Maes
I like big butts!
Posts: 8664
Registered: 07-06 |
The problem is hardly miniaturization, even in the case of the original gameboys vs the Mega Drive or the SNES. If they REALLY wanted, they could have packed the same ICs in the same motherboard space, even with the manufacturing processes of the day: the CPUs used were already hyper-mature (both having over a decade of successful commercial adoption) and in the case of the Gameboy, even the Z80 was not a full-size IC like the one on e.g. an Amstrad CPC, but a smaller package, lower-power version.
No siree, the problem was (and still is) power consumption. Laptops are an easy example of this, since they can run the same software as desktop computers and have comparable powers: fire up any intensive game on a laptop with full setting, no power-saving compromises features etc. and you'll see how much the battery will last: you will get a hefty 50-90W power pull that will drain any laptop battery in an hour or so.
Other examples: Android phones. Playing Angry Birds on a binge really overheats it (forcing the 600 MHz ARM CPU to work overtime) and drains a fully charged battery in 2-3 hours max, compared to a standby time of days. That's because those games are NOT designed to optimize power consumption: they just use whatever the phone can dish out, if requested, unlike how actual targeted games for portable consoles are designed.
Other types of portable devices like e.g. cell phones media players etc. manage to keep power consumption down by using specialized ASICs and DSPs that can do e.g. MPEG4 decoding or GSM processing very efficiently, but if you were to use a general purpose CPU for those same tasks, you can't do them without at least a 3-5 W TDP processor, no matter if you use ARM, Atom, Coldfire or whatnot.
If they REALLY wanted, they could produce portable versions of the Wii or even PS3, for what regards size, but then you'd also have to walk around with a waist-strapped camera battery pack to get any reasonable gaming time from them. Serious portable console manufacturers and developers do take these limitations into account, and the hardware and the software itself is carefully built around them, rather than ignoring them. This is also the reason why portable versions of even e.g. a Megadrive or classic NES are not particularly successful as portable devices: it's near impossible to implement power saving features on them like e.g. variable clock speeds: they have to work full power all the time, and their CPUs doesn't even have a power-saving IDLE state.
FOr smartphones, there's a dual standard: Android third-party apps don't seem to give a shit about battery efficiency (except for the core OS) , while e.g. Apple is particularly anal about the power efficiency aspect of iPod/iPhone/iPad apps, and such behavior is grounds for rejection during their app approval process.
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04-08-11 21:31 
