Well done ogre.
I know what blink is.
I want to know what makes blink 2 such a super duper feat.
It's just a video player/codec as I understand it.
Bink 2 is 75% simd instructions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMD
Again, simd is like a factory of little cpu's all working on different little parts of the same thing.
This enabled bink 2 to be I think 12x now? Faster than bink 1. And since it was so fast now, it allowed them to add real time compression artifact removal via pixel shaders and other boons. All hugely simd dependent. If you dont have the factory, you stuck with bink 1.
As long as you have modern simd on your processor, its mostly easy as pie (although some people congfigure it wrong and it destroys their performance as it goes through the cpu).
Even arm processors... provided you have neon for simd.
Espresso has no 'modern' simd. The g3 750 series is a non simd cpu. The g4 series was a 750 with an altivec bolted on for simd... But nintendo decided to go their own route.
Of course it has simd for nintendo's systems, nintendo added 50 something new simd instructions... paired singles: iirc 2x32 bit simd around 2Gflops for single precision.
It had to to crunch geometry, it was a game system, so it was necessary. And it kicked butt pretty damn good back in the day. Cube is still king of the hill for in game polygon counts of its generation. By a lot.
But a lot has happened since then. Apple and ibm came up with altivec, then on the intel side we had sse2 and 3....
Yet Nintendo's cpu's simd's have remained the same, 2x32 bit simd the paired singles. wii's clock increase boosted flop count a bit. As did espressos near 2x increase, cache increase, and now with 3 cores (bink 2 only uses 2) But, as far as we know, and rad tools seems to support this, its still the same simd from the gamecube... Not sse3 or even 2, or even altivec as the rest of the world now uses. Its apparantly so removed from modern simd paralell computing engines rad tools calls it a 'non simd cpu'.
I didnt see an issue with this, as the days of the cpu handling all or even the bulk of geometry crunching should be over, and it certainly looks like nintendo intended that to be handled by the graphics unit with wii u (as opposed to 360, and especially ps3, using the flop power of their cpu's to generate geometry). So this 'weak' simd didnt seem like an issue to me. It was more than enough for what a cpu needed in that situation.
But apparantly, the performance has been improved considerably via the upclock and cache increases. Enough to surprise rad game tools.
So here, we have this cpu with 'no simd' as the people making the product see it, running a brand new very simd demanding, designed specifically to function via simd, media application.
Its surprising it packs such a punch in an area its supposed to be very weak in. Its not 'supposed' to really pack any punch here. Its surprising nintendo and ibm's solution back in the gamecube era is upscaling to be this competent today, in this particular area. It was really a fantastic design.