WDStudios wrote on 2021-06-19, 07:36:
Taking old designs and remaking them on a 7 nm process is cheap.
What you're proposing requires re-designing old hardware, adding a CPU and GPU on the same die, and fitting it to a new process. It is EXPENSIVE. You can't just take a clawhammer core and a R350 GPU , die shrink them and then super glue them together. The SOC will require a custom southbridge with appropriate I/O, a bridge interface and the whole thing will need to have a go-over in order to print it on a new process. The difference between 90nm and 7nm is so huge that just printing a clawhammer core on 7nm is unfeasible.
WDStudios wrote on 2021-06-19, 07:36:
Massively parallel floating-point operations are useful for more than gaming. Just ask any Bitcoin miner.
Running win98 and DOS has nothing to do with mining. Neither the ClawHammer core (athlon64) or the R350 (radeon 9800) have enough floating point muscle to be of any use for miners. An SoC designed for retro games running real hardware not emulation will be SLOW. Going the other way, designing a highly parallel chip useful for mining, would make it useless for retro gaming, as it wouldn't even be x86 compatible and would require emulation, witch can be done using existing hardware, no need to design something new.
WDStudios wrote on 2021-06-19, 07:36:
Most DOS games play just fine at any clock speed.
Really? Have you tried playing Jazz Jackrabbit on a fast machine? Or supaplex? Or Volfield? Or Commander Keen? Biomanace? The list goes on. Only SOME post 96 dos games will run well at any clock speed. The others will either refuse to run at all (Jazz), have stuttering/scrolling issues (keen, biomanece, supaplex) or run way too fast (volfield).
This topic has been discussed before. My dream retro gaming SoC should include:
- x86 compatible core capable of scaling from 286 performance all the way to say a pentium 3 tualatin
- fully VGA / VESA compliant video chip to avoid compatibility issues with some games (keen, biomance, duke1)
- glide compatible 3D core (at least trough software like nvglide)
- IDE/CF/SD interface and or SATA
- ATX powered
- AGP, PCI and ISA slots
- Windows 9x and DOS drivers