Through the rise of casual and then social gaming, the slow demise of the traditional retail model, and the explosion of the high-end smartphone market, the videogame industry is in a state of flux. Which company, then, is the dominant force right now? Is it Nintendo? Apple? Activision? Zynga? In fact, it might be none of them. Arguably, it is a company set up in 1990 in Cambridge, a company that many consumers have never heard of. Its chip designs are in Apple?s iPhone, most Android handsets, Nintendo?s 3DS and Sony?s upcoming PlayStation Vita. It is ARM ? and it has plans for the future of gaming.
Sitting with a group of lead engineers in a meeting room at the company?s sprawling campus-like HQ, the topic of discussion is Vita. The latest handheld from Sony packs in a quad-core Cortex-A9 design, ARM?s current-generation product, a blisteringly fast CPU offering 2.50 DMIPS/MHz per core (ARM claims to have tech demos running at up to 2GHz, putting it in line with current desktop systems). A key feature is the chipset?s NEON media engine, a 128bit SIMD architecture, designed to accelerate multimedia operations ? and run the physics engines required by console-quality titles. ?Game developers will get the best out of this platform,? says Lance Howarth, general manager of ARM?s media processing division. ?It?s going to be a massive leap on in terms of technology.?
From left to right: demo solutions manager Anand Patel, media processing division director of marketing Ian Smythe and general manager Lance Howarth
The use of a quad-core setup is intriguing. The Cortex-A9 is also in devices like the Motorola Xoom, RIM PlayBook and Galaxy Tab II, but they?ve all gone for a dual-core setup. Howarth believes that Sony may ? at last ? be thinking about practicalities rather than simply sheer processing oomph. ?There are power management techniques called dynamic frequency and voltage scaling. It might actually be more power efficient to run quad-core at a lower speed than dual core at a higher speed,? he says. It is, perhaps, an example of how the traditional game industry is coming round to ARM?s way of thinking. Low power is in this company?s very DNA.
And Sony?s not the only company sitting up and taking notice. The massive graphics processing power of ARM?s system-on-a-chip (SoC) points to a self-evident truth: that the gaming and smartphone industries are becoming inextricably entwined and mutually dependent. ?Apple has changed consumer expectations about the user experience from these devices,? Howarth says. ?GPU technology ? and, through that, gaming ? is increasing in importance dramatically. What differentiates iPhone and Android from the Java handsets of six years ago is the number of apps and the ease of downloading them. The vast majority of those apps are games.? Over in the tablet sector, a recent survey found that 84 per cent are using their devices for game use. As we?ve seen in the desktop chipset industry, it?s gaming that now drives the tech forward.
No wonder mainstream developers are ramping up their support for high-end handsets. As we?ve seen from EA Mobile and Epic, mobile gaming is no longer simply about quick and trashy miniature knockoffs to exploit successful gaming brands: the power is there ? as is a massive new market ? to ensure that smartphones are becoming a key part of the multiplatform development agenda. ?Companies like Epic and id are planning in the mobile SKUs of their games alongside the console versions,? says technical marketing manager Ed Plowman, a veteran game industry engineer who has worked at Argonaut. ?The stuff we?re being shown behind closed doors suggests that publishers have much bigger plans for mobile. The tipping point between the two markets ? traditional under-the-TV console and handheld ? is the tablet. You?ve got enough resolution there, enough fidelity in the screen, to drive high-quality graphics and a decent gameplay experience.?
Source: http://www.next-gen.biz/features/gaming-arms-way
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