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More PlayStation 3 Grid Computing Details
gwernol writes: "Redherring has a good article on Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3: not too many technical details but good background to the Xbox/PlayStation wars. Sony are touting the use of massively parallel 'cell computing' to get a 1,000 times performance increase over the PS2. This plan, also known as grid computing is also discussed here."
relying on other playstations on the internet to do 3D rendering for you?
How is that possible even if there were gigabit ether internet connections?
I want 30+fps games here not 1fps because at 9pm everyone is playing their ps3 and theres no processing power left to be used
this is completely worthless read. IT just throws out a bunch of buzz words and make no sense at all.
"Buoyed by so much processing power, consumers will be able to interact with these worlds without worrying about hackers, viruses, or lost connections."
What the hell are they talking about? I want to say some clever comment but I am not so much stupider having read that first sentence of the paragraph that I can't think of a thing to say.
Exactly. What we need 1000x more of is developer hours on the games.
Teh graphics are pretty damed realistic now. The plot-lines and interactivity of most games is at about the level of the games in the 80s. Worse in many cases.
Why do these companies continually throw processor performance at a problem that requires a larger but no more processor intensive code base.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
how many people will really want their bandwidth getting chewed up by a console that they are not playing, so that others can play? especially with all the talk of providers going to a capped model that allows you to transfer X number of gigs per month before incurring additional fees.
personally if they could even make the sucker work, i would just yank the cat-5 out of the thing whenever im not playing
Maybe someone else can help me out here, but the bigger problem I see here isn't bandwidth so much as latency. Even if they have enough bandwidth to send a super-realistic rendering of the whole world in parallel what good does it do if I get it 20 frames later? Last time I checked you can move anything faster than the speed of light. Maybe we'll use tachyons instead of electrons......
It's just the Sony hype machine again. Remember what they wanted you to believe about the PS2?
Of course PS3 is gonna be faster than the PS2. No, it won't be 1000 times faster.
-jfedor
Anything this wierd will require some kind of distributed OS to manage the thing. (Obligatory "Beowulf cluster" remark might actually be appropriate here.) Operating systems like that are hard to do and not, historically, easy to use.
The hype is totally out of sync with the hardware concept. "If Sony's aspirations succeed, then the Playstation 3 will not be a pure video game console, but rather measure the amount of milk left in the fridge, record TV programs to hard-disk, automatically download new software..." Huh? For this we need massively parallel computing?
Note that the last IBM press release on this was 16 months ago.
This has to be a bad description of what Sony, IBM, and Toshiba are up to. Those are real companies that do real innovation; they have to have a clearer vision of where they're going.
I don't know anybody that leaves their console on while their not using it for long stretches.
I personally know several. Some people play old NES games that take hours to beat yet do not have a save feature.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know Sony must have some engineers, or they could never have built the PS2. The engineers must know that everything that's been written about the PS3 so far is hype and fluff, but they must also have a non-stupid idea in mind. So the question is, can we extrapolate from the hype and fluff what the non-stupid idea is? Two thoughts come to mind.
1) The PS3 processor will be composed of many small, simple computing elements which will make it possible to keep a lot more of the silicon busy if programs can be parallelized, which in the case of world simulation, which is what gaming is converging into, maybe it can. You can just assign individual processors to individual components of the world.
2) Future PS3s will be joined together into some kind of virtual computing grid, where the grid as a whole will simulate the gaming world. Using a grid to do rendering won't work. Even if ping time was 50 msec and processing time at the remote node was 0 that would set a limit of 20 frames per second. Before someone thinks I'm stupid, that's only one of the reasons it won't work. Meanwhile, GPUs are getting so powerful that there is no need to offload rendinging to remote processors.
However, what if a portion of the processing capacity of each console was used for shared world simulation? You could have a peer to peer MMORPG game. It would require that the consoles be trusted and that the world state be saves as consoles joined and left the game, but if it could work we might be able to have MMORPGs where you just have to buy the game but not pay a fee to someone else to run a server for you. Not that that would be good for Sony since they make tons of money running the servers, but it would be great for gamers.
Anyway, this is the best I can make of the utter nonsense that's been written about the PS3 so far. Bother very futuristic, but not outside the pale of possibility. Meanwhile, maybe someone can explain to that reporter that a fast computer does not protect you from hackers and viruses, any more than a fast car protects you from car theives and catching a cold.
The original gameplan was use the first generation EE/GS for the PS2. The next generation, EE2/GS2, would be used for graphic workstations and would have "100x the power" of the original EE/GS combo (or something like that, Sony PR). Then, the EE3/GS3 would be used for the PS3, giving it "1000x the power" of the PS2.
Distributed processing for console games (or games in general) is not a good idea. People want their games to work all the time, not only when peak bandwith isn't occuring. It doesn't sound good on paper, and definately wouldn't look good for actual processing and rendering.
Maybe if the game required you to find an actual extra-terrestrial, then you might have a reason for distributed processing on a game. Otherwise, I can't think of any reason Sony would do this. It would be a headache to keep maintained and wouldn't really bring in the cash considering the slower-than-expected broadband invasion.
This article isn't really a great read.