Customization Direction and Anti-Piracy
"As for the bus..." Mark Cerny took over the explanation, his finger tracing a connecting line on the blueprint. "The on-chip Northbridge replaces the AGP. The DMA model is retained. There must absolutely be no bottlenecks in the data exchange between the GPU and the CPU."
Jensen Huang grabbed the pen from Mark's hand and quickly jotted down a few formulas in the blank space.
"This kind of routing has extremely high demands on memory." Jensen looked up. "How much memory do you plan to equip this machine with?"
"Sixty-four megabytes," Sato announced the figure. "DDR, 128-bit bus width."
The pen in Jensen's hand stopped mid-air, the ink bleeding into a small black dot on the paper.
In the PC market of early 1998, mainstream graphics cards were still using four or eight megabytes of video memory.
Sato dropped a massive sixty-four megabytes of DDR directly onto a console, which was utterly insane.
"Not just sixty-four megabytes." Mark extended his index finger and tapped heavily on the memory module of the blueprint. "We're going to create a UMA unified address space. Fully shared."
Jensen stood up abruptly, staring at Mark.
"CPU, GPU, textures, frame buffer, all in one pool?" Jensen's brain worked at top speed. "If that's the case, no roundabout latency, zero-copy direct calls. Sustained bandwidth can hit 4.8 to 6.4 gigs. If you're willing to spend money on GDDR, the bandwidth can be pushed even higher!"
"That's the exact effect we want." Mark slapped the table.
Yuji Naka nodded repeatedly beside them.
Mark gave his closing statement. "So Sega needs to ensure that capacity and bandwidth are completely balanced. The most fatal part is that this unified memory architecture highly overlaps with the PC-side development environment. The code third-party developers write on PCs can