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The NUON article in EDGE Magazine
Source: NuonEverything
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* Well folks, it's here in my palms. The new copy of EDGE has, as
promised:
1. Two pages devoted to Jeff Minter (in profile format)
2. Six thoughtfully written pages about the NUON hardware
3. Two pages reviewing Tempest 3000, with an overall score of
Nine/Ten
Some quotes have been taken from EDGE #95, and are acknowledged here
as being the property of Future Publishing. The quotes are
highlighted in the text. To take each one of these points in turn:
1.A picture of Jeff sitting on some kind of office chair in the
middle of one of his fields graces the background. A small box
(containing probably less than 500 words) to the left talks about his
various programming achievements of the past and present, and how
they show his abstract creativity. Jeff explains his aversion to
reality when creating games, and prefers to stick to a non-rigid
definition of his software. This allows him to fit stuff into his
games as he creates them, eg effects he creates as he codes. The most
interesting part of the interview comes at the end, where Jeff
details his newest idea for an original game. This deserves a
blockquote:
"I've got stuff in my head which I really, really want to do. I
can see it running in my head, and there isn't quite enough power
yet to do it, but there may well be very shortly. Again, it's
abstract ideas, in a way bringing together the idea of
videogaming and VLM [Virtual Light Machine]. It would still be
goal oriented but... it's just the amalgamation of those two
things - videogaming and VLM... it's hard to explain, I'll have
to do it." [italics added]
What do you make of that??? I think there are 2 points here - the
imminent arrival at VM Labs of new NUON silicon, and Jeff's awesome
idea for a game. 2.The article, titled "NUON lights", presents a well
balanced appraisal of the NUON hardware and what it will probably
achieve. The majority of the article gets into the technical details,
and the rest discusses market viability of the NUON
concept.Technical:The salient points are that Very Long Instruction
Word (VLIW) lets you give instructions to several processor units
simultaneously, and that makes NUON a very fast, capable processor.
Low clock speeds don't matter when your executing several
instructions at once. Minter says he thinks all processors will
eventually go this route. The economy of NUON compared to MPEG2
decoders is discussed, along the lines that it doesn't make sense to
use hardwired decoders when NUON costs the same and does so much
more. Minter thinks too many NUON developers might be relying too
heavily on the NUON libraries, instead of opting to "go to the
metal". This leads into a discussion of hardware graphics functions
used by "consoles", and how the distribution of that hardware power
into other areas of processing is next to impossible, yielding a
highlighting of another NUON strength: software programmability.
"Write your own co-processors" laments Minter. Unfortunately, there
is no benchmark test. A box out titled "NUON on test" goes into the
crispness of NUON playback, and cites T3K as an example of unique
NUON power. An interesting revelation is that:
"In addition to handling several sets of instructions at once,
embedded in the NUON design are various layers of parallelers
with the purpose of making massive number crunching a reality.
What this enables a developer to do is to: "Do quite a lot of
maths for every pixel on the screen... (Real time raytracing is
also achievable, though not implemented in Tempest 3000)....
Market Viability: After revealing that Samsung and Toshiba were the
top 2 selling DVD manufacturers in Europe, Jeff's belief is that more
chips will get onto the market not because people will buy the
players for games, but because NUON is a better solution that,
ultimately, manufacturers could not refuse to use. The explosion of
DVD all over the world, and the trojan horse effect of NUON CPU's,
will take a couple of years, and "then hopefully the chip will start
to get fairly ubiquitous, and then we'll have enormous market
penetration for the games." A good, final quote, comes as follows:
"Ultimately, EDGE would not try to convince you that NUON is a
viable gaming platform. And neither would it's manufacturer, for
that matter. It's a clever piece of electronic-entertainment
hardware, but very much in the broader sense of the term. You can
use it to play games, of course, especially if more examples of
Tempest 3000's calibre show up. But the unit's primary use would
be elsewhere. If Minter is right, market penetration could be
phenomenal. On DVD playback alone, it deserves to do well. Of
course, there's always the potential bonus of playing host to
another outstanding example of video gaming. If that should ever
happen again, EDGE will take a look at it.
To me, this last statement means that EDGE will only review NUON
games when good ones come out. But they understand what NUON is
about, and overall they seem to have done a good job writing it on
paper. 3.TEMPEST 3000: I will post their opinions of T3K later today.
I have classes and a CAE lab to attend. But it did get 9/10, which is
a very good score from EDGE.
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