Developing a Game Application using a Console Development Kit.

Console Game Application

Examination

Evolution of game console hardware and architecture. 
Types of game platforms. 
Game platform languages.
Game platform constraints
Task-based decomposition
Using Game Engines and Middleware targeting Game Consoles. 
Using Close-To-Metal Console SDKs and APIs
Using Console Profiling and Debugging Tools.
Game Console Platform Support and OS Ecosystems.
Assembly/machine language programming; Instruction formats; Addressing modes; I/O and interrupts.
Shared memory multiprocessors/multicore organization.
Introduction to SIMD vs. MIMD and the Flynn Taxonomy.
Review of physical memory and memory management hardware.
Memory hierarchy: importance of temporal and spatial locality.
Main memory organization and operations.
Buses: bus protocols, arbitration, direct-memory access (DMA).
Instruction pipelining.
Introduction to instruction-level parallelism (ILP).
Example SIMD and MIMD instruction sets and architectures.
Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP).
Shared multiprocessor memory systems and memory consistency.
Multiprocessor cache coherence.
Multicore architectures and hardware support for synchronization.
Performance figures of merit.
Workloads and representative benchmarks, and methods of collecting and analysing performance figures of merit.
CPI (Cycles per Instruction) equation as tool for understanding trade-offs in the design of instruction sets, processor pipelines, and memory system organizations.
Amdahl’s Law.
Managing Latencies: memory vs. disk latencies.
Caches and the effects of spatial and temporal locality on performance in processors and systems.
Introduction into the processor memory hierarchy and the formula for average memory access time.
Superscalar architecture.
Vector processors and GPUs.
Hardware support for multithreading.
Memory/disk management requirements in a real-time environment.
Why system performance needs to be evaluated and what is to be evaluated.
Implementation strategies such as threads.
Data-parallel decomposition.
Shared Memory.
Maintaining spatial locality.
Sequential vs. parallel processing.
Parallel programming vs. concurrent programming.
Request parallelism vs. Task parallelism.
Re-Defining Algorithms for Games using Console Architecture Awareness.

Console Game Development - 7119COMP

Console Game Development

Explain the theories of parallel processing, GPU processing and memory management strategies in relation to a modern console architecture.

Produce console game applications using game SDKs.

Use low-level APIs, middleware, and game engines targeting a given console ecosystem in order to solve game software development problems on a games console.

Critically evaluate the hardware architecture and processing models employed in modern game consoles.