7 hours ago, Wavicle said:
[1] Source? Is this referring to MMIO "ports"?
[2] As the kid who would be the first (and ultimately only) one on the block whose parents got him a Plus/4 instead of the C64 he wanted, I remember that the defining characteristic of those chips was that they sucked. 120 colors couldn't make up for the fact that it had no sprites and sad audio consisting of two channels of square waves. (Or one channel could be noise instead... yay?)
[3] The copper and blitter lived on Agnus, the DMA controller, not Denise, the video chip. Much of what the blitter was needed for (compositing rectangular graphics with transparency on top of a playfield) can be accomplished less expensively on CX16 using VERA's sprites and those won't steal CPU cycles while doing it. In no case could the Amigas of the 80s display 8 bit plane graphics or sprites that were more than 16 pixels wide (and I think limited to 4 colors, or 16 colors when grouped together). Hence why I say VERA is "competitive" with.
(Side note: since the "world's first" (Nvidia's phrasing) "graphical processing unit" (GeForce 256, 1999), that term has always referred to a chip that contains a pixel pipeline capable of doing, at a minimum, texture and lighting. Hardware bit blitters were common in mid and high end SVGA cards (e.g. ET4000/W32) from the early 90s and didn't use that moniker. I don't think anyone has been seriously asking for a texture or shader engine in VERA.)
7 hours ago, picosecond said:
Yup. That matches my guess exactly. I did not see anyone from the design team confirm this but I can't think of any other parts that match.
The 16Kx16 SPRAM has just one address port so I would call it single-port and leave it at that. But that is picking nits. I think we both agree that it is definitely not "truly dual-ported". Hence the request for citations...
The only source is multiple mentions by a member of the design team, back in the morass of the FB site. Perhaps that was a holdover from the first generation design with the Gameduino, which used 32K(x9bits) of Block RAM rather than SPRAM, where Block RAM has a read port and a write port and can be synthesized to be fully dual ported if the data paths are half or less than the width of each of those ports (at least, I've seen that mentioned regarding the Xilinx and Altera families, I don't know about Lattice but IIRC the Gameduino was on an obsolete Xilinx FPGA).
If it's SPRAM, then I wouldn't imagine that synthesis is possible.
[2] The target is to be an 8bit "dream machine" so sprite and tile graphics with lots of sprites and 80 column text mode is a core design feature. Even if TED chips were available, they wouldn't have ticked that box. They just make the point that having sound and video on a single chip is something that was done in various 8bit systems. Having a VGA resolution rowbuffer display with sprites and tiles may make it "better" in the sense of designing sprite based games than something like the IBM CGA/VGA display cards, but those were designed for business applications and games were designed to work with them as best they could. I think the overview of the likely performance of the video system made it clear it has a serious claim to qualify for an 8bit "Dream Machine", but it falls well short of best in class against the 16/32bit systems.
So, tl;dr: if "like a 16/32bit system" means "like the best of the graphical oriented 16/32bit systems", I don't buy it, and if "like a 16/32bit" system means "overlapping the low end 16/32bit systems although focusing on the features relied on most heavily in 8bit systems", that's just a different way of phrasing "8bit Dream Machine".
[3] The point is that the processing is offloaded from the CPU, which is starting the technological evolution toward the GPU. Where in that evolution the term "GPU" is conventionally applied is a pure semantic quibble ... the best of the 16/32 video systems had already started down the path toward framebuffer oriented dedicated graphical processing and the CX16 video system steadfastly insists on relying on the 8bit CPU doing all of the processing.
