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A PlayStation In Deep Blue, Or Vice Versa?
Tebubaga writes: "The BBC is reporting that IBM has won the contract to produce the next generation of micro-processors for Sony's Playstation 3 game console due sometime in 2004. Sony, IBM and Toshiba are joining toether to create a 'supercomputer on a chip' which sounds like the PS3 will be much more than just another games console. Quote, 'The result will be consumer devices that are more powerful than IBM's Deep Blue super-computer, operate at low power and access the broadband internet at ultra-high speeds". Bet it still won't do my laundry though...'
Wow, the Playstation 3 sound great! I'm saving the money I was going to spend on a Playstation 2 to make sure I can buy the next one as soon as it comes out!
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I am so tired of this marketspeak coming from everywhere that seems to imply that if you buy the latest processor you're going to be able to surf faster.
Come on, even if I stick a pentium IV, or one of these vaporware chips and connect to the internet via a modem, it's not going to be faster than a 486.
If I connect via a cable connection shared with 200 other people who download stuff all day at the same time, it's not going to be faster than a 486.
If I connect via whatever connection you want, and the proverbial backhoe operator cuts some fibers causing massive lag spikes everywhere, it's not going to be faster than a 486, and it has the potential to be slower than a carrying pigeon if you happen to be on the wrong side of the cut hop.
-- the cake is a lie
The PS3 Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic gameplaying. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
When can we have linux on this?
I really really really doubt it, remember that Sony makes quite a pretty penny from all of these 'specialized units'.
;)
What they want, is to get you to buy one, period. Then, if you want the features that a 'real' DVD player has (progressive component outputs, better remote control, HDCD compatibility etc.) they will steer you towards one of their 'specialized' players.
The same can be said about hi-fi systems: while the drive pick up mechanics are pretty much the same in your cdrom vs in a dedicated cd unit that goes in an hi-fi, all of the other electronics is very different (converters, preamplifiers etc.) since the objective of your cheap playstation is to play games, while the objective of a (sometimes twice as) expensive cd drive, is to provide the most faithful possible music reproduction.
Also remember that the 'specialized' CD player will have a good remote control, and a nice led display that tells you a lot of information without having to turn on the tv all the time...
All of this talk of 'digital convergence' is IMHO marketing doublespeak, since if they really wanted things to converge, the form factor of a console would much more closely resemble the form factor of a 'standard' dvd/cd/hi-fi component, with a nice, big, illuminated programmable LCD display at the front, that can display relevant information (track number, cd-text, whatever). Let's also not forget a really nice remote control, maybe similar to a palm device, so the 'keys' can be reprogrammed on the fly.
Obviously, if they did indeed create such a component, they would be shooting themselves in the foot, since they wouldn't be taken seriously by the audiophiles (my CD player plays games? bleurgh) by the gamers (what's with this big square console, the Xbox looks nicer and it's way smaller) and by the average user (1500$ for this thing? I don't need all this stuff, I just want to play games/play dvds/play CDs).
My 2c, 'specialized' units will not die for a long time coming, not really because of technical reasons (even if, like I said, nobody has yet tried to produce a *real* universal player) but mostly because a specialized unit, obviously, will be better and cheaper at what it does, and because the designer will be able to target its visual appearance to its target market (that's why you'll never see wood panelings in a console and transparent orange plastic in a high-end stereo equipment
-- the cake is a lie
2004? That's more vaporous hype than microsoft!
The game I'm waiting for is the game that lets you enter a complete virtual world and do essentially anything you want. There would be stories and quests and things that you could go on, but I'd want to experience that fat lazy guy sitting at home watching the TV... wait a minute... nevermind. Anyhow, I want something that is like TradeWars (the new upgraded one doesn't impress me) where you can be good or evil. Something like a StarWars MMORPG where you get to play the stormtroopers - just for shits and giggles I suppose.
; 2b=b;2=1
Most games now-a-days rely on repetition and call it "skill." True, zerg-rushing a terran base is simple enough, but a real skill would be one of the zerg that are in the rush. Ever see how many of your little ones die in the attack and you win anyway? Wouldn't be much fun if you were amoung the first to die.
I like Rainbow six type games where, when you die, that's it. None of this die, respawn and try again bullshit. I want consequences. I want a game that if I fuck up I'm starting all over with nothing.
I'd love a game where AI characters come looking for you if you kill their boss... but not this shit of "all the AI guys rush in" once you do it. I want the bad guys to have lives. I love hitman for the way it plays so realistically with the AI characters but I hate the way they have set patterns. I might like it better if they told the character to start at point A and, however way they feel, get to point B. Then I have to get them but I don't know exactly where they are - makes it more of a challenge. Makes it more interesting.
What are you looking at?
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a=b;a^2=ab;a^2-b^2=ab-b^2;(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b);a+b=b
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
when he can't beat the PS3 in the CompUSA display case...
Don't Panic...
Are you actually trying to tell me that if you're standing among a crowd of 1000 people, you're going to be able to distinguish among
individual strands of hair for all 1000 people?
No. But you should be able to see large-scale effects -- highlights, flowing in the wind, etc. Try looking at someone sitting 10 feet away -- their hair has a ridiculous amount of visible detail at that distance. Current systems can't come within a tiny fraction of this in real-time.
My point being that human perception, and not raw processing horsepower, is quickly becoming the limiting factor in video graphics presentations.
Ridiculous. Current resolutions are far below what the eye can see. Anti-aliasing can keep this from being overly apparent on large-scale features, but it cannot counter the fact that details that you would be able to easily see with your eye are far too small to render.
When computers can render the loops in my carpet halfway across my room and make the ant struggling across those loops visible and recognizeable at proper scale, come back and we'll talk.
because the human eye can only distinguish the difference in the nearest few trees.
Perhaps you just need to get your eyes checked. When I stand in a forest, I can make out individual leaves and branches on trees two hundred feet away with ease.
And then there's the macroscopic effects. A tree half a mile away doesn't need to have each leaf rendered -- but it needs to _look_ like it does. So you either need to have some higher-level model of what trees look from a distance, or simulate each leaf anyway.
In the event that we do reach the limits of perception (probably inevitable, but certainly not near!), then anyone with a modicum of imagination can think of tons of things to do with the extra horsepower. More accurate simulation springs immediately to mind. Sure, your tree are accurate to the leaf, but do they wave properly in the wind? What about the hair?
The enemies of Democracy are
Uh huh. I still haven't seen a rendered-on-the-fly animation that I can't immediately tell was computer generated. And I don't mean piddly little GeForce cards either. I'm talking about million-dollar SGI workhorses. The need for processing power doesn't come from pushing polygons. It comes from realistically making the objects in the environment behave in a realistic fashion. There isn't a computer in existence that can realistically render the motion of hair blowing in the wind. Even if we get to the point where a computer can render an animation of a human being that is indistiguishable from a film of the real article, we still won't have enough power. The environments get larger and larger. Once you can simulate one person, you need to be able to simulate a thousand at the same time. Think massively multiplayer environments. We aren't even close to having the raw processing power necessary to simulate large-scale environments with thousands of objects.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
..Actually it will play these Tiny, secure music disks the size of a quarter, but what with that security hole in TCP, users will be horrified to discover that while using the off-shore napster the new document-destroying copy protection will wipe these tiny disks clean. The users will revolt, ultimately leading to the PS3 Marketdroids escape in their brand new electric cars (which are luckily faster than the users Ferrari's).
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Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
Sorry, that's a bunch of crap. There isn't a single GPU on the market that can 'do photo-realistic rendering at over 30fps.' Consider that a photo is something like 4000x3000. Now consider 30fps. Now consider 32bpp necessary to do photo-realism. Just pumping out the bitmap is
4000x3000x32x30=11.5Gb/s of bandwidth.
There isn't an architecture on the planet (save -maybe- Crays) that has that kind of bandwidth. Even the on-die interconnect between the processor cores of the POWER4 is only like 6.4Gb/s, a little more than half, and the POWER4 isn't even out yet.
Take a look at the DOOM3 screenshots. That's not photo-realistic. The technology doesn't even exist to make photo-realistic pictures on the fly. Even the Final Fantasy movie, while extremely realistic, is still fairly obviously CG. Consider that Toy Story 2 took, I believe, 2 weeks on 168 processors worth of Sun servers to do the final render, I think it's safe to say that there are many years yet to go before a game console is capable of real-time photo-realistic rendering at over 30fps, much less the 60-70fps that the human eye can differentiate between.
Nintendo looks shaky.
Why is this such a common myth? (or are you basing this on some numbers?) The only numbers I've seen is that Nintendo is raking it it in with the GB/GBA, and soon the gamecube (which looks like a kick ass system).
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python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
IBM also made the ppc gekko processor in Nintendo's gamecube, so they're not new to the game-console embedded-processor market.
It just goes to show that whoever strikes gold, it's the fellows selling the picks and shovels who really make a bundle. No one is sure which of the big console players will dominate the market in five years, but whoever it is, IBM will be selling their processors. That's a winning strategy by anyone's standard.
The P3 will certainly be more than just a games console. They've said before that their aim is to replace specialised units like DVD players and hi-fi systems with a central unit which does all of these jobs - the Playstation 2 makes a start at this, but by the time the P3 is rolled out people will be used to the idea of a central controlling device.
And let's face it - the P3 is likely to sell well solely on it's strength as a games machine and Sony's marketing muscle.
Of course there is a lot of risk with this - a central controlling device means that it's far easier to incorporate more effective content control mechanisms - you only need to include them with one device rather than every device in the house. And people are likely to choose convenience over freedom as they so often do.
Unfortunately it's only rarely that people reject convenience, and Sony will undoubtedly have another huge hit with the P3. If they can manage to produce any of course :)
The real Paul Vallee is slashdot userid 2192, and, what do you mean it's not cool to point out your low userid?
In the large historical view, consoles are gradually heading *away* from monopoly.
u zzword of the future. It'll be like a stereo component! Honest!).
While there were a decent number of consoles in the 70's back when the games "industry" was only a small step away from the concurrent hobbyist PC market (or at least it seems that way to me, who wasn't around at the time much less following the video game market), the late 70's/early 80's were essentially monopolized by Atari, especially the 2600. ColecoVision and Intellivision were around as well (I think they were competing against a later Atari, perhaps the 7600?), but Atari had a large, long run as the controlling power in console games. That they had a monopoly is unquestionable.
Especially because when they tanked, the entire industry tanked with them. Indeed, the console market collapse of...1983 or so?...had many writing off the console market for good. And it would have stayed that way too, were it not for giant monopoly #2, the NES.
The NES came out in late 1985 at a time when no one in their right mind was thinking of bringing out a video game console. Its only competition, the SMS, didn't even go on sale until 1988 I believe. In any case, it wasn't a competition at all; the NES sold something like 80 million units in the US, more than any other console ever. Pretty much every household with children had one. The 16-bit generation (SNES and Genesis) barely sold half that *combined*. Meanwhile, the Master system sold like 6 or 8 million of the things, mainly to people who already had Nintendos. That was a monopoly, plain and simple. Nothing like that is likely to occur in the video game market again, for the simple reason that the situation that led to it (i.e. only one company actually believed the console market was big business) will likely never occur again.
Ever since then, there has always been at least 2 large competitors for each generation of hardware. The Genesis and SNES were roughly evenly matched in sales. The PS1 eventually won a decisive victory over the N64 and Saturn, but by the time that was brutally clear, Dreamcast was already around; in other words, while the PS1 was a spectacular success, it never held the sort of monopoly position that the NES did for something like 5 years (until Genesis).
The PS2 has beaten the DC (mainly on the basis of hype, which in an industry where cross-platform compatibility is unimaginable, is just as powerful and dangerous as FUD in the computer industry), but will still suffer competition from it until XBox and GameCube arrive. While I don't think Indreema has a chance in hell, the open source idea is powerful enough that an open console might actually make it a few years from now. (As has been pointed out, the fact that consoles are a loss leader which the parent company tries to make up by licensing games presents a large problem to this business model, though...)
At this point, it is certain that the PS2 will face serious competition for sales from at least 2 other consoles at every step of its life. (Now: DC, N64 and PS1; 2002 and later: XBox and GameCube.) It is by *no* means clear that PS2 will be the eventual winner, either; in my view, MS has taken all the tactics that made the PS1 such a surprise success (good developer relations, easy to program, just concentrate on games) while Sony has strangely decided to try to emulate the tremendous failures of the Sega Saturn (launch with low volumes and bad games, put theoretical performance above ease of programming, overhype) and crap like the CDi and 3D0 (be the digital-convergance-set-top-information-highway-b
Gosh, it's not enough that Apple tells me my page layout machine out-supercomputes supercomputers (hope the SETI people appreciate my largess, because I sure don't need supercomputing power). Now my gaming system needs to have more CPU power than my laptop.
Of course, there are some downsides:
Me:Inserts DOA5 game
PS3:Your request to see jiggling has been denied. I'm busy defeating Kasparov again.
Me:Up, up, down, down...
PS3:I'm sorry, I can't do that, Doctor.
Maybe we need a visual test on par with the turing test?
:-)
:-)
Call it, I don't know, Turingv2.0
Basically, have someone look at a scene thats unfolding in realtime on a monitor in front of them, and decide if its real footage, or a computer generated scene
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Why do so many people here post about this being overkill for graphics? Sure, a modern graphics card with adequate memory can saturate a monitor or tv, but Nvidia's not doing incredible AI for me. With chips like these, now while my GPU is spitting out all those pretty pictures my proc can be planning on its next 100,000 moves.
Wouldn't this be cool for strategy/simulation games? AI wouldn't do as much for me in a frag fest, but this would be cool if I could upgrade my old 486-era Civil War strategy game to this and face off with Robert E. Lee.
Now this does sound incredibly interesting, but lets think about desktops (god forbid something usefull!) for a minute. Lets see.. Moore's law states processing power will double every 18 months. That means it should double roughly 1.8 times by 2004 right? 2^(1.8)= roughly 3.5. The fastest 32 bit desktop processor currently sold runs at 1.5 gigahertz.. so by the time the PS3 comes out top of the line destop should run at about 5.25 gigahertz.
a rallel.html)
. 3.3a.html) "this year Deep Blue will be running on a faster system - the latest version of the SP - which uses 30 P2SC or Power Two Super Chip processors"
To quote from ibm, (http://www.research.ibm.com/actc/RS_6000/Topic_P
"[the] P2SC design has reached its peak operating frequency at 160MHz" and (http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/meet/html/d
Assuming pefect smp deep blue theirfore runs at 4.8 Ghz.
5.25 is greater than 4.8. 5.25 is projected by Moore's law for 2004, so this is no big shakes.
By 2004 we should see top of the line desktops just as powefull.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
A supercomputer on a chip, much much more than a games console, fast internet access blah blah blah. Has everyone forgotten how much of Sony's PR bilge was regurgitated in the runup to the PS2 launch? The let-down launch titles, the buggy DVD software, the self-corrupting memory cards? Are the world's media already taking backhanders to hype up the PS3? Let's forget all about it until the launch and judge it the contents of the box in 2004, hmmm?
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
I would like to see an Open Source console, one which can be cloned, much like the IBM PC could be cloned. This would lead to a vital market. It does not so much matter bout the software side of things - a games console does not really need an OS, the games can hit the metal.
If one company created an open architecture and promoted it, before long there would be hundreds of clone makers and a real movement in the industry.
We must break the hegemony of the sealed, synthetic box.
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