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Sega had prototypes of a Dreamcast on a PCI card ages ago. But this isn't a Dreamcast on a chip at all! These writers don't know what they're talking about. If I take an Intel P4 1.5Ghz and an Nvidia Geforce 5600 mobile and shove them together, do I have an Xbox? No. This chip combines a newer SH chip with more punch than the SH4 variant in the DC, and a PVR MBX core, which is quite different from the Series 2 chip in the Dreamcast. MBX is designed through and through for mobile purposes, but it can be used for other things because it is small, and would be cheap and easy to embed in a chip and used for set-tops and whatnot. That's probably why they used it, it is a full 3D accelerator but it is very small and inexpensive.
That does not mean it is suited for mobile devices, since the CPU alone would probably eat too much power. For mobile applications, Renesas is combining SH-mobile chips (SH3-compatible IIRC, low power, decent performance) with the MBX cores. As far as replacing the Atomiswave goes, it's not a drop in replacement. But it wouldn't be hard to start making arcade games for it, and it'd probably be cheap as dirt to produce these things. |
