Which had the most powerful processor, TurboGrafx-16 or SNES?

[Zebbe]

It's a well known fact that the Mega Drive/Genesis ruled above all thanks to the unlimited power of blast processing, but which one is most powerful of the HuC6280A and the 5A22? Higher clock frequence or 16-bit? That, and many other things are considerable when looking at the best processor of these two, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia.

[Joe Redifer]

If you're talking raw CPU, then the TurboGrafx-16, definitely. The SNES had lots of helper hardware to get around it's basically crippled CPU.

[Zebbe]

What helper hardware do you mean? The enhancement chips in the cartridges were used in less than 5% of the game library.

[Joe Redifer]

The sound hardware, the graphics hardware, all that stuff takes much of the load needed off of the CPU whereas the Turbo CPU has to worry about doing a lot of those things itself. For example, Mode 7 was done in the hardware so it was effortless for the SNES to do. But I'm not sure about VRAM and all that and I'm sure someone else will come along to clear all of that up. I do know that the SNES usually ran at a fraction of what the CPU was capable of, and it was only capable of up to 3.58 Mhz.

[Zebbe]

Hmm, yeah, it's the same with the Mega Drive/Genesis which had a sound processor (although the 68k was also used for sound sometimes). I guess this makes the SNES overall winner, but then again it was released 3 years later and was much more expensive (comparable to N64 and DC, I guess).

[TmEE]

PCE wins as long as you're doing only 8 bit things, MD kicks the ass of all of them when you do 16 and/or 32 bit things. 8bit things on 68K take as much time as 16bit things so you really don't want to do 8 bit things if you care for performance.

[gamegenie]

How fast was the Turbo's main CPU?

[Joe Redifer]

7.14Mhz I think. Not a quad core or anything.

[roundwars]

Doesn't the SNES supposedly have a math coprocessor or something? I wonder how much that added to the system's computational power.

[TmEE]

It has a multiplier built into te PPU I think, but that you cannot exactly call as a math coprocessor... some games had DSP chips etc. in their carts for computational purposes

[sheath]

Nintendo's fake editorial on the SNES/Genesis comparison agrees with Joe's analysis. The SNES cpu needed co-oprocessors to compete.

[Kamahl]

The SNES CPU is weaker no doubt, the clock speed is just too low. If it was like 5-6MHz it would be on par with the M68000 on the Genesis.
The PCE CPU is pretty efficient, it might be 8bit but running at 7MHz it's a scary beast. If you use as much 8bit operations as possible it can exceed the M68000 in performance, but this takes quite a bit of planning.

You're not getting RESQ out of it.

"Real life" performance will be worse since there's no auxiliary soundchip, and the need for dynamic tiles takes quite a bit of extra processing (either for realtime computation or to send them to the screen).

[gamegenie]

I can't believe Nintendo wrote that.

[Iron Lizard]

Its pretty funny because as much as they bag on Sega its like they are saying " Fine you can play your Sonic on your Genesis but please buy our Snes"

[sheath]

I'm pretty sure this "editorial" is the origin of all of the talk online about Sega claiming the Genesis had a "blast processor", or a special hidden chip. Sega only said "Genesis has blast processing," which is at least somewhat based in reality.