Which platform is better?

Sparc. Or maybe Alpha. Possibly a Z8000. Dragonball? ARM? There are more than three processors out there.

Seriously, though, you need to think through a whole bunch of questions before coming to any conclusions. For example:

- How does development work?

- What is the power budget?

- What is your target price per unit?

- Do you need compatability with another device?

- What special needs do you require from the CPU (write expansion, various other multimedia bits, endian, addressable memory, memory protection model, etc.)?

You'll need to evaluate each one and see how they address your needs. And, again, you need to understand what you want out of the video system before you can start picking components. How many shaded triangles per second? What does the chip interface look like? Alpha planes? Texture mapping support? Some manner of GL acceleration?

If you're only building one of these, I'd say just use a PC. On the other hand, if you want to build a million, then you'd better make sure you've got a plan that will blow away Sony and/or Microsoft.

If you want deeper expansion, I'm available at my Standard Consulting Rate.

x86 chips run hotter and take more power; that might be a problem for you, who knows.

I think IBM's PPC is going to be used in future systems from several major game companies. That's the family I'd bet on.

- Dan

Do you need an Alpha processor for this ?

- Michael

Depends on price of the complete system, power consumption, processing power, suggested lifetime of the series, availability of development tools...

-Michael

Thanks everyone for replying..

I'm leaning allot toward x86. Because I want to develop a open architecture system, and although MIPS or PPC is not exactly closed, x86 would be the easiest to develop for I'm betting.

Also, I'm thinking of using Mobile based Pentium chip. Super low power usage, very low heat, x86 platform, and dropping in price very very fast.

Still not sure what graphics chips to use though..

Thanks

-Richard

While the Pentium M certainly is a nice chip regarding performance and low power consumption and scalabilaty of same, it's supposedly the most expensive alternative. You might want to take a look at the Transmeta series: quite high performance, very low power consumption and X86 platform. I heard that they just released a new high performance chip.

-Michael