blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
When you try to make a devkit with a yet-unreleased gpu, you normally go for the closest available (target-) performance equivalent, along with a similar architecture, if one exists. If you were nintendo, and you had started off with a R700, you'd keep an R700 in the devkits and try to mimic the target performance, until the day you had your target part available. Moving up to Evergreen or Tahiti in the devkit would make no sense for you.The point was that either console started with one gpu design throughout the dev kits. They went from sud-6800, 6800 to 7800 to RSX. Xbox 360 did the same.
He was making the point that they started with r700 beacuase it was the only one out at that time and it didnt make sense to move to evergreen or another core because it already a custom part. His understanding of what makes it a custom part is wayyy out there I believe.
Taking your RSX example, sony were moving up with the stock parts in the devkit as each new one was resembling closer the target in both performance and architecture.
Microsoft did nothing of the sorts - they were sitting with a x1900 up until they had functional Xenos in their hands, despite the fact X1900 had little architectural similarities with Xenos. In this regards, MS did what nintendo are doing today - they stayed with the performance buddy until they had their custom silicon ready.
When you say designing a "custom part" what do you think it means? Are you saying they started with a r700 core and then completely redesign it and made it completely custom? That is why you think they spent 4-5 year designing this gpu?
And really it doesn matter, amd VLIW designs is what I been basing every statement on. You have performance per watt for every different VLIW design. It really doesnt change much until you get into GCN. Even using GCN performance per watt put us a little over 550 gflops at 35w or double the raw performance of ps360. That is best case for whatever crazy theory you go by even if they spend 10 more year "designing" this gpu.
Perhaps you missed my reply to you in the other thread, but the 'best case' E6760 you were discussing there (i.e. 576GFLOPs, 35W) is a Turks part.