Rambus, he admitted. "The games guys couldn't compare with PCs. What Rambus has in Nintendo is a 500MHz, 8-bit ver- sion."