Can Smartphones Outplay Consoles?

An incredible amount of processing power in a tiny space, with 1 watt of consumption.

A smartphone could never compete with a console for sheer processing horsepower... could it? One startup thinks that may be possible soon... they've got a 64 core chip that doesn't take up much space (as you can see in the above comparison to Apple's A5 chip) and only chews up 1 watt at full bore. If you want to scale up to 4,096 cores, that will only cost you 64 watts... not a bad thing if you plan to put it in a set-top box (Google TV, Apple TV, are you paying attention?)

Now, you might say that a console, having much more space and being plugged into a wall socket, will always beat out a smartphone. But consider that the latest console technology is about 8 years old, and that consoles are refreshing the technology ever more slowly with each generation. While smartphones are busily upgunning their tech every year, or even faster. Suddenly a smartphone that can outrun a console doesn't seem quite as fantastic a notion.

Especially if such smartphone technology can quickly migrate to the family room, via an Apple TV or a Google TV. Not only would those companies have all the advantages they currently have over consoles (hundreds of thousands of apps, low manufacturing costs due to smartphone volume, amazing variety of apps, smooth connection to smartphones and tablets), but their graphics technology might even be better.

If that's the case, game over, man. And it can happen very swiftly indeed... perhaps while Microsoft and Sony are still deciding when to come out with a new console generation. We may already have begun the move to a post-console era...

That's without even considering what this sort of graphics revolution will mean to the smartphone business. Add in one of those pico-size projectors so you can get a big screen display, and you've got some amazing capabilities in a handhled device. The game console shrinks right into the controller and the display, all in one pocketable package. Sounds like science fiction, but we could see it in a few years. Continuous computing, on a global scale... not just gaming will feel the effects of the transformation.

GDC Day 2

The second day of the GDC is really the day before the real conference... right now there are only 3 or 4 thousand attendees, and tomorrow the number will be closer to 20,000. The first two days are summits and tutorials, with "summits" being mini-conferences on such topics as AI, Education, Social & Online, Smartphone, Independent Games, Serious Games and Localization. It's kind of odd that the fastest growing market segments (smartphone and social games) are relegated to a smaller footprint, but I guess it would just be overwhelming to include those specific topics in the myriad other tracks competing for attention during the next three days.

I attended an interesting session on emerging technologies today, which was discussing the ways being created to bring higher-powered gaming to browsers. Adobe's Molehill project will give developers access to the GPU for accelerating 3D performance with a browser... speeding up things by an order of magnitude or two (check out the videos on that link). Facebook has been working on seeing just how fast they can get Facebook games to perform, with some impressive results. And Mozilla has been working on a version of OpenGL called WebGL, hoping they can provide a universal solution to fast browser performance for games.

I'm not sure what technology will wint out here, but it's clear that browser game performance on desktops, tablets, and smartphones is going to take a big leap forward in the next year. Which is good news for game developers looking to bring some more graphic buzz to their games that can work on a very wide array of devices.

Most of the day, though, was spent renewing old contacts and having new discussions. Lunch with Warren Spector was fun, as was chatting with Eric Goldberg about old times in the game business. There will be a lot fo things to follow up on after the show...as is usually the case.

One thing I have learned, though, is to make sure next year to be there for Google's first seminars... attendees were given laptops running ChromeOS, Motorola Xoom tablets or Nexus S smartphones... wow. Nothing like encouraging developers to attend your seminars!