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The Economist Looks At The Console Industry
Fromeo writes "The Economist is running an interesting article discussing the state of the console industry, along with their usual interesting graph, showing the cycle that the industry follows."
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My god...this article has more inaccuracies than a Slashdot story!
but Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all intend to release plug-in adaptors to link their boxes to networks.
And WHERE do you plug in the Xbox broadband adapter, eh?
Both Sony and Microsoft decided that ordinary modem connections were too slow to do justice to their advanced consoles.
Really? Then why does the PS2 network adapter have BOTH network and modem ports?
All three firms are losing money on their consoles, though exactly how much is difficult to say.
Wrong again! Microsoft is the only one doing this!
And as far as that sales graph goes...not a single one of these systems is 128 bit. The GameCube and Xbox are both 32-bit systems (PowerPC-based and Intel x86, respectively). I don't know about the Emotion engine in the PS2, but I suspect that with less than 32 MB of RAM, there's no reason for it to have more address lines, so it's probably 32-bit as well. And the Dreamcast uses a SH4 processor...That certainly isn't 128-bit either.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
http://www.theinquirer.net/25060210.htm
I don't have any references about Nintendo, but I've heard rumors that they can build a GameCube for That means that for at least a little while, Sony was pulling in a cool $115 in profit on each PS2 they sold.
Funny, I kepp hearing about the ps2 having problems with movies, but every dvd I put in has worked fine. Granted I've only tried about 50 or so...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Well, what do you expect when Microsoft used their petty cash account to buy Bungie (a long-time Mac-first or hybrid-first company)?
Remember, the original plan was for Halo to come out for PC, Mac, and PS/2 (the latter was officially killed, the other two are merely "delayed"). Do you think they would have sold more copies for PS/2 than they did for XBox? Do you think that Microsoft therefore basically gave up profits so they could use Halo to help XBox sales? Doesn't that sound kind of like the actions they've been convicted of in other areas?
> How the hell does one business line exceed 100% of a compannies profits?
When the company, exclusive of that business line, is losing money. For example: product A made by company X shows a net profit of $120 million a year. Leaving aside the revenues and costs associated with A, X loses $20 million a year. Result: Company X as a whole shows a net profit of $100 million a year, with product A being 120% of X's profits.
Chris Mattern
First off, the external addressing of the chip has nothing to do with the internal width of the chips registers. The last time I checked, the Nintendo Gamecube was MIPS 5000-based, which is an enhancement of the 64-bit MIPS 4000 core. And the Sony Emotion engine is a customized MIPS 4000 core with a specialized 128-bit SIMD execution unit and registers.
The only reason the X-box can challenge them with its general Intel x86 approach is the fact that the CPU clock is much faster (almost 4x the PS2's) and has a GPU that is 18 months newer in design. Otherwise, at least the PS2 is a much sweeter custom design -- and it costs far less to reproduce at today's feature sizes in the massive volume consoles are reproduced at.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Sony owns its own factories and is an R&D company - they have been lowering the size of each of the PS2's chips, and very recently put both the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer on one chip, allowing them to further cut costs on production.
Look at it this way - back when the PSX was released, the price of $300 meant it sold at a loss. Opening up a PSX showed a mess of an architecture and the things were commonly known to overheat (infact, when PSX-mastermind Ken Kutaragi showed that the PS2 could be kept in a 'vertical' position, a lot of people had to chuckle at the fact that the only way their PSX's wouldn't overheat is if they were in the same position). But by the time the PS2 was unveiled, the cost to make a PSX core was around a couple of bucks at most, a reason why a PSX chip is the I/O processor inside the PS2 (and thus allows just-about perfect PSX emulation on the PS2.
That was over a period of 5-6 years, so I imagine at this point Sony has been able to drastically cut costs to the point where $199 might actually be a profitable price.
Meanwhile, both Intel and NVidia are pocketing whatever production improvements they make, and are sticking it to Microsoft. I believe this might be the reason Microsoft has recently been getting ready to start their own chip production (for the Xbox 2, of course).
As for Nintendo, I have no idea how ArtX's Flipper GPU license is being handled (especially since ArtX is now a part of ATI, the reason ATI's logo appears on every GameCube), nor do I know too much about the Gekko, other than it was done with the help of IBM. Panasonic helped with the proprietary disc format, but I believe the only thing they got from that is the right to make a DVD-playing GameCube, the Q. The only thing I know is that the GameCube doesn't cost nearly as much to make as an Xbox, and probably less than or equal to (but more likely less than) a PS2.
That's ok, I know more about the PS2 than either of the others. The actual situation with regards to EE registers is pretty complex, as the EE actually consists of the core, 2 vector units, and an fpu.
The core has 31 128-bit registers, and instructions to manipulate them either as 32-bit, or 64-bit integers, or as 4x32-bit integers, or as 8x16-bit integers (where 4x32 bit means, four 32-bit integers packed into one-128 bit integer). The reason there's 31, is that register 0 (zr) is a constant 0.
Each vector unit has 31 4x32-bit float registers, and 15 16-bit integer registers. One of the vector units (VU0) is available to the core as a co-processor, as are all of it's registers. The other sits in the DMA stream, and can be thought of as a pumped up vertex shader.
Finally the fpu is pretty traditional, with 32 32-bit float registers.
So thats 31 128-bit integer registers, 31 4x32-bit float registers, 15 16-bit integer registers, and 32 32-bit float registers. Giving us a total of 109 registers, with a total of 8208 bits, and that's not including 20 or so status or result registers.
None of this is modal, you can mix core, VU, and fpu instructions as you like. There's also nothing stopping you treating a 128-bit core register as a 32, 64, 4x32, or 8x16-bit integer, nor moving it to a VU0 register, where it's treated as a 4x32-bit float.
There's also the IPU, a DMA controller, and a whole bunch of other stuff, but they're not directly accessibly from the core. Well, actually, even that's not true, as most things are also memory mapped, but that's only really for debugging, as memory mapped access has a habit of stalling everything.
Oh, and the bus to the RDRAM is 128 bit, while the bus to the GS is 64 bit.
So, in summary, mostly 128-bit registers, and a 128-bit data bus. It's a 128-bit system.
I do not know what the main processor in the PS2 is derived from, but MIPS does ring a tiny bell.
It means that the other divisions at Sony operated at a loss, so the total profit at Sony was less than the profit generated by the Playstation related items.
-asb