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Distributed Playstation

Posted by Hemos on from the concatenate-two-buzzwords dept.

withinavoid writes "News.com has a story up about the next generation Playstation 3. Apparently the game developers are asking for a 1000 times performance increase and that's just not possible, so they are looking at distributed computing as a possibility. "

4 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't make sense... by Ami+Ganguli · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the article, this makes no sense at all. Rendering a video game isn't nearly the same kind of workload as rendering a movie. The former requires low-latency, whereas the latter can be farmed out and done in batches.

    There's no way you're going to get a 1000x performance boost by distributing a video game over the Internet.

    I would bet that the real idea is to build in support for distributed multi-player games, and somewhere between the engineers and the marketroids things got horribly twisted.

    --
    It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
  2. Dumb by rho · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I got as far as "maybe the Playstation 6 or 7 will be based on biotechnology", or some such garbage.

    Please. This story is nothing more than a trumped up press release targetted towards the Xbox and GameCube in an attempt to either 1) slow their sales or 2) engender positive mindshare for the Playstation.

    Distributed computing? In other words, "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these..."

    --
    Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
  3. Chip MultiProcessors? by Erich · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Generating fast traditional processors is getting harder and harder to do. Look how fast a P4 is compared to a P3 or a P2, in terms of actual performance per transistor count. It sucks. In fact, per transistor count, smaller, simpler chips (386) do better. Since most of the performance improvement in chips comes from process migration instead of architecture (386s would run a lot faster in a .13 micron process...) one idea is to put a bunch of simple processors on a single chip.

    There are several problems with this. Memory bandwith, power consumption, etc... but the main one is that most normal applications are written for a single thread.

    Imagine how many MIPS 4K cores you can fit in 300mm^2 in 4-5 years. That's a lot of power. Sure, they might only run at 1-2Ghz, but there will be 64 of them on a die. If you can harness that power, it might give your game developers much of that huge performance boost they want.

    Think beowulf-cluster-on-a-chip. As with multiple-workstation distributed computing clusters, the trick is not in setting the thing up, but in figuring out how to distribute your work.

    --

    -- Erich

    Slashdot reader since 1997

  4. Very interesting Microsoft quote by Jeppe+Salvesen · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The lead developer for "Microsoft's Xbox Advanced Technology Group", Pete Isensee, said something interesting:
    "Microsoft has this stigma about not getting it right until version three. We didn't have a choice with Xbox. If we didn't get it right with version one, Sony and Nintendo would eat us alive."
    What is the implicit message? I would say : "As long as we have direct, real competition, we will produce quality products on time"
    --

    Stop the brainwash