Hardware 3DS CPU

[TyRaNtM]

I think that the "64 mb in RAM of 3DS" are only for games, and another 64 mb will be for multitask.
Also, 3DS web browsing will be a lot better than DSi, because the hardware is better and we have a better wifi connection.
I wish flash support for web browsing, with a 3D support for Youtube the thing will be a beast.

 

[DiscostewSM]

Dual core is literally two processors on the same chip. Probably creates a little more heat, but it has an advantage of being on one chip, which saves space and money when dealing with motherboards.

Does Dual Core mean they share the Cache and stuff like that built in the CPU?
I'm not entirely sure. Rydian! Help me out pl0x

That would depend on the chip. Early designed multi-core chip more than likely had some shared resources, but I think chips nowadays have everything separate for each core along with some sort of network-on-chip to control where the data goes. Multi-core chips could also have an inter-core communication design, which would allow the cores to communicate with each other without having the limit of the motherboard in the way, but programs would need to be designed to take advantage of them.

 

[Rydian]

No, it's not going to be 64+64 for multitasking.


L2 cache isn't shared, but L3 is. When listing L2 they'll either tell you the total amount, or how much per core.

 

[bloodred]

the 3DS is going to be awesome!

 

[DiscostewSM]

No, it's not going to be 64+64 for multitasking.

We have no idea what Nintendo has planned to handle it, so we can't say they'll do one or the other without some hard proof. They could very well limit the amount of RAM developers could use in their games to allow this multi-tasking to work, dropping the supposed 64MB for games lower, like 48MB, or even 32MB, but having that limited amount of RAM would seem to counter what developers had said in interviews about the 3DS, that it had a lot of memory to work with. With computers, when memory has been depleted, it resorts to virtual memory via the hard drive, which really slows down performance. Unless you believe the 3DS will use the internal flash memory as virtual memory, anything ran while a game is in it's "frozen" state would be limited to what's left of the main RAM, fragmented or not. Did the DSi use it's internal flash memory as virtual memory when it's 16MB of RAM was filled?

 

[Rydian]

In order to page to the harddrive, you need an MMU. AFAIk the DSi doesn't have an MMU so if all 16 megs got filled it'd crash one way or another (just like the DS did with it's 4 megs of memory). Developers just need to be careful to not go over that amount.

With the 3DS it might have an MMU (thus multi-tasking), but I don't know how they'll handle paging.

I just know they're not going to include another 64MB of RAM that'll barely get used by normal people...

 

[pachura]

I think MMU is required when you want to use paging (virtual memory) on the fly, e.g. load a 20Gb photo in Photoshop and don't care which parts are held on the harddrive and which in main memory.

However, in 3DS, you don't really need all of that, and you don't need multitasking. So, Nintendo could have implemented a simpler technique: when user pushes the "Home" button, they could just freeze the game, dump the current console state to the SD card and switch to the browser, making full 64 MB available. In such case, there is no need for a true virtual memory, just to store and restore the current console state.

 

[Painguy]

I think MMU is required when you want to use paging (virtual memory) on the fly, e.g. load a 20Gb photo in Photoshop and don't care which parts are held on the harddrive and which in main memory.

However, in 3DS, you don't really need all of that, and you don't need multitasking. So, Nintendo could have implemented a simpler technique: when user pushes the "Home" button, they could just freeze the game, dump the current console state to the SD card and switch to the browser, making full 64 MB available. In such case, there is no need for a true virtual memory, just to store and restore the current console state.

that actually is possible, but then what if the user doesnt have an SD inserted? maybe there is some extra memory that serves that specific purpose? Also how long would it take to save the state of a game on the 3DS and then load it up. The video showed a pretty smooth transition between the two.

 

[DiscostewSM]

If there was no SD card to do it with, they'd either have to have a separate space to make a copy, or copy to the internal flash storage. Considering that memory can be fragmented, you'd have no idea which parts were really needed (sections of memory that had been used can contain garbage even when deallocated), so you'd have to make a full copy of the memory that the game was capable of using. Because that could be a good 60MB for a game and 4MB for the OS (this is just an example), there'd be no point in having that extra section for the copy when having 2 64MB sections could be used, one for the OS and games, and the other for everything else, with no copying. If it were to be copied to flash storage, then the read/write speed of the storage would need to be pretty quick to manage such a quick transition as the video shows.

I wonder if Nintendo would at least tell us about this (not actual specs, but how they can manage to do it).

 

[fgghjjkll]

If there was no SD card to do it with, they'd either have to have a separate space to make a copy, or copy to the internal flash storage. Considering that memory can be fragmented, you'd have no idea which parts were really needed (sections of memory that had been used can contain garbage even when deallocated), so you'd have to make a full copy of the memory that the game was capable of using. Because that could be a good 60MB for a game and 4MB for the OS (this is just an example), there'd be no point in having that extra section for the copy when having 2 64MB sections could be used, one for the OS and games, and the other for everything else, with no copying. If it were to be copied to flash storage, then the read/write speed of the storage would need to be pretty quick to manage such a quick transition as the video shows.

I wonder if Nintendo would at least tell us about this (not actual specs, but how they can manage to do it).

I heard nintendo are bundling 2GB SD cards with the Japanese 3DS'. Not sure about other region's 3DS'.

 

[Midna]

It was announced at the Japanese press conference that it'll come with a 2GB SD. But all that info was specifically pertaining to Japan. You should be able to expect it here too though.