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Playstation 2 Innards, Annotated
Kenneth writes: "Firingsquad.com just released a really hefty technical article explaining exactly how the PS2 works. It goes into detail about the number of FMAC/FDIV units each PS2 processor contains vs. other computing platforms, and actually delves into more than just the graphics capabilities of the machine." The article also addresses some of the corporate / technological history of how that cute blue box came to be cooler than hula-hoops.
http://www.iongames.org/glossary/terms.html
At least this glossary says the Expansion pack has it, and the system itself has 4mb of RDRAM...
http://www.pcquest.com/nov98/speed.asp
This site mentions the usage of RDRAM in a variety of devices, including the N64
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Right here
t /
m mi ng/Technical/
http://mc.pp.se/dc/
http://members.tripod.co.uk/tom_waters/dreamcas
http://www.dcdev.f2s.com/links/Dreamcast/Progra
http://www.diedrichs.org/dreamcast/
And since the Dreamcast is powered by a Hitachi SH4, you can get detailed, comprehensive documents for that from http://www.hitachi.com
FMAC does not stand for Floating-Point Multiply-Adder Calculator. FMAC is short for floating-point multiply-accumulator. A MAC operation is a multiply followed by an accumulation. It is used to add the product of two factors to an existing sum, such as when computing the dot product of two vectors. MAC instructions are pretty common on DSPs where they are used in various signal processing applications.
Yesterday it worked; today it is not working; Windows is like that...
Stop telling bullshit..
Dreamcast does not run Linux. Dreamcast can run two os which are on your game disc, depending on developper's choice. They are Shinobi (sega's light and powerful os, used by 99% of games) or the crappy and discontinued WindowsCE (used by 1% of games). The CE thing is just marketing hype. If you look at first generation japanese dreamcast they had "Designed for Windows CE" on front, newer ones have "Compatible with Windows CE"...
Despite popular rumor, PS2 doesn't run linux either. Devkits consist of two boards, one "real" PS2 hardware, and a pentium class board which is the controller of the development system. This board, which is the one hooked on the network is the ones that runs Red Hat. But in no way does your average PS2 run any Linux.
PowerSaw 2?? Yeah, heaps more powerful than the first one... Cuts through about 20 inches/sec. Still, most of the blades at release suck, but they have some awesome looking ones coming... Still for now I think I'll stick with my DreamCutter.
Fwiw, SGI uses Rambus memory in their IMPACT graphics systems (IMPACT for the Indigo2 came out in 1995).
From over at the Gaming-Age forums:
Somewhat decently informed article but flawed on plenty of points nonetheless. I don't feel like going into details about that though, just to point a few that stand out.
"GS is texel bandwith limited"
- GS is most certainly not texture bandwith limited, quite the opposite, there is headroom left even with all 32bit texel access. (and you can figure in color lookup on GS just as well reducing texel lookup bandwith requirement further if it was really needed).
"GS is underpowered in fillrate vs XBox"
- XBox has only twice the texel rate of PS2. With 1.5 year time gap that hardly makes the latter underpowered. But I guess Tresh likes to forget fillrate jumped up roughly 10times in last 1.5 years on PC market.
"PS1 compatibility is a hardware design"
PS1 compatibility is Not a hardware design, it's software emulated. The only part of PS1 hardware in there is the main cpu that also functions as an I/O unit. The entire 3d pipeline is emulated through EE and GS.
More could be said but I'm kinda tired myself today...
Peace
Had Sony bothered to write a set of high-level libraries, an emu might have been able to intercept calls to it and translate them a port of Sony's library.
You could probably shift the bulk of such a library's work onto the NV20's T&L processor, leaving the x86 to deal with the application's physics code and the like. Of course, Sony hasn't yet released such a library so this is pure speculation.
Of course, then, you wouldn't have compatibility for the best-performing games on the machine, and no one would want half-done compatibility. Those games are always the ones that go straight to the metal, like some of Square's latest games. While it's a stumbling block not to have libraries for developers getting used to the system, those that do will be writing much more powerful games. The article covers a couple of possible uses of the different units in the Emotion Engine architecture for different kinds of games.
There's also a few other problems that I'm not sure the X-box could handle. The main CPU core is capable of doing two 64-bit integer operations at once. I'm not even sure if the x86 family supports 64-bit integer ops. I'm positive it doesn't support doing them in an explicitly parallel fashion, though you could try to rely on the processor to schedule them at once in a superscalar fashion. At the very least, it won't do 64-bit integer math at optimum speeds. Then, there's always the precise timing based on knowledge of the hardware that emulators sometimes have trouble with.
Add to that the requirement for more memory than the PS2 has total (so that the games and the emulator can all be in memory at once) and the usual 50% or more slow-down that even the best emulators seem to have compared to native chip speeds due to emulator overhead... Well, it seems to be at least nigh-impossible.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
As I understand it, the max theoretical limit for the Playstation 2 is around 75 million polygons per second. However, this would be without any texturing, shading, or other necessary things like AI or physics modeling. The realistic maximum limit for the PS2 during gameplay is said to be 20 million polygons per second.
So, at what time will PC technology surpass the Sony box? Considering the imminent arrival of 1 GHz Athlons, plus the hardware T & L of video cards like the GeForce, will a PC system be able to match the PS2? Or will the I/O limitations of the PC cripple it in comparison to the PS2?
I don't see why everybody is so excited about the hardware of all these next generation video game consoles. It really seems like the software is the most important thing. Games that were released with the PS1 are nothing compared to Gran Turismo 2 or the new Tony Hawk. Remember these games are running on 5 or 6 year old technology, and the graphics are not too shabby. Why don't we focus on developing software for these consoles rather than arguing about polygons per second capabilities.
Anyway, its just a rumour for now, what ya think could a useable PS2 emulator be developed for an xbox spec machine ?
Two words: Hell, no.
Just trying to emulate VU0 & VU1 on the PS2 would be far more than an x86 chip could handle. If you've read the article, you'll remember that that's up to 10 simultaneous floating point calculations that the Emotion Engine platform can chew on at once (1 for the main FPU, 4 for VU0, and 5 for VU1). Intel's SSE can barely choke on 4 at a time, if I recall correctly, coupled with -- maybe -- up to two simultaneously issued instructions to the FPUs on a Celeron. I'll almost guarantee that it gets better FPU performance too. FP and SIMD have not been x86 strong-points compared to other architectures.
Then you've got to consider emulating the interaction between various components of the system, such as how VU0 & VU1 may do math in serial or in parallel to render a scene. Then there's the insane bandwidth between the system and the Graphics Synthesizer -- 2560 bits at 150 MHz. The PS2 is meant to be constantly transferring data over its busses and to make relatively little use of cache. Oh, and then there's the little inconsequential IO processor that's basically a PSX on a chip.
Time will tell whether the X-box will be a better gaming platform or not. However, I don't care how good it is, you won't see something capable of emulating a PS2 for years, unless someone else takes the radical architectural approaches that they did. It's just too different from a regular PC-like architecture, and let's face it -- that's all the X-box is is a suped-up PC in a console box.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why the heck is MIPs so popular?
:)
The correct name is MIPS. It isn't a plural
MIPS processors are popular because they give a very good balance between price, performance, and power consumption. Compared to x86 processors, MIPS chips are much cheaper, use much less power, and give better performance at the same clock rate.
Additionally, the MIPS core is smaller than that of equivalent speed Pentiums and Athlons. This makes it easier to customize the processor and to put it on a chip with other parts. Sony has done both of these.
The icon for the "Games" topic in Slashdot is a picture of the N64 controller. However, it is widely known that most Slashdotters are biased towards the PlayStation and the PS2. Why haven't I heard other people complain about this? (No, apathy is not a legitimate reason.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Actually, the DC will run whatever is put onto the CD - it doesn't actually boot an OS from ROM - it happens that the system itself *CAN* run CE (hence the logo on the box, and on some games), but many game manufacturers are choosing to run their own stuff, rather than CE.
ArsTechnica has had a great discussion of the PS2 innards for some time now. The Firingsquad stuff was neat, but I still think the article by John Stokes outweighs it.
It is easy to control all that you see,
Okay, honestly I haven't made it all the way through the article, but it seems like a watered down version of two previous Ars Technica articles (they used the same source, so its not surprising.
emotion engine overview
ps2 vs pc
-brian
Why the heck is MIPs so popular?
This is a hypothetical, but if I recall correctly, Sega Saturn, N64, PSX, PS2, all use MIPs. Maybe other platforms too... but that boils down to the fact that, combined, there are many more MIPs machines out there than there are x86 machines (at least until recently, when PCs started to drop below 1k)
Then there is the issue that N64 and PS2 both use Rambus; why, oh why, would they be hurting for money? Did they happen to make a really stupid license deal, and not realize just how big Nintendo and Sony are, as regards sales of systems? Or is it, because the devices are sold at a loss, that Rambus can't actually make any money? I would have though Sony or Nintendo would suck up the difference?
I'm also wondering if there can be hybrid PS games? Games that play under PSX, but when popped into the PS2, new, additional features and options become available?
Or, as an alternative, could one use a PSX++ development system? Develop using mostly PSX libraries, and use useful supplementary PS2 technologies as needed?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
It's because you can license the MIPS core for a good price, and it's a very nice RISC architecture, and probably pretty cheap to fab.
Then again... I don't think that the N64 uses RAMBUS, where are you getting this info? Because the N64 came out in 1997, and I'm not quite sure that RDRAM was ready back then....
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Yeah. Only a dominant player in the market could force an architecture like that on developers. You can't port much to those vector units; you have to redesign for the platform.
The X-box, on the other hand, is very vanilla. It's an x86 PC with an nVidia graphics controller. Of course, the big problem with the X-box will be manufacturing them cheaply enough.
very poor spelling. it's "grammar."
You always have to have the word "4n" before words starting with a vowell. "4" is used by itself only before constinents.
what the hell is a "constinent?" i think you meant "consonant." and "133t" doesn't begin with a "vowell", fuckwit.
The trolling will continue until the moderation system is fixed
ooh... another moderation revolutionary. how original.