Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Economist Looks At The Console Industry

Posted by Hemos on from the what-will-happen dept.

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."

3 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot linking to The Economist... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... is like the National Enquirer mentioning Scientific American.

  2. Huh? by Ex-Parrot · · Score: 5, Funny
    Sony's PlayStation business currently generates around 60% of the firm's profits. That figure has exceeded 100% at times.

    That sounds like either new math or Andersen accounting practices.

    --
    To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation. -- St. Augustine
  3. Re:8192 bits by 2030! by Phil+Wilkins · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.