Why did sega decide to use this chip? Nobody else in the industry was using Hitachi's SuperH, so why them?
Why did sega decide to use this chip? Nobody else in the industry was using Hitachi's SuperH, so why them?
Why did sega decide to use this chip? Nobody else in the industry was using Hitachi's SuperH, so why them?
Package deal, they were offered the chips in lots of $25 a piece.
The free excavators they threw in didn't hurt
Someone needs to teach those board designers the alphabet.
Cheap good performance
>Why did sega decide to use this chip?
They could have gone with lowtachi, but decided to take the hi road.
:3
Probably the same reason whatever other company you're a fanboi of did the same thing.
PS2 had Sony’s custom Emotion Engine GPU, GameCube was ATI and Xbox used Nvidia. Hitachi was indeed a weird choice for the Dreamcast.
not really considering they had been Sega's trusted butt-buddies since the 80s
What did the Saturn have?
Gamecube was power pc. Xbox was Intel. PS2 was MIPS.
You're looking at the GPUs not the CPUs.
It had the Hitachi SH2.
I meant GPU not processor.
The dreamcast didn't use a Hitachi GPU. It used one from NEC.
Oh gotcha, my bad.
Hitachi SuperH series of cpus were just fine. They were simple RISC devices perfect for embedded devices. They were jammed in DVD players and appliances. Sega used them and found they were easy to work with. Capcom used them too.
I get the impression that they weren't the most high performance thing on the market. Nintendo and Sony used CPUs from the desktop computer market.
What was the result with SuperH arcade machines and gaming consoles? Several good games came out on these platforms.
>What was the result with SuperH arcade machines and gaming consoles? Several good games came out on these platforms.
I don't think Sega used Hitachi in the arcade boards. They used Fujitsu, NEC and Motorola.
I think he means other companies. Capcom and Cave both used them.
The real answer is because they were really tight with Hitachi so they could ask them to "make us a CPU that can do this and this". The chip got custom built for Sega and they just named it SH4 as it was the 4th chip with that ISA. And staying on the same family meant that all the experience they got coding the SH2 would carry over, including dev tools like compilers.
I think Sega asked them to boost the FPU or add the MMU, I forgot. The PVR2 also got a bunch of extra functions Sega asked for, like support for using index lookup colors.
different divisions and different eras. After the model 3 they made the Naomi which used the SH4 and was their best selling arcade hardware including the Naomi 2. Then the Atomiswave which was the same hardware too. Anything beyond that was either based on some console (ps2/gamecube/xbox), based on PCs, or the Hikaru (a Naomi souped up to extreme degrees with a custom gpu, but still using the SH4 CPU).
Ah I forgot about Naomi. But the question becomes why did Sega ditch their previous CPU manufacturers and go with Hitachi? I would imagine the other manufacturers had already proven that their chips could do gaming with the other arcade boards. Why go with a company that had no experience making chips for gaming? As far as I know Hitachi has never done anything gaming related besides what they did with Sega.
It’s talked in an interview that they were considering the 68020 from Motorola for their next chip, but that was seen as just an iteration from the 68k used in the genesis, and they wanted more of an evolutionary jump.
Everyone was adopting brand new RISC chips with a clean break from the past from previous architectures (68k, 6502 etc) and Sega just happened to choose Hitachi’s. NEC’s V-series was in consideration too.
Different anon here.
What about all the backroom politics?
Was Hitachi'a CEO the brother of Sega's CEO or somethjng?
From the interview I read, it suggests that the choice to go with Hitachi was mostly arbitrary, but I remember reading another forum post before that that there was a lot of stuff going on between Hitachi and Sega.
But what was the tipping point for choosing Hitachi? Why not go with something proven like Intel? Sega had used Intel in their arcade boards.
The 68060 released in 94 as well. Had they not rushed the Saturn to market, it would have been a MUCH sounder choice. It was pretty damn good at rendering 3D games, and it was a chipset that developers were very experienced with. Developers had a very rough time coming to grips with the N64 and PS1, so sticking with a tried and true architecture would have done Sega very, very good.
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/motorola_plans_to_sample_the_68060_next_quarter
$263 for 50mhz version $169 for the low cost version. Not sure how SH2 compares to that
Surely they would be a huge discount since Sega would buying millions of them?
Why has no one put the 68040 or 68050 into consideration yet since they already floated the 68020 at first, it would have been cheap enough by 1994 with four years of production already done
Not to mention it was an "off-the-shelf" component and much less R&D would have been necessary to produce the Saturn with it inside. The savings and added ease of game development would have contributed to a much stronger software lineup than what we got, and would have made up for any losses incurred selling the hardware.
The 68060 was not economical to use. That chip was used in computers that cost 1k+ and was marketed to be used in devices that costed that much.
The SH2 was designed for embedded markets, which is a lot more cost sensitive.
The 020 was economical and old enough to use in a low-priced video game console, but at that point it was 5-6 years old, and wasn't designed in a time when 3D graphics were a big concern. Again, it was seen as just an iteration of the genesis, whereas Sega wanted more of an evolutionary jump that was indicative of the 2D-3D transition.
Hitachi's new RISC chip was a better suitor than Motorola at this point.
Even a slightly older model like the 68050 would have been a better choice than what Sega ended up doing. The damage a poorly laid out console can do to the longterm health of it's lifecycle can not be understated. It means more time and money wasted on R&D, a more stressful and difficult task for devs, etc. I doubt Sega themselves knew how to handle the Saturn, let alone third parties who couldn't give two shits about it and would rather develop for the easiest console at the time, which was the PlayStation. By going with Hitachi and producing a frankenstein's monster of a console, Sega incurred more losses than had they simply gone with a 68060. You also have to consider that by sticking with the Motorola architecture, they could have done something truly great and allowed for backwards compatibility between the Genesis and the Saturn. Which would have set themselves apart in the eyes of gamers, and made them a prime choice for investment. Especially among the Genesis loyal.
>Zoomie had no idea that a CPU and GPU are different things
Posting was indeed a weird choice for the zoomie
William Gibson made frequent references to Hitachi in his Neuromancer trilogy, but I don't think there's any connection.
He is just talking jacking with a Magic Wand.
but I thought OSHA banned that excavator attachment after all those workplace deaths
whatever problems later sega consoles had, they weren't a cpu issue
Capcom CPSIII used the SH2. CAVE CV1000 used SH3. It was Japanese and made by Hitachi. Why not?
>why did sega
You can descend into eldritch insanity ever trying to answer a question that starts with this
>they didnt use the current industry standards 20 years ago?? what were they thinking?
do zoomers really
Hitachi were Sega's close buddies and had developed the GPUs for all of their home consoles.
Hitachi made chips for Sega's BIGGEST failures: The 32x and Sega Saturn. Why would Sega go with them again?
>Hitachi: owned by yakuza
>Sega: owned by yakuza
Pretty simple logic anon.
But Sega was using other suppliers for their Sega Genesis and Arcade Boards up to Model 3. Why suddenly switch to Hitachi?
The VDU in the Model 1 Mega Drive was produced by Hitachi although the other components were generally a grab bag of parts. The Model 2 had mostly Hitachi components including the CPU which was a Hitachi second source CMOS 68000 (the Model 1 used NMOS 68000s either from Motorola or Signetics).
If my memory is correct, the Sega Model 2 used an Intel CPU, and a Fujitsu GPU.
It was actually a digital signal processor. Namco and Sega were both using them for 3d before dedicated hardware existed for this.
Model 1 had an NEC V60 for the CPU
Graphics processor in Model 1 Mega Drive was called VDP (not VDU) and it was made by Yamaha, not Hitachi
They were designed that way because of Sega you know
properly speaking Sega engineers did the work and Hitachi just built the chips based on their specs. rather like Atari; they didn't own a chip fab so they just did the design work and contracted it to different fabs (Atari didn't use a single supplier like Sega did).
wow surprised no one mentioned the FD1094 in this thread so far
is everyone here new or something?
I'm pretty sure the mega drive 68k is actually Hitachi and not Motorola. It was not uncommon for the Japanese to do this. NEC's CPUs were x86 clones.
the Model 1 Genesis as anon said had Motorola or Signetics 68000s, the Model 2 Genesis had Hitachi ones
>Model 2 Genesis had Hitachi ones
No. Hitachi was not involved at all.
>I'm pretty sure the mega drive 68k is actually Hitachi and not Motorola.
It was Motorola
It had decent usage in the arcade industry, was the same family as the Saturn/32X so Sega already had experience with it, and it was cheap.
They were originally gonna go with PowerPC I believe until 3dfx blew it.
>It had decent usage in the arcade industry, was the same family as the Saturn/32X so Sega already had experience with it
Yeah but Sega didn't use Hitachi chip in their arcade machines until much later. Not until Naomi arcade boards which was like 1999/early 2000s.
Probably some backroom deals with the yakuza n shit.
Hey guys, is this the new Sega is Shit thread?
Seriously, just make a general on /vg/ at this point.