Underdog Tech Company Switches to Intel

This is kind of sad in one way but it's hard to argue with the practicality of commodity parts vs. specialized hardware.

Oh, I'm of course talking about the new Sega arcade architecture. (d'uh, what did you think?) Link.

Sega Lindbergh

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The Lindbergh as shown at AM Show 2005

The Sega Lindbergh is an arcade system board developed by Sega. Intended for the arcade, the Sega Lindbergh will be included in future Sega arcade cabinets, including a remake of the classic air combat simulator, After Burner.

Due to the similarity to PC architecture, there has been talk about emulating this system even before its release, although Sega has referred to extensive anti-piracy techniques to be employed in this architecture.

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Specifications

• CPU: Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with 1 megabyte L2 Cache, Hyper Threading Compatible, 800MHz FSB
• RAM: 184 pin DDR SDRAM PC3200(400 MHz) 512 MB × 2(Dual)
• GPU: Nvidia Unknown GPU (most likely related to the GeForce 7 Series) 256 bit GDDR3 256 MB, Compatible Vertex Shader 3.0 & Pixel Shader 3.0
• Sound: 64 channel, 5.1 ch SP-DIF
• LAN: On board, 10/100/1000 BASE-TX. JVS I/O Connector
• Serial: 2 Channel (can switch one channel between 232C and 422)
• Other: USB port x 4, Compatible HDTV (High Definition), DVD Drive Support, Sega ALL.NET online support

This is in contrast to their Dreamcast / NAOMI architecture which used a really beautiful setup with a Hitachi SH-4 embedded systems chip that could handle lots of incoming data at a time and a very ahead-of-its time NEC PowerVR2 graphics architecture that used shortcuts like automatic portalling (where the card doesn't do any work to try and calculate out-of-view polygons.)

Of course it makes loads of sense to give developers something they're familiar with, and to just use commodity hardware. The Apple / Intel switch shows that what's in the box really doesn't make much of a difference these days, and that it's the software that counts.

And I'm also totally cool with Sega being just a software company in the home market if it means I don't have to buy two different consoles to get my Sonic and Zelda fixes.

Here are some screenshots: Link.

Of course this comes at the time when the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 are switching away from commodity hardware to super-specialized gaming architectures. (Which I think will be biting off more tech development than either company can swallow, but MS won't admit that they can't make money in the console market so they'll push ahead anyway.)

With the amount of specialized arcane hardware knowledge it takes to be a top-tier console game programmer it's interesting that the big games company with the most obscure hardware knowledge under its belt (the Saturn had a bizarre 3-processor architecture that no one outside of Sega seemed to be able to get their heads around) are just going for what's well-known and cheap and presumably does the job. Perhaps the other two should be paying attention.
Technorati Tags: Sega, Video+Games, Intel, Processors