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New PlayStation 2 Chip
Iron Chef Japan writes "Sony has announced that they have fit the PlayStation 2 Emotion Engine, and the Graphics Synthesizer on to a single chip using a 0.13-micron process. This will allow Sony to make three times more PlayStation 2's annually, so it's all for the better."
They've probably been working overtime to get the production costs down on this thing to be able to drop the price and take a chunk out of X-Box's gains in marketshare. "Always wanted a PS2 but couldn't stomach dropping $300...well, here you go".
"...and generally behaved in a manner one can only describe as despicable." - February 27 2001, Michael Sims
No. Since the console is a known hardware target, Sony can not alter its specifications on the fly. That would cause serioues problems to developers with writing uniform software. This is not to say it wouldn't be possible to increase performance, however. Developers rely on each console operating the same way. Very serious developers even rely on various operations to execute in a specific amount of time. If one spin of the board did certain operations faster, it would be a nightmare on developers. They have a hard enough time as it is.
Wouldn't it be great if they could reengineer consoles so that the games were reasonably priced?
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
There's rumors to the effect that Nintendo may drop the price of the GameCube. If that happens, then it's likely Sony and possibly Microsoft will have to follow suit.
The time frame I heard was E3'ish, but please consider that it is a non-substantiated rumor.
"Derp de derp."
and fit it in a pc expansion bay, like the apparently vaporware GD-Rom drive that Sega was thinking about making. Make it $150-$175 and I'll buy it & one for my brother...
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
The new model will have exactly the same specs as the old one. This is not a PC based architecture, speeding it up could very well effect the playability (to do with timing) of existing games. One of the disadvantages of a highly low-level environment
:-(
This is purely to:
a: reduce the number of chips that they have to have custom made, thereby allowing them to more efficiently use their existing production facilities and make more PS2's per year.
b: reduce the cost of the PS2 to produce so that they can sell it at a lower price, to make people want to buy it when given the choice of the pretty(graphics, can you say easy, low cost anti-aliasing) X-Box at a similiar price point.
There is a possibility they may update the case somewhat to distingish the new model (eg: playstation vs PS1)
Samn that made me look pro X-Box. I have a PS2, but the blocky graphics gets on my nerves. Pity anti-aliasing has to be done on the CPU and is therfore rarely done
Now that the protection on the currrent line of PS2s has been pretty much cracked to allow swaps using just non-evasive plugin-card, I wonder if Sony is planning to make these new ones different enough to foil hack attempts?
The architecture may also not be designed to be clocked that much higher - think short pipelines, etc.
This means that the new PS2 is liable to be a lot cooler than the old PS2... and cheaper to boot with one less chip on the motherboard, and the other major chip costing less to make.
Lets just wait for the overclocks :)
There are two blackbirds shagging outside my window right this moment.
This also could improve chances of the PS3 being PS2 compatible.
After all, as I understand it, the PS2's compatibility with the PS1 were mainly a side effect of the "Playstation On a Chip" design that was created for the PSone.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
How lame is this? Our wonderful "story" is merely a reference to a post on gamefu which, itself, points to no credible source.
Slashdot: "Sony says... cause Gamefu says that Nikkei Microdevice says that Sony says..."
Good, God. I don't really doubt it's happened, but where's the interview? Where's the real scoop? I'd rather know a bit more than this. I'd like to know what else might get integrated; I don't consider squeezing 2 chips into 1 is going redefine the marketplace, or even Sony's bottomline.
Mod as you will, and let's hope someone on Slashdot can post a link with more info...
-
This is a logical evolution to the PS2 chip design. Those 3 chips were so integrated in function, placing them into a single unit was a logical step. It would allow for a move to $200 and eventually $100 price tags for the PS2. Likely the incentive to move design is due to Sony having recouped their investment on the 3-chip solution. Otherwise, this move would not make sence. Plus this would allow for the PS3, in 2008, to have PS2 (and PSOne) compatability.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
They're selling 20,000 PS2s a week in the UK compared to 7,000 Xboxen. 85,000 PS2s vs 5,000 Xboxen a week in Japan. I don't have the figures to hand for the US but again, more PS2s being sold than any other console. It's selling an absolutely truck loads and shows no sign of slowing down significantly.
Reducing the manufacturing cost and hence the retail cost of the console will make it's position even stronger against newcomers. Just in time for some decent games to turn up for the competition.
I forgot to reply to the two folk that asked about the Atari chips source files, so here is the link:n etlist. htm
http://www.geocities.com/glenn_b18/jaguar/
It's in a custom HDL that can decode to Verilog simply. All you need to create your own Jaguar Tom and Jerry chips.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
20,000,000 PS2s in the market place, that means people are writing games for that console so they can sell big and make money. A shit-hot hardware console is nothing without games.
The Canuck Buck is now sitting around 63 cents US.
In '91 it was 89 cents US.
.89/.63 = 1.41
$85/1.41 = $60
Feeling a little poorer now? Well, keep voting Liberal or Conservative-- they are the economic wizards that were in charge all that time....
Cheers,
-B
Does 0.13u also means that the fan won't have to be so noisy to dissipate heat on the new chip in this coming model. I found that fan on my current model way too noisy in a quiet environment (when you are not in a car in gta3.) The Nintendo cube has also a fan but it's quieter. Actually I always had trouble with Sony noise level for fans. The VAIO R505 I bought had this intolerable variable fan that made it even worse (constant noise is way better to cover with a pair of cancelling noise earphones.)
That could also mean that Sony would be able to come with a System on a card for PCs. I would definitely buy a PS2 PCI/AGP card to play on my PC. My monitor and sound system in my office are way better than my TV/Stereo in my living room.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
Industry common knowledge (aka mostly semi-informed rumor) has it that Sony has been making money on the actual PS2 unit for a while now. (In terms of the production timeline it makes sense.) M$ is still losing a bunch of money on the XBox units themselves.
I have a feeling that Sony's decision to lower prices have more to do with market positioning and the XBox. If they lower the price on the PS2 then M$ will probably follow suit on the XBox and that might make open it up to a wider market of shoppers - and since Sony has the numbers head start they may not want that. Remember - it's all about market share and Sony's winning that race with their big head start. But with both boxes at ~$200 the XBox might appeal to bigger audience and dilute Sony's advantage.
Of course they'll have to drop prices sooner or later... if this chip advance means Sony could still make money (or break even) at $200 and M$ would be losing $200 a unit Sony might not be able to resist that. Against any other company it would be a pretty automatic move - but M$ can afford (and seems willing) to take that loss and keep pushing so Sony seems to be treading much more lightly.
Don't forget Sony's price move with the PS1. It was $250 for months but the DAY before the N64 was officially announced Sony dropped the price to $200. Nintendo was then forced announced the N64 at $200 rather than $250 when it shipped. Sony literally took AT LEAST $50Million (probably more like $150Million+) from Nintendo with that move. Wicked.
My point is - Sony is a very market/sales aware company... they have a short, medium and long range plan.
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
That's exactly it. A lot of Japanese didn't want to insult Nintendo (which is, as I recall, over 100 years old) or Sony, or even Sega, by buying this unproven Gaijin product.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Yup. Take a look at the guts of a first run Playstation; it's crammed full of electronics, tended to overheat. Now, take a look at one of the last run of Playstation, before it was the PSone; same exterior case, but the inside is a little bitty circuit board, and lots of empty space.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I doubt the problem with Sony is a lack of careful chip design. The problem Sony is having with the EE is that it is freak-ass complicated. Read This ArsTechnica article for details about why the EE is so complex. Also read This article for information about why the GS is so complex. In total, the EE + GS consist of about 55 million transistors, which is comparable to the 63 million in the GeForce4. Unlike NVIDIA, however, Sony did not have the luxury of an established, evolving architecture (GeForce1 -> GeForce 4) that allowed NVIDIA to implement it's complex chips with relatively few problems.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And did X-Box have dating and fishing and hallucinating games when it launched in Japan?
Doubt it. Those games all come out for PS2, which has enough market share to support niche markets. "Hmm," says Japanese Consumer, "think I'll get a PS2."
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
In fact one of basic M$ has a strategy is to make people believe that it's product will literally "invade" the market ! they lobby journalist or make them believe this will be the case, hence the flood of press articles making people believe this. It's like a self fulfilling prediction, the more you make people believe it'll happen the more it has chance to actually happen.
Did you remember the public hysteria when Windows 95 was released ? and TV showing all these people waiting for the stores to happen to rush in and buy that crappy OS ?
Yes M$ is really very clever at that kind of mass manipulation !
It's because of this (very wrong) mindset that piracy is so rampant.
You aren't paying that much for a "silly plastic disc and some paper", you are paying for the man hours and labor of some dozens of people, all working together for year long stints or more to create graphics, models, artwork, scripting, a storyline and then put it all together into a coherent package so that you can sit down, play and enjoy the game for some 10-50 hrs (depending on the game genere.)
If you really think this, then you simply have NO freaking clue what is involved in the production of a modern video game, which today, rivals the scale and budgets of major motion pictures, of which "only" provide you with 2 or so hrs of non-interactive entertainment.
True. Like I said earlier, they had to build a new plant and design new processes/manufacturing techniques just to produce their chip. They (sony and hitachi) were trailblazers at the time. The complexity cost them quality with early development because even though they had the tech, they didn't have many good or easy to use tools to take advantage of it. The ps1 was no different in this respect.
In contrast the Xbox developers have it easy. Mature development tools, a well-known platform, etc. Despite this the Xbox just doesn't have any must-buy games and the controller sucks. There's just no compelling, console-specific software on Xbox yet.
Now, if you go into Electronics Boutique (who do mark their games up more than anyone else in town), you can find games for consoles for as much as $85, as the norm. That's fucking steep. I remember paying $55 or $60 for a game in most cases.
I'm remembering when the N64 came out, and everyone was decrying the cartridge format as being 'too expensive'. Yet, I was able to buy games for it for $70ish most of the time.
Now that everything's on CD, which cost pennies to press, games for the new systems cost MORE?!?!?!
Oh wait, and casettes are still cheaper than CD's. This has nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with companies being able to gouge whatever the hell they want from the consumer. Seriously, anyone else remember Sony and Sega's attacks on the N64? "Our games will be cheaper because we aren't using the obsolete and expensive cartridge format". Well, we see the truth now, don't we?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
... because if history is any indication, then the console with the most shovelware titles invariably wins. Atari 2600: shovelware. (Remember E.T.?) NES: shovelware. PlayStation: shovelware.
True, a lot of great games are released for these systems but the idea is to get "a library of over a hojillion titles" because new game developers, if they want their game to sell well, will jump on board the biggest bandwagon.
It may not be doing so hot now, but a few more quality titles and the X-box will be king.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
1. Lack of Japanese style games on xbox
2. Several faulty xbox consoles ruined MS' rep
3. MS refused to admit (2) was true
4. Till this day MS won't replace discs destoried by (2), just the console itself
5. Two of Japan's largest retailers quit selling the console because of (2) and (4)
...so to answer no content for the market, and poor customer service.
Also, the first guy was talking Canadian money. Is your $70ish figure for the N64 American or Canadian?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Obviously you know nothing about the PS2 arch. The Emotion Engine is actually several SGI-based chips that were tweaked and modified by Sony and packed up into just a couple chips, with a 297MHz R5900 MIPS CPU. The EE is a very powerful and complex system, and I think it rocks from a developer and gamer standpoint. Using a Wintel CPU in a game console is, IMO, a big mistake. The EE is specifically designed to be a game console; the Wintel arch is just a generic architecture with stuff games will never use, and lacking in areas where MIPS and EE together shine.
You speak of inherent problems with the EE. What are you talking about specifically? What situation do you say Sony is in now? PS2 outsold Xbox and GC combined last holiday season.
A solution to the problem with music today
Now that everything's on CD, which cost pennies to press, games for the new systems cost MORE?!?!?!
They're also a couple orders of magnitude bigger. Filling a CD requires creation of over 640 MB of data; filling a Game Boy Advance cartridge takes only 8 MB with the cartridges that nintendo is currently offering to licensees. It takes more labor to create 640 MB worth of data than 8 MB. Game companies have to pay for this labor somehow, and they do so by charging for copies of their games.
Also, US$20 when the Game Boy first came out (1990-ish) is worth what now after inflation, $35? Coincidentally, that's how much Game Boy Advance games cost now; therefore, real prices for Game Boy games have not changed.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ack, thanks for the correction.
So how much does it matter?
The N64 in its day had the coolest bad assed graphics chip ever (the SGIs of the day used lots of chips to do the same work).
What happened? Did developers ever use it? Were the 3d libraries ever tweaked to used the custom programming? Based on the success of some of the emulators, I would say no. The hardware is still faster than most of the graphics chips in PCs today (gamers boxes excepted) but a few year old PC can run the games without any trouble.
If you create your game engine so it only runs on one bit of hardware then it costs way too much to convert it to another platform. That will cost the developer money and it seems easier to work on other aspects of the game where more common tools can be used.
The 0.18 micron GS with the extra embedded memory is for a different application. It's not going to appear in future PS2s. The 0.13 micron version is a process change and is functionality identical to the existing systems.
Sony aren't going to make a PS2 that behaves differently for games. The whole console business model is predicated around mass install base - if you change the spec you splinter the market and one of two things happens. Either developers won't support the new features because it'll mean a smaller market share for their games, or customers won't upgrade and again you have a smaller market share.
Sony are extremely picky about what they let us do, too. For example don't get to use the Playstation MDEC and GTE on the I/O processor core because they clock it faster in PS2 mode and don't test those features at the higher clock speed which means they can't guarantee they work reliably in PS2 mode.
While I'm here I might as well correct the "anti-aliasing has to be done on the CPU" comment made earlier in the thread. There are two kinds of anti-aliasing commonly used on PS2. Edge anti-aliasing and scene anti-aliasing. The former requires you to depth-sort your polys because it's an alpha blending operation (and because it uses the alpha blend ciruit in the pixel pipeline your textures can't have alpha either) and as such is basically never used. The other can be done several ways but is most commonly done by rendering at 640x448 60Hz and 50/50 blending pairs of pixel rows together using the dual output circuits. You can get the same effect by copying the back buffer to the front buffer using a bilinear filter during vblank (rather than just swapping the buffer address) - in fact if you have a 512x224 front buffer and a 768x448 back buffer you get even nicer anti-aliasing and because it's a rendering operation you can do motion blur and similar effects for no extra cost.
On a final note, I think most of the games that look bad on PS2 would look basically as bad on XBox because their aliasing problems come from poor texture mapping (too much high-contrast detail, bad/no mipmaps) and poor LOD (drawing too many sub-pixel polys) and bad colour choices (NTSC is very finicky about strong colour changes). The XBox's rasteriser is much superior but it'll only get you so far.
Graham
Buying the first run of consoles isn't the best idea. The first versions of consoles tend to be less stable.
I bet this new Playstation2 will generate far less heat.
One thing that bugs me about modern games is that people think that games have to have storylines. Asteroids had no storyline, neither did Defender, Pacman, Pong, Tetris, Super Mario Kart, Metroid, Qix, Quake Deathmatch, and many other games. Games are supposed to be about play, not about interactive movies, interactive books, interactive stories, etc...
In my opinion, the best games are those based around a simple premise. Story based games lose their replay value once the story is over. Games like Tetris, Nethack, etc... those games have a simple premise and near unlimited replay value.
Scripting and stories are turning games into movies. See the final fantasy series for example. Started out great. Peaked with Final Fantasy 6... and then the games turned into movies that require button pressing to advance the story. *yawn*
Early PS2s, before the first die-shrink, had absolutely enormous heatsinks on them and ran damn hot. It's difficult to see what else they could have done to prepare for the future.
I'm assuming the answer is yes, because the external interfaces should still be the same, but does this hose up device drivers or anything?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Making something complex doesn't automatically make it bad design. The EE has a huge amount of resources available for vector processing. The PS2 needs all those resources if not more. If the only way to achieve that level of power is a complex chip, so be it. It's not just Sony, however. NVIDIA does it all the time. They introduce gigantic complex GPUs every six months at very high prices. Eventually, those chips stabilize and trickle down into the mainstream, but the high-end gets the complex stuff, always. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you can make money on it (and oh yes, Sony is making a ton of money on PS2 licenses).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...