Renesas Announces "Dreamcast On A Chip"

October 7th, 2004, 08:15 Posted By: DCEmu_Newsposter

ExtremeTech reports that Renesas Technology has taken many of the technologies used in the Sega Dreamcast game console and combined them into a single core.[br][br]Officials from Japan's Renesas, which assumed control over the development of the SH processor from ST Microelectronics on Sept. 28, announced the SH3707 embedded processor at the Fall Processor Forum here today. The SH3707 combines both an advanced SuperH core and a PowerVR graphics core, the components found in the original Dreamcast. [br][br]Specifically, the Dreamcast console contained a 200-MHz Hitachi SH4 with the capability to perform 360 million instructions per second (MIPS) and 1.4 million megaflops, or floating-point operations per second. The Dreamcast also contained an NEC PowerVR2 graphics chip.[br][br]The new SH3707 uses a faster 540 MIPS/2.1 gigaflops engine, with a 64-bit interface to memory. The core also contains a PowerVR MBX chip, a core that Imagination Technologies has licensed to Intel and Texas Instruments, among others. [br][br]According to Miyazaki, the target specification for the platform is to achieve up to 1024 x 768 resolution, 10 million to 13 million vertices or 5 million to 6 million triangles per second, with up to 20 percent translucency per scene – in other words, anticipating a game where some of the polygons would be enhanced with transparency effects. That would place the SH3707 at somewhat over twice the performance of the Dreamcast, which could handle up to 3 million triangles per second. The SH3707 also has the capability of processing MPEG-1, -2, and -4 video and eight-channel PCM/ADCPM audio.[br][br]The SH3707 will ship in the first quarter of 2005, Miyazaki said.

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