Price and speed of ram in 1990

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psycopathicteen
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Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by psycopathicteen »

It was brought up in another thread how Nintendo had to sacrifice VRAM access slots, and a more flexible oam for BG3. It makes me wonder how much it would've cost if Nintendo used 2x faster vram.
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TmEE
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by TmEE »

I looked into my SNESs' and all of them have real SRAM as VRAM, 100ns flavor. Sound RAM is 100-150ns PSRAM.
My google-fu seems to suck, I could only find prices of DRAM...
tepples
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by tepples »

Assuming a 945/44 MHz master clock, and 4 clocks per dot, there are about 186 ns per dot. If you want to take it out to half dots, you'd need 70 ns memory and a lot more pipelining in the tile reader logic.
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by psycopathicteen »

Would it still require more logic if they cut down on the amount of graphic modes? Or are the two completely unrelated?
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by tepples »

You'd still need modes for bit depth (8bpp for everything has disadvantages), offset per tile, affine mapping, etc. But perhaps they'd be set per layer, much as 4/8 bpp mode is set on GBA.
psycopathicteen
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by psycopathicteen »

Here's a simple approach:

mode 0: 4 4bpp BGs
mode 1: 2 4bpp BGs and 1 8bpp affine layer

Every non-affine layer will have offset-per-tile available, and disabled backgrounds will be replaced with open DMA access slots. Not only would it have time to fetch sprite patterns during h-blank, but it also would have time to fetch sprite attributes too.

I don't really care that much about 8bpp other than it made mode-7 possible. 4bpp just has a more authentic 16-bit feel to it. Now that I'm at it, why not change it to packed pixel format?
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by tepples »

Now that's looking very, very GBA, if I do say so myself.
psycopathicteen
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by psycopathicteen »

Is the price of ram usually proportional to the speed of ram? Or is it exponentially more expensive? Were there any computers around at the time that used 70ns or faster RAM? I know that the Sega Saturn had 28Mhz VRAM accesses, but that was 4 or 5 years later.
lidnariq
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by lidnariq »

Hm, 1990 predates DEC's Alphas. Everyone else (POWER, SPARC, i860, 88k, ARM) seemed to be pretty comparable in 1990 (ca. 30MHz).
I do remember some systems using funny RAMs, but for the most part, UNIX workstations were mostly using stock DRAM, usually just put in enough parallel to fetch a 32-bit or 64-bit word all at once. (So, not faster)

For speed, I suspect it's just economies of scale, with a lower sales opportunity and stricter requirements for faster parts.
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by psycopathicteen »

So there were computers available that used 30Mhz RAM? How much more expensive were they compared to the SNES? We could probably estimate how much extra money a 2x speed VRAM would've cost.
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by tepples »

A lot of these faster RAMs had a penalty for accesses to non-consecutive addresses. This "seek time" was common in "fast page mode" DRAMs, which loaded a whole word-line into a small buffer; other accesses within the same word-line had less penalty.
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TmEE
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by TmEE »

SRAMs used for cache chips don't have any speed penalties, not on the async ones which were ofter 10, 12 or 15ns. Later synchronous SRAMs do have "latency", it takes one cycle to set address, and remaining cycles can be used as reads or writes.
I tried to find any pricing info on cache chips you'd use on a 486 or mayhaps a 36 mobo but could not find any... those are vanilla async SRAM, but much faster than what you would find in a game console, but still may be useful for some ideas.
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by psycopathicteen »

I have a another question about memory latency. Would 6.136Mhz accessing with 150ns ROM possible, or would that need 120ns ROM? I'm asking because it would've made sense to design a system with every chip clocked to the same frequency, including the dot clock, and 6.136Mhz would've gave you square pixels.
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by tepples »

You'd still need a master clock of 945/44 = 21.48 MHz to generate the 3.58 MHz color subcarrier. You'd divide it by 7 instead of 6 or 8 to get the 3.07 MHz CPU clock, but you'd need to divide it by 1.75 to get the 12.28 MHz half-pixel clock used by hires mode. And to avoid unsightly side borders, you'd need to redesign nametable layouts around a 288px wide display plane, which means nametables would have to be 64x32 cells.

Arcade and other RGB systems have a lot more freedom with their dot clock rates because they aren't tied to crystals that are multiples of 3.58 MHz.
psycopathicteen
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Re: Price and speed of ram in 1990

Post by psycopathicteen »

I know how the clock frequency would be derived, I was asking if 150ns ROMs were fast enough for a 6.136Mhz clock. Theoretically it should because 1000/150=6.667Mhz.
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