Will GameStick have Emulators?

[Eclipse]

Well, Gamestop is the only one that invested in them.

Right, so very true. They've guaranteed exclusivity to Game in the UK. No other stores can carry it there. Essentially only 3 means of getting GameStick into people's hands - GameStop, Game in UK and Amazon?

I don't know how many they'll be shipping. Mention of holiday was short-sighted on my part. They may be looking ahead to spring and beyond to see what they need to do to be a player in the world of Android mini consoles.

[rushmore]

For emulators, the Gamestick will perform about the same as Ouya. 3D games favor the Ouya.

[madmax2069]

For emulators, the Gamestick will perform about the same as Ouya. 3D games favor the Ouya.

The ouya should kick the snot out of gamestick in every possible way, 5 cores is better then 2.

[Moonlight]

The ouya should kick the snot out of gamestick in every possible way, 5 cores is better then 2.

Dont you mean 4 core? Lol

[sirius3100]

Less power and [...]

I keep reading this and in some areas it's certainly true (e.g. the GPU has less GFlops and the CPU is slower), but I'm really interested in the memory bandwidth of gamestick chip. One of the main problems of the Tegra 3 chip is that it only has single channel RAM. If the gamestick chip uses dual channel it could have ~2x the bandwidth.

But I have no idea how important the memory bandwidth is for emulators.

[madmax2069]

I keep reading this and in some areas it's certainly true (e.g. the GPU has less GFlops and the CPU is slower), but I'm really interested in the memory bandwidth of gamestick chip. One of the main problems of the Tegra 3 chip is that it only has single channel RAM. If the gamestick chip uses dual channel it could have ~2x the bandwidth.

But I have no idea how important the memory bandwidth is for emulators.

Well if the rest of the system can't push enough data to use all available bandwidth then its pretty much useless. Its a joint effort of the system as a whole you have to look at, the system is only as good as its weakest link, while the tegra has less bandwidth it does have more cores that can be used, while only two cores can only do so much.

[sirius3100]

Yes of course. But it's often said that the Tegra 3 is limited by it's memory bandwidth. How important each of the components is and what finally sets the limits also always depends on the application.

I suspect that the AML8726-MXS also only uses a 32bit bus, but I could never find information on that using google.

[rushmore]

The ouya should kick the snot out of gamestick in every possible way, 5 cores is better then 2.

Should in your premise, but does not. All the current emulators are compiled from Linux or PC counterparts as their base. There is no apparent specificity to efficiently leverage more than two cores and there are diminished returns due to threading priorities and I/O bottlenecks. Factor in the byte code dalvik layer on top of that and there are inherent constraints.

Case in point, the dual 4470 is faster for emulators than the Tegra 3 for MAME. The reason is MAME is all cpu and no 3d resources from the gpu. N64 though that uses 3d from the gpu is a tad faster, but barely. Catch there is most of the emulation is cpu dependent.

That all said, like the Tegra 3, the 4470 is getting on now to the old side of tech, but both handle most emulators well for mobile chips. MAME is still the summit, since Dead or Alive, Soul Calibur and other 3D games that smooth on basic three year old laptops, still play slow in Android and iOS devices. The reason is all emulation is done by the CPU.

Tested MAME on every newer chipset except the 800 and Tegra 4. The litmus for me is Dead or Alive +.