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Sony Announces GScube Development System
A reader writes: "At the SIGGRAPH 2000 computer graphics conference this week, Sony Computer Entertainment announced its 'strategic vision for the evolution of computer entertainment in the broadband network era.' At the core of this vision is a piece of hardware which is composed of the same building blocks as the PlayStation2, but multiplied many times. The GScube development system, as it is called, will be used in the development of 'e-cinema,' computer graphics movies and other new digital content.
The GScube prototypes are powered by 16 Emotion Engines and 16 Graphics Synthesizers. Yes, this is 16 PlayStation2s rolled into one. It is NOT a game system, though, so don't write into Q&A asking about what games will be released for it. It's a computer graphics workstation, comparable to the systems created by Silicon Graphics and other companies to produce high-quality CG movies. It'll be a bit too expensive for you to pick up at your local Toys R Us." So, the going theories about Emotion Engine as general purpose CPU seem to pan out.
They are cramming all that CPU power/bus bandwidth/fill rate into their system but are still limiting the color depth to a pitiful 32 bits per pixel (8bits per channel)??
Really, besides the enormous amount of CPU and bus bandwidth, there really isn't anything here that can't be found on the average 1999-2000 consumer PC hardware.
No, it's something designed to model and render CG movies with. Who in their right mind would use it for a webserver?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It's a MIPS core, with a couple of nice vector units. arstechnica have a couple of overview articles:
2 /ee-1.html
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/playstation
Yes, the export restrictions on the PS2 got plenty of media attention, yes, there were plenty of authortative sources cited telling you exactly how many PS2s you could take home.
But about a month ago, a friend of mine traveled to Japan, and brought back eight PS2s. Yes, eight (8) of them.
With no problem. In fact, he asked customs about it when he arrived, and again, just before he bought them, and they laughed and told him that they had seen the news, but that there had never been any official hold on PS2s. In fact, one of them actually said something along the lines of "it's just for publicity".
Now, this is one person, and I have no idea where he came in/went out of Japan (other than by air between the US and Japan), but I would think that such a loose attitude would not exist in customs officials unless it really was just a PR stunt.
--
Evan (YMMV, IANAJ)
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
You can make anything seem cooler by adding "cube" to the name. For example, "Sack of Shit" = bad, but "ShitCube" = good.
but are still limiting the color depth to a pitiful 32 bits per pixel (8bits per channel)??
Why not, since the CRT (or LCD) you're going to display that on isn't capable of any better. (TV screens are even worse, since the transmission standards impose a contrast range even lower than what the hardware is capable of.)
Now, when something like micromirror projectors become more widely available, increasing that might make more sense. (The Cineon image format for motion picture work uses I think 10 bpp, on a logarithmic scale to correspond to photographic film's range.)
-- Alastair
What could possess them to put this system together? Sixteen-way multiplayer? Did Square order a bunch of these? Hmm. Wait, I've got it... they're demo machines for showing pre-release PS2 games on at E3 and ECTS! Now it all makes sense. :^)
there's even some similarities between the colors of the PlayStation logo and the colors of the NeXT logo...
anybody else see this?
The biggest value of any form of real time content generation is interactivity. There are many possibilities e.g some sort of interactive movie with viewer participation?
Okay, here's a press release we released today - basically it means that Renderware and Rendervision will be avaliable on the GSCube - Renderware is a middleware cross-platform graphics library, and RenderVision is this cool system that allows you to preview your scene (and walk through) your scene that you are designing in your 3D package instantly on your target platform (like PS2, for instance...)
(Actually, I work for the Fiendish Games part of Criterion...)
Criterion Software delivers RenderWare on Sony Computer Entertainment's GScube Development System
RenderWare ushers in the future of real-time digital creation in the broadband era
NEW ORLEANS, July 25th, 2000 - Criterion Software today announced a major milestone in its mission to provide a seamless digital content development path from concept to delivery, with the demonstration of its market leading Renderware3 interactive 3D graphics middleware driving Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.'s GScube visualizer prototype for e-cinema and real-time digital content creation.
A subsidiary of Canon, headquartered in Guildford, UK, Criterion Software Ltd. is the leading developer of multimedia middleware for convergence platforms, including next generation videogame consoles, digital televisions and web terminals.
"We reshaped the world of 3D middleware with the invention of our Renderware3 Powerpipe architecture." said David Lau-Kee, President, Criterion Software, "Powerpipe is a uniquely flexible graphics software architecture that allows unprecedented control over content-specific processing, special effects and acceleration. Now, driving the GScube development system, the benefits of this flexibility towards the creation of insanely inventive digital content by studios across all forms of visual entertainment become startling clear."
Subject to agreement, Criterion Software expects to provide its 3D middleware and tools, including Renderware for 3D programmers and RenderVisionTM for 3D artists, to GScube application and content developers in the near future.
"Criterion Software is a valued partner for our PlayStation2 middleware program," said Makoto Hatakenaka, Vice President, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. "and we are pleased that they are providing the same high level of commitment and support to GScube, our next step in pioneering the creation of real-time digital entertainment.
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
Recognized as the undisputed global leader and company responsible for the progression of consumer-based computer entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) manufacturers, distributes and markets the PlayStation game console and PlayStation2 computer entertainment system. SCEI, along with its subsidiary divisions Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd., develops, publishes, markets and distributes software, and manages the third party licensing programs for these two platforms in the respective markets worldwide. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. is an independent business unit of Sony Corporation.
Criterion Software
Criterion Software develops and distributes the market leading 3D middleware tools for convergence platforms, including RenderWare3 for 3D programmers and RenderVision for 3D artists, and distributes complementary 3rd party tools, such as Metrowerks CodeWarrior® game development tools for PlayStation2 computer entertainment system in Europe and North America.
RenderWare is a registered trademark of Canon Inc. RenderVision is a trademark of Criterion Software Ltd. PlayStation is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. All other company and product names may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies/holders, and are hereby recognized.
Looks like the claimed specs for the 3DFX Voodoo5 6000!
*joke*
..don't panic
Mainly because the things designed to do floating point. Its kind of like how those 64 CPU Hitachi vector units end up in the top few flots along side 512CPU SGI units.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The current "top of the line" SGI spec wise?
Also for all those saying this won't be a good game box, read the goddamn article.
Yep, a 1Ghz Athlon can barely manage 1 GFLOP. Same goes for the G4 500Mhz. and a P3 can't even do 1Gflop(at this time) The CPUs in the IBM's ASCI White Supercomputer also hovers somewhere above 1GFLOP(of course they have thosands of them in the machine).
If they should go linux and provide OpenGL, then the road to Maya might be shorter than you think, considering that Maya is being ported to linux.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>a pitiful 32 bits per pixel
Never mind that the human eye can't resolve color even that well (about 16bpp, glad you asked). Sure, there are some fun things you can do by treating non-color attributes - e.g. transparency - as though they were colors, increasing the on-paper bpp, but when it comes to the output this little numbers game is of no benefit to consumers.
>besides the enormous amount of CPU and bus bandwidth, there really isn't anything here that can't be found on the average 1999-2000 consumer PC hardware.
Yeah, besides that. Besides the most important determinants of overall system performance, which involve the most difficult design challenges, it's just like a PC. That's like saying that besides the armor plating and the big gun on the front an Abrams tank is just like the family car...in other words it's a totally meaningless statement.
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It would at least be helpful if someone could get info on the thing's internal bus bit-depth: if _that_ is 16 bit too, we're talking 'The Horror! The Horror!' time. Even a sound-tracker I've occasionally worked with (PlayerPro) has gone to running internal DSP busses at 32 bits and dithering to 16 for output- outputting 20 or 24 bit would be better still for professional work. The bar's being raised pretty damn rapidly when a ill-funded audiogeek like me can work in 20 bit analog mixing, all ready to feed DVD-audio at full resolution. If this GScube is not capable of doing better than 16 bit output that's a major problem. Can't it at least do 8 outputs at 24 bit by storing the least significant bits on dedicated tracks? Hell, my _ADAT_ can do that (or could if I had two of 'em :) )
And I've just seen a demo of the beast. The guy shows what looks like an extract of the upcoming CGI film Final Fantasy from Square, but then he stops the scene at any point, rotates it in real time changes the lightning with no visible degradation... It's simply *amazing*.
From what the guy said, their was 500000 polygons on the screen. He also said it was a prototype and that Sony doesn't sell them yet.
Anybody know how this thing compares to the SGI machine just named? And are they using these things for the Final Fantasy movie that's coming up?
How much would one of these cost? Hopefully they'll provide PS2 dev tools with one.
One of these links has already been posted above, but if anyone wants a well-written, easy-to-understand-but-plenty-technical introduction to why the Emotion Engine is cheap to produce and a terrible general-purpose chip, but an amazing design for high-quality low-latency 3D graphics, assuming programers can figure out how to take advantage of it...
This is wrong. The consumer level version of the chip is poor (not terrible) for general purpose use, but this is because it needs to be in a $299 device. So, for example, there's only 8K of data cache and 16K of instruction cache, and the clock speed is a "slow" 300MHz. There's no reason that both of these have to be true in high-end device. In fact, Sony has said that they plan to pushing for higher speed chips.
Hmmm...re-reading the above I find it humorous that a 300MHz chip isn't treated with reverence. Heck, that was top of the line in 1998. And when you look at the amazing PlayStation games that have been done with a 30MHz processor...
Oh look it's another cube. How original :)
That said a nice purple anodised aluminium one would look quite cool on my desk.
Seriously though it should be quite cool to see what sort of real time content it can produce. I'd like to see more of the entirely CGI environment that real ppl can be placed into. BBC news certainly used to have something similar to that.
developers are struggling with the complexity of programming the emotion engine, so how much support and backing will this receive?
Time does not wait.
Does anyone know a good resource where I could get the specs on the CPU? is it CISC or RISC? I'd like to see the assembly set for one of them.
-Leo
http://ps2.ign.com/news/22490.html
They're Japanese. The Japanese say "CG" almost compulsively. It's one of those English buzzwords you see surrounded by katakana -- CG this, CG that. It's applied to anything from Toy Story to art hand-drawn in Photoshop (i.e. things we wouldn't normally call CGI in the Western world). And by the way, CGI has stood for Computer Generated Imagery since before Tim Berners-Lee set hands on a NeXT system.
Face it the best systems for games are the really expensive cutting edge ones.
Heh, yep. About two decades ago when I was working at Concordia University we got in a brand spanking new VAX 11/780, complete with a Norpak graphics unit for some mechanical engineering project, and an A/D - D/A converter for some speech recognition project.
Starting from a simple program to put a shape on the graphics screen and move it around, it wasn't long before I had multi-player "Vaxteroids" running on it: input was by keyboard from the various VT-52 terminals in the room, display was on the central large monitor connected to the graphics box (not card!), and sound was via an amp and speaker I'd rigged up to the D/A outputs. The whole thing written in Fortran, running under VMS no less.
Not quite up to the likes of Galaxian that was hitting the arcades about that time, but better (IMHO) than original Asteroids and multi (up to 4) players (kind of a cross between Asteroids and Space War).
-- Alastair
One of these links has already been posted above, but if anyone wants a well-written, easy-to-understand-but-plenty-technical introduction to why the Emotion Engine is cheap to produce and a terrible general-purpose chip, but an amazing design for high-quality low-latency 3D graphics, assuming programers can figure out how to take advantage of it...
start with these excellent articles from ArsTechnica:
Emotion Engine overview
Comparison of the EE's rendering process to that of a typical PC + graphics card
The second article is, IMO, the particularly interesting and relevant one, since the approach to rendering taken by today's high end graphics workstations from SGI et. al. is more similar to the PC + graphics card way of doing it than the EE way of doing it. Or rather, the PC + graphics card way of doing it was copied from the workstation approach. Of course, the major problem spot of the PC + card approach to rendering--the horrible bandwidth from the motherboard to the graphics card (the AGP bus is a joke compared to what would be required to actually stream textures into the graphics card in real-time; as it is now, entire levels must be loaded into the graphics card memory and stay there until the next level is accessed)--is not such a problem on a high-end workstation. It'll be quite interesting to see how this GScube thing compares, but the specs are there for it to make a very inexpensive and powerful alternative to the standard SGI stuff.
This is simply not finely grained enough for professional use. Do some calculations- first, you know what 8 bit audio sounds like? Familiarize yourself with how bad that sounds and how grungy it is. In 16 bit linear encoding, 8 bit sound is present at a volume level of 0.39 percent of the total volume of the recording (less than a hundredth of full volume). This does not sound significant, but check that out in _db_- volume is _logarithmic_. In decibels, that 'grunge zone' with eight bit resolution is not 96 db down, not 80, but around _50_ db down. 50 db and 96 db are pretty damn different, aren't they? 50 db is within the range of any junky thing with speakers on it.
When you say that 16 bit is 96 db and 96 db down is 'the quietest sounds you can hear' you are conveniently overlooking the fact that those 'sounds' 96 db down are _one_ _bit_. One bit is not 'sound'. One bit is old PC speakers or music played over the one-bit tone generator on old Apple IIs. I would argue that 8 bits is not sound either, but cheap noise to send over the web or something- and if you listened to 8 bit audio even at 44.1K you'd likely agree. Yet that 8 bit zone is in _all_ 16 bit recordings, a mere 50 db down. Anything around 50 db down is being represented by merely 8 bits... hell, 12 bits is still noticably compromised and that is a mere 20 db down. This sort of thing is not acceptable for professional work- hence the amazing and deeply needed proliferation of 20 and 24 bit devices, and of internal busses of DSPs running at 24 or 32 or even 48 bits or more, for doing calculations without losing everything to rapidly accumulating bit error.
20 bits, 24 bits are not perfect, but they are a hell of a lot better. A 20 bit unit like my ADAT is running around 12 bits where a CD would be down to 8- which is enough better (it's 50 db down after all) to leave little room to gripe. 20 db down, the 20 bit unit is at 16 bits. If you have a fully 24 bit unit, it's going to have 16 bits available a whole 50 db down, and get very close in practice to what you mistakenly believe for 16 bit digital audio- that you'll get infinitesimally faint sounds recorded and sounding convincing and believable. There's no way you're going to do that with 50 db down having all the resolution of a Sun .au file, but it doesn't take all that many more bits to fix matters.
I should thank you for inspiring me to hunt down these various formulas and tables and to work this out mathematically- I didn't realise it was quite as bad as it is! :) It's a piss-poor engineer who can't get 50 db of dynamic range out of his recordings if he tries :)
When you are looking at your specs, use these numbers for a reference of what the maximum signal quality is for various bit depths (given linear encoding these are the SAME NUMBERS as Matt gives- but ouch, when you get a sense of what it actually means in practice!)
Its called SMP. Maybe you've heard of it? 3D rendering is hideosly parallizable. You've got a few hundred million vertecies laid out in memory, and you can process them all in any order. Its a cinch to divy that up between the processors. Then, after geometry, you can do a lot of the lighting in parallel. Or if you're doing raytracing, you could assign a ray to each processor. As for rendering, you can simply do the SLI type thing 3DFx does. I mean putting many rendering and geometry engines together is nothing new. Just take a look at some of SGI's RealityEngine machines.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
For starters, much of what Avid does. Real-time effects for news and sports shows, for example.
Ohhhh, so that's why those two penguins are there when I boot up. I always thought it stood for Supports Multiple Penguins. Silly me.
The difference between GScube and some of its predecessors in this field of computer equipment seems to be that GScube is being created with real-time content generation in mind. The overall plan seems to involve generating content with this development system, which is then streamed from a powerful server to viewers downloading it via broadband Internet connections.
What do they mean by real time content generation? Is the article just throwing out buzzwords or do they think that someone is going to be creating something on one of these boxes and simultaneously uploading it so that it can be streamed from a "powerful server?" That would seem a little hard to swallow. Are they trying to say that these things can render so quickly that they will practically (or actually) be able to pull off real-time raytracing as a developer is creating something, so once he has finished he can send it to the server to be downloaded to everyone lucky enough to have a high-bandwidth connection?
mmm...real-time raytracing. that would be something.
Moller
>Carmack gives a good explanation on why wee need more than jsut 32 bit color.
That's a good pointer. Thank you.
What he's talking about is basically roundoff error that occurs when multiple operations are applied to a pixel. He may have a point. OTOH, there's a little voice in my head that says the accumulation of roundoff errors is not really inevitable but is really an artifact of exactly how and in which order those operations are done in a "traditional" rendering scheme. Obviously it's going to be even worse with something like 3dfx's fractional-pixel FSAA scheme. Maintaining higher-precision color information, at least in some parts in the rendering process, may be the easiest solution, but I think we also need to consider whether this accumulation of roundoff errors is a sign that traditional rendering methods are headed down the wrong path entirely.
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"strategic vision for the evolution of computer entertainment in the broadband network era."
:))
To me, the most entertaining part is building the broadband network infrastructure itself - once that's done, it'll just be a pipe for all the same old commercials, spam and asst. garbage that clogs up AM radio, TV, Cable, telephones, snail mail, email, search engines, etc. Ya know, business as usual
Have a fun day....
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It is believed by many that Sony had in fact asked it's government to do this in order to:
- Create enormous media hype. This of course happened very successfully and even had its own Slashdot story!
- Prevent people from legally exporting amounts (larger than 2?) of PS2 from Japan and into a foreign market where Sony hadn't officially launched the product. Most notably, the United States.
On the other hand, considering that:and thus has considerable processing muscle, wouldn't it be extremely ironic if the GScube is placed under strict export laws by the Japanese government because it is a mini-supercomputer that can become a "threat to world peace by 'rogue states'." Now wouldn't that be a hilarious thought?
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
So what software is available for it? This is going to be about useless unless there is some useful software ported to it. I doubt that we are going to see Maya, SoftImage, or any Discreet Logic tools on it anytime soon. Granted, big companies like Digital Domain and ILM can dedicate some programmers to porting in house tools, but why would they want to? For the same amount that it would cost them to pay for the developers time, they can buy a couple more SGIs. I'll be curious to see what the future brings for this product.
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-- Dave
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
First things first. They probably won't run Linux on this thing. Even if they do, it will be either /.) and to get full performance out of it, its going to take specialized software. Not only are most off the shelf apps just not designed for 16 way operation, but none are designed with the peculiarities of the PS2 hardware in mind. More likely than not, Sony will probably get some companies to port special versions of their software and more likely than not will use a custom OS for the machine. (Though the choice of OS really doesn't matter.) As for performance, specially designed software will scream on this machine. 3D is a very easy task to split up between multiple processors and thus, the 16 way architecture will result in at least 10X the performance of a PS2. To put that into perspective, a PS2 is a good deal more powerful than a GeForce2 GTS, probably on par (or exceeding) Intergraph's Wildcat 4210 (the fastest PC based OpenGL accelerator.) Now at 10x that performance, you've got a machine easily capable of trashing most SGIs. Its not a Reality Engine, but if Sony can pull this off in a sane price it should be quite a machine. Secondly, has anybody notice the amount of embedded RAM on this thing? 32MB per chip! Not only is that one hell of a jump from 4MB on the PS2, but I'm wondering how they got a manufacturing process to handle all those transistors without having 1% yields.
A) Heavily tweeked or
B) Simply serve as a host for some special access libraries. This is a very parallel machine with a lot of quirks (graphics RAM divided into 16 32MB chunks for example) (read the article about the difficulty of programming the Playstation 2 earlier on
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Its stupid to use BeOS in its current state as a webserver. It can be done (especially since BeTips is running the experimental BONE networking) but why? BeTips simply runs the site on BeOS, because
A) That's his personal machine and he uses BeOS on it, and
B) He wants to show support for the platform.
The GScube is not designed for web serving. Its got small caches and unspectacular integer performance. Additionally, you're essentially wasting the 512MB or graphics RAM and the 16 graphics processors. Its like buying an SGI Infinate Reality to do webserving. Sure its doable (maybe it won't be, the GScube might use a custom OS) but you'd be wasting your money on the additional graphics hardware, and you'd be getting less performance than you would have from a much cheaper machine that was designed to handle webserving.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Gee Ess Cube?
Gee Scoob Eee?
Hey! Scooby snacks for everybody!
Rami James
Guy who fried his brain today. (Must.. go.. home!)
--
rJames.org - illustration
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