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YouTuber gets classic Tomb Raider running on a chip that sips a mere 1 W of power - The SoC in question is the ESP32-P4 microcontroller, a lightweight 32-bit RISC-V processor featuring two cores (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago* by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

a 32 bit dual core cpu is probably way more powerful than the low-mhz scale one it originally ran on?

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  • [–] 13 points 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    Tomb raider 1996 was a primary title for the Sega Saturn which used hitachi superH 32bit RISC processors at 28mhz and 2m RAM. A little more digging lists the minimum PC requirements for the DOS/win9x version to be a Pentium 60 and 8m RAM.

    Not even counting that overall instructions per clock has increased tremendously since the 90s, yeah, there's plenty of power in an esp32 at 400mhz lol

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago*

    The ESP32 seems to even do more MIPS per Mhz that the original Pentium, so it's even faster than a 400mhz pentium would be. Computationally at least

    Edit: apparently the Pentium was actually much faster at 64-bit floating point calculations (ESP32 has to do 2 32-bit operations and combine in software), but I don't think that's an issue here

    Guess it depends on how tomb raider was written. Even on 32-bit CPUs games like quake were still doing 64-bit math

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    This reminds me of very early mobile ports of this game for Pocket PC PDAs from 2002.

    Allow me to geek out a little: The two least powerful of the officially supported devices - Compaq iPAQ 3630 and Toshiba e310 - feature a 32bit ARM-based RISC CPU clocked at 206 MHz, paired with 32 MB of RAM and a 240 x 320 display. The Toshiba cost $899 when it came out in October of 2002, equivalent to $1661 in today's money (in other words, way too much for a kid who desperately wanted one back then).

    Here's the interesting part though: This CPU - the Intel StrongARM SA-1110 (yes, Intel used to license ARM CPUs)- has a TDP of less than 400 mW when clocked at 206 MHz. This is without RAM, of course, but still, this was a very power-efficient chip for the time - and it could take up tasks that were usually done by other chips, like acting as a softmodem.

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