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Playstation 3 CPU Almost Finished?
dnxthx writes "According to this ZDNet article the design of the Playstation 3 chip is nearly complete. The PS3 chip will have near "supercomputer capabilities" --- including 1 TFLOP. Reportedly, this chip is being engineered with Linux in mind."
Aww crap he's back again?! Where the hell is Goku?!!
Cell's designers are engineering the chip to work with a wide range of operating systems, including Linux.
I don't see how that sentence translates to the statement by the submitter that the chip is designed with Linux in mind. Besides, shouldn't the OS adapt to the chip, not the reverse?
The PS3 chip will have near supercomputer capabilities --- including 1 TFLOP.
Wasn't the old PS2 a supercomputer, and there were export rules on it?
Saddam was rumored to buy some to control missles or something?
TheJapanese government realised that the computers in the PS2s were very powerful for the time and could be networked to create a crude missile guidance system.
By the time 2005 comes around, everyone will have a Terraflop of processing power in their toaster. Comon Sony, cant you do better than that?
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
engineered with Linux in mind
Perfect for dropping off inconspicuous items in the workplace!
until they can get a 3D lara to give me a lap-dance, i'm not impressed.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
What kind of a processor is that and where did they get it? And if so, how many millions will that PS3 cost?
Sure, but does it out perform the G4?
you haven't seen anything yet.
In terms of scalability, the uber-parallel-processing-pipelined PS2 makes a lot of sense, and will continue to get more powerful in the future as its software improves. In terms of usability though, the PS2 has irked a lot of console developers because it's an entirely different beast and doesn't behave like a PC when you get down to performance bottlenecks.
The PS3 and beyond can only continue this trend. Sony hopefully won't make the same mistake ease-of-use wise, but the PS3 will be getting tantalizingly close to the "do everything you ever cared to do in a game" performance.
The future of this technology is hugely dependant on software capability to make sense of and utilize it. This will be the biggest hurdle, and clearly nothing like it really exists today.
One of the next big steps may be carbon-nanotube based computing, because it will enable architectures with massive hierarchical processing power and near limitless involatile stupidly fast memory, all embedded everywhere. Carbon (and other) nanotubes will be used for both logic and memory (as well as actual display surfaces), and ultimately be laid out more like a brain than a serial system.
I look foward having a complete system in a display where you push morphing procedures in one end which ultimately get streamed into content on the output side.
The networked aspect will be important too, but not how it's colored in this article. Your games will ineveitably run graphics processing on your local machine, with non-realtime and background tasks offloaded to others on the network. However, distributed simulation of gaming environments will only really make sense when players become the content producers and the worlds expand procedurally to simulate whatever ideas of interest their imaginations have conjured.
Then I just have to ask, when game consoles power the realization of our imaginations, whose world are we going to be living in? [hint: this is rhetorical, don't answer, just think about it]
A large international company trusted by millions can only be a good thing for the linux community...
with the advent of "Cell", IBM, Sony and Toshiba have formed a new company known as the "Red Ribbon Army". They have also named a new lead scientist, a fellow by the name of "Dr. Gero".
LI
How long before someone runs Doom on it at ??????fps?
At this rate, commercial production of Cell could come as soon as the end of 2004.
The article states they've merely got the pen and paper design almost complete. No working hardware, and it 'could' end up in the PS3
Toshiba and IBM have had more than their share of flops.
Remember the Toshiba MPACT chipset that was supposed to take over the 3D Graphics/Sound/Video market in the PC world?
Why didn't they just buy out transmeta? I know they just had a big round of layoffs, lost some big contracts, and can really use the cash right now.
The main benifit of course would be having linus. Throw in the transmeta technology after that.
The really scary thing about the whole sony/linux relationship is the parent company Sony is also Sony Records, one of the biggest supporters of DRM and the DMCA. It's kind of odd that they would support an open O/S that will never have DRM in it, makes me wonder why?
--toq
Come on, we've heard the hype from Sony before with their PS2, which was a nice system but not all it way hyped to be. OK PS3 will be an interesting piece of cheap hardware but do we have to see a round of flawed comparrisons that measure a single metrics as Sony try to promote themselves to an audience only too eagre to lap it all up. Take it all with a pinch of salt.
"Reportedly, this chip is being engineered with Linux in mind."
Why?
Well, I fear that one marketing might of Sony think of "how can we prevent those hackers from using our Playstation without buying our great games"
down real low.
Within 3 paragraphs:
"It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz."
And
"I just don't see that Cell is revolutionary, except in its marketing impact, Glaskowsky said "
If the first statement is true, I would say that's quite revolutionary.
The new multimedia processor, touted as a "supercomputer on a chip," is well on the way to completion, IBM says.
So it's a G4 then.
The cake is a pie
see
sony and MIPS
multicore
"PS3 chip will have near "supercomputer capabilities"
I predict that these 'supercomputer capabilities' will be illustrated by technological demos of games that have no sound, contorl, or AI.
"This processor can add 1+1 over 3 trillion times!"
I hope they realize that I buy game systems to play games, not rendering in 3D.
"Derp de derp."
The terraflop statistic is a little hard for me to swallow.
The NERSC IBM SP RS/600 (the fifth most powerful computer in the world, according to top500.org) located in Berkeley consists of 2,944 processors. The processors are distributed among 184 compute nodes with 16 processors per node. Each node has a common pool of between 16 and 64 GBytes of memory.
This machine is a 3 terraflop system. Although, I guess three PS3's could do the same...
I'm having some trouble believing that in two years there will be a consumer chip 100 times as fast as the ones today. Moore's law would say that it will be twice as fast. I'd believe 5 times and maybe even 10. But not 100. ZDNet is way too gullible.
Wow, same song, different year. Last time Sony acted like the PS2 chip was 'God-on-a-PCB'. They even claimed that they could make highend 3D dev systems that could blow the machines of that time away with super realtime rendering, etc. And now, they say they have a supercomputer-like chip. Maybe for the PS4 they can tell us about the NASA beowulf-cluster-like chip which can predict the stock market's picks up to 1 year in advance. Oh, and also create a 1:1 model of the universe, complete with infinity. Seriously, I understand that these chips are powerful, but Sony hypes this crap like its god-in-a-can. Lets not buy into it.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
"...could enter production in 2004" "...could end up inside the PlayStation 3" Doesn't sound too definitive that the PS3 will get this chip does it? This is just more marketing and hype from what I read. I also really doubt that Intel will be standing still for the next two years, so the comparison to today's processors is completely worthless.
You just connect a bunch of them together and you can do anything! Realign warp fields, degauss tachyon emitters, and render fighting games with big bouncy breasted women. Now THAT's a good use of a teraflop or two -- accurate breast bounce.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
From the article:
From earlier threads on here, even if it is geared towards Linux, I wonder if the impending inclusion of Palladium and other DRM would make it into a processor like this? It initially sounds like this would be an ideal candidate, since having different processes would make it easier to program just that one part to exclude your copied DVDs or your non-WMAs.
That, in itself, might derail this from being a powerful addition to the Linux arsenal, but then again, wouldn't that be exactly what M$ would want?
Slashdot - Come for the creative thought, stay for the lesbians!
Here's a thought. The idea behind these chips is that they combine several smaller chips (Cells) into one large one, then use multilple processor cores to control the information. Want to make it small? Just one processor core and a few Cells. Need more power? Add more cells and more processor cores.
If this system works out, there could be a lot of power here. Now, here's the kicker: if they're really working to make this run with Linux and the like, what's to stop some other applications? X86 emulation, for example, done on the hardware level? Or, even better, PCC emulation - now Apple has access to powerful chips that were made from the ground up for graphics processing, something they're moving OS X into big time. It been thought that Apple might move from the PPC to something else (unless Motorola has some plans nobody knows about to make a faster chip) - this could be their ticket to both high power and economy of scale.
Could this technology be used to challenge Intel/AMD? Probably not, and we'll have to wait until they announce more details. But since I'm working on some database programming, my mind is wandering a bit.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
"Enron Linux Distribution"
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Of course, this will probably be the same product by then. You didn't think Sony was going to let Microsoft push them around any longer than they had to, did you?
Lack of creativity is no excuse for not having a
After all, the Playstation 2 can render Phantom Menace in real-time just like they said, and has been used to guide missiles for the military, just like they said it would..
*yawn* This sort of marketing tripe gets posted to Slashdot? And people here take it seriously? C'mon, guys, these are the people who gave you the Emotion Engine -- what are you thinking to be suckered in by them twice?
"The chip could end up inside the PlayStation 3, and elements of its design will be seen in future server chips from IBM."
Dose anyone read the articals these days?
But on a more OT point,
the ideas good, maybe that line in the artical
is more a hint that this might just be the
frist chip, and they are hopeing to get
second gen out not long after.. ?
Eitehr way im wondering what everyones else
has got lined up for there next consoles..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
From the article:
:), along comes 'linked' cpus. Sure parallelization rocks for performance, but it's a head ache for game design & implementation. This is one thing the X-Box got right - port your PC game over in days, not months. Ok, enuf k'vitching.
;-)
"It's like a beehive -- cell components can also be ganged together," he said.
Just when I thought programming the PS3 couldn't be any *worse* the then PS2 (lots of fun debugging the EE, VU0, VU1, GS, SPU, IOP all running simulatenously on the PS2
How long do we have to wait for Gran Turismo to show-case the PS3 ?
...translates into some serious processing power, and it's a synergistic gain, not just an additive gain; it's possible that the combined abilities of multi-core chips will lead to some serious innovations in software design which is sorely needed as the advancement of software has lagged behind advancement in hardware in a big way. Indeed, it's the singular linearness of processors which have defined software development to date, so having processors with multiple core capabilities could lead to more capable software design and implementation.
Think systems on a chip vs. processors on a chip and the possibilities start poping up.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
The question was posed earlier as to whether this could challenge the PC, I say sure, why not! Think about it. Engines are going to be primarily software based, so the more power you have at the CPU side the better. If the cores are truly able to handle any task, imagine this: you get a new game, and it sets up a certain number or percentage of the cores to be GPUs. If the unit's expandable and processor cores are cheap, imagine the kind of games we could see. A game running slow? Go down to the store a buy a few more cores, slap them in, and you're off.
Just some ideas from me, I'm not claiming to be an expert on how this thing's going to work, but who knows. Comments?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
My first thought was "Cool, but why use 3 CPUs instead of 2 or 4?"
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
The cell is a highly parallel chip, it is outside the bounds of Moore's "law" because it doesn't follow the same design methodology. If I designed an FPGA today that had 1000 FPU's, and a simple CPU to control them, I could easily best a P4 in FLOPS. Trivial. Sony has done/will do in hardware what I have suggested, and given that they've been working on it for a couple of years, I think there may be more than just a couple of extra FPU's.
All it takes is a little thought....
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Comon mods, have a sense of humor for a change.
I thought a super computer was a gigaflop, and we're talking about a teraflop being almost a supercomputer? Is this right or am I misinformed?
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
So when did Google implement a "generate report based on current buzzwords" feature? Incredible!
How come I just dont even care..
Karma: Terrible (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)
Who do they think they are kidding? In it's time, the 386 chip was a "supercomputer" too...
did against the Dreamcast. All the gamers waited for the Awesome PoS2!!! As far as hardware goes the Gamecube is better than the PS2. This is just a way to get the PS2 people to wait for the PS3 for 3-4 years. When they spring something less viable on them because the cannot live up to 1 TFLOP.
Hummm.... might want to rethink that....
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
It used to be the first thing one did with a new processor or a new platform was port BSD to it. BSD is the most portable operating system in the world. Now NetBSD and FreeBSD are freely available in source code format, so it is ideal for porting to new platforms. It's more stable and fastert and more advanced than linux because it doesn't have to re-implement everything from scratch.
Caches help for little problems, but you don't put a 1 TFLOP CPU onto a little problem.
Are computers becoming more and more dangerous the smaller they get?
For example:
While the processor's design is still under wraps, the companies say Cell's capabilities will allow it to deliver one trillion calculations per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second,
This was obviously from Zdnet's Division of Redundancy Division. It happens to be listed twice on the organizational chart.
> I think it may be time to pick up a Gamecube
..
/w Star Fox licence (traditional Startfox game coming out later.) Looks beautiful. Nintendo makes great adventure games. Will probably be much fun, although not ground-breaking.
You can pick one up now. Two words: Eternal Darkness. The inclusion of 'Sanity Effects' is the most innovative gimmick for a new game I've seen in a *longlong* time. Without giving it away, this game has the capability to play you (as in you, the gamer, not you, the character in the game). Should be required playing for anybody who tells you that the story of a game can only get in the way of the game itself.
BTW, for those curious about Metroid, Zelda, Starfox and wonder what could possibly be innovative about these games considering the age of their franchises
Metroid: Will be set in an FPS style. Gimmick is that your HUD actually curves as its displayed onto your helmet visor. It's a subtle effect, but thats Nintendo. They always do that last mile. When bright flashes occur during game play, you can see the animated reflection of your face on the inside of the visor. The effect is gorgeous beyond words. The gameplay looks great, and I have no doubt Metroid is about to make an amazing comeback. (And props to Nintendo for letting the franchise settle and age for awhile, makes the return that much more sweet.)
Zelda: Probably much like Ocarina of time, but cel shaded. This'll be a love/hate thing. The PS/XBox fan base really really really seems to hate 'cuteness' in their games. The Nintendo fan base shouldn't mind too much, but whether or not you like this game will seperate who plays games for the visual style and 'edgy content' and who plays games for the gameplay. Plus, if this works, I'd wager that the next Super Mario game will be cel shaded.
Starfox: Ocarina of time
Combine all this with Nintendo finally shipping gory games, getting souped-up port after souped-up port from the PS2 library, and I think you've got a console easily worth committing too if you're the type of gamer who's bored with the style'n'flash-over-gameplay approach to game development these days.
I guess others will just wait until PS3 - they say that in GTA5, you'll actually be able to _watch_ yourself do it with the hookers! (Insert Beavis and Butthead sounds here.)
"Old man yells at systemd"
"Cell's designers are engineering the chip to work with a wide range of operating systems, including Linux."
a range of operating systems, and development tools will be created along side the hardare. but, the cellular nature of the distributed processing is very cool. non-pc platforms should give the general purpose computer a good run for the money as a consumer business. how many homes will have pc's when one can run staroffice/openoffice, surf and email from their ps3?
If X-Box development is that easy for PC game developers, why wouldn't the opposite hold true? First example that pops to mind is: Why is Halo not coming out for PC until next August?
put the what in the where?
synergistic gain, not just an additive gain
Okay, WTF is a 'synergistic' gain? And multiple CPUs/CPU cores doesn't even give you a simple additive gain due to the overhead of parallelizing tasks to take advantage of multiple streams of execution as well as basic synchronisation overhead. Basic computer science.
It looks like I was right all along
If 3 PS3's can do the same i'm going to have to pick me up a few and let them crunch packets for me. Be cool to see how many packets a day you could get though.
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
"It's going to take an enormous amount of software development...to really make it get up and dance."
*groans* Here we go again. One of the primary mistakes that these guys keep making is that every time they reinvent the wheel, we have to remake the cars, the highways, driver's training, etc! Having to relearn coding for the umpteenth time is going to actually shoot the PS3 in the foot severely.
Non-ADD suffers should remember that when the PS2 originally debuted, there were significant problems with it's anti-aliasing abilities. Every two-bit flamebaiter was crowing the latest 'clever' pun like "Tekken Jag Tournament." These problems eventually diminished when software companies discovered a poorly-documented workaround in the PS2 phonebook of "Programming 101 (again!)" The second generation of PS2 games that hit just before this last Xmas was friggin incredible (Devil May Cry, FF10, GTA!). This was because programmers had finally wangled out of the system the ability to make it do what they want. This allowed them to concentrate resources on that crucial element: Gameplay.
Moral of the story? Buy your PS3 a year after it comes out. That'll be when the games finally start getting good.
http://liquidben.com - Aspiring to an 'under construction' gif
but is it proactive?
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Consider that a 1TFLOP system would currently be ranked the #24 most powerful computer in the world
As other people have said, this must be a typo.
...follow the money.
it almost appears as if a human being wrote this. what software did you use to create it?
Yeah, I'll be getting a gamecube soon. Metroid looks really nice, it'll be cool to see how it plays. If you're looking for some more "traditional" metroid action, there is a new metroid game coming out for GBA that looks to be a lot like super metroid (drool...).
The new mario game won't be cellshaded (it'll be out at the end of august), but it does look pretty fun, and challenging. The waterpack that he uses is supposed to really be a big part of the gameplay, so that'll be interesting. I can't even talk about zelda. Words can't express how much I want to play that.
Sony makes some awesome hardware, but don't make the mistake of thinking it will be general purpose like an Athlon or Pentium IV. The way this works in the PS2 is that vector instructions can process four values at a time, and there are multiple, almost completely independent, CPUs with these instructions. So we're talking about a custom, multi-processor, highly parallel system. It's going to take special case code to exploit it, it's not like off the shelf Linux will start getting 1 TFlop performance.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Its the year 2002 not 1998. Simply having Mr. Torvalds working for Sony would not revolutionize the company leading to greater products/marketshare or whatever. He's not a product guy. He's just a guy who made a free kernel. Thats all. He's not equal to Gates in any way shape or form. While they were both programmers, Gates eventually transcended that limited capability to become one of the world's greatest and most successful businesmen. His products brought cheap computing to the masses. (Yes, they did. Apple would charge you, and continues to charge you an arm and a leg for less and MS and Apple are the only ones who were capable and serious of brining desktop computing to the masses at the time).
How would employing Linux benefit Sony? Your ideas sound like another one of those horrible scribbled on a napkin business plans that dotted the dot.com landscape so many years ago.
1. Hire Linus
2. ??????
3. Profit!
P.S. No, Gates no longer programs himself. Its also pretty frickin irrelevant. Larry Ellison was a programmer as well. I doubt he commited one line of code for the latest Oracle DB. Gates and those like him are multi-dimensional. They realize there's more to the world than simply banging out code. I don't think Mr. Torvalds, or his many blindly following minons realize that.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
What does that mean? "Off of" seems redundant to me, but I don't have English as a first language.
Couldn't "from" be used instead?
a single chip will contain multiple processing cores (hence Cell)
I think it is unfortunate to choose a name that would remind people of terrorist cells, in light of recent activities by those cells.
when you have a perfectly good Atari 2600 in the basement. Seriously, although some of the new graphics intense games are cool, sometimes Pac-man holds just as much entertainment.
You have a valid viewpoint, but there are a lot more people that want their PS2 to last for 4 or 5 years. I still have a Pentium 3/850 and and a GeForce 2 GTS and I won't be upgrading it for at least another year, maybe two. I agree that the PS2 graphics will look dated by the time the PS3 comes out, but that won't keep people from buying them and buying games. PS1 graphics and processing power were VERY dated by the time the PS2 came out. But guess what: people still buy PS1's.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
> The new mario game won't be cellshaded
I actually meant the mario game coming *after* Mario Sunshine. Not that anything's been announced, just that more than one mario game for the gamecube has got to be a certainty, and if the cel shading works for Celda, they will hopefully have enough sense to give Mario the same treatment.
Sunshine looks way fun tho.
"Old man yells at systemd"
"Metroid: Will be set in an FPS style."
Oh god, I hope not. IIRC, there are going to be two elements critical to FPSes missing: aiming and ammo management. There will be some sort of auto aim and/or target locking to make aiming unnecessary. Most guns will have unlimited ammo (freeze beam et al), and if it is like the older Metroids, enemies will respawn constantly and give you plenty of chances to refill. Metroid was always about: exploration, item collecting, shooting, and platforming. Sadly, it looks like we'll be losing the platforming, but such is life.
Starfox: is actually being made by Rare ( http://www.rareware.com/ ).
BlackGriffen
the MS astroturfers sure are out in force today!
BC
The only thing even close to being almost ready about the PS3 is that the processor has been taped out. This means that they have the plans on paper for the chip -- that's it. There's no working chip, no fab process figured out yet, no software, no sound or off-core GPU (if there is one?) or anything. Claiming the PS3 is almost ready is like a real estate agent claiming your new house is almost ready when all he has is a blueprint with no lot, and no materials.
If they carried over things like high-jump boots, spin jump/attack, huge open areas, and long ass tunnels (both vertical and horizontal), I'd be a very happy man.
What would be really nice is another Metroid platform shooter on a high end system, kinda like how Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was done in 2D on the Playstation. It had some 3D effects but the gamestyle was still platform.
As far as 3d environments go, I didn't think Zelda 64 was going to be that good, but it is pretty fun. Except for the controls and low frame rate at times. Damn, I hated that.
That's like comparing....StarFox to Galaga
Both might be great games, but ONE is a classic.
Actually StarFox is a classic in it's own right, but Crash is simply Crash.
Cell Achieves Perfection
(for all you DragonBall Z fans)
From the article:
"It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz"
'Scuse me, I gotta go change my underpants.
My love for you is ticking clock, BESERKER.
Some info on Saddam buying Playstations...
You might also be thinking of Apple's TV ad with tanks and a G4. From the commercial:
"When the Power Mac G4 became the first personal computer to cross the threshold of one billion floating-point operations per second (also known as a gigaflop), it entered the rarefied realm of supercomputing- and got the attention of the U.S. government. The Pentagon regards supercomputers as "strategic technology"- in effect, making the Power Mac G4 a weapon that shouldn't fall into the wrong hands."
The numbers sound pretty reasonable to me. Bear in mind that the the Emotion Engine is capable of 6GFlops, and that clocks at 300MHz - it does it by using 2 4-wide multiply-add units which can both issue every cycle (and for purposes of Flop-count you get to count both the multiply and the add), plus some dividers and other stuff. I know zilch about chip design, but I guess if they lengthen the instruction pipeline and have good processes there's nothing stopping them ramping up the clockspeed in 2004 to what's achievable for the P4 today (say 2.4GHz), giving an 8x speedup, and a lot of graphics and physics code can be written with a relatively low branch density so doesn't suffer too badly from pipeline length (e.g. the DX8 vertex-shader). Or they could just put more (or wider) SIMD multiply-adders on each CPU and increase the instructions per clock. 16 chips * 8x speedup * 6GFlops = 750+ GFlops In fact, I'd be surprised if that was so far ahead of the PC graphics cores of that time. Massive parallelism and deep pipelines are the key in both cases, NVIDIA are currently claiming 1.23 trillion ops/second for the GeForce4 Ti4600, and floating point pixel shaders are on the way... The interesting questions are how they're going to get the memory bandwidth to feed this monster, and what they'll do with all the heat.
I'm not the guy who posts the original updates. I have responded to some of them. Yes, it would be nice if he logged in.
I was under the assumption that Power=!PowerPC. IIRC Motorola can make PowerPC chips and IBM can only make Power. But Motorola can make PowerPC chips for IBM.
First yes, basically all current Intel and AMD chips can pull a Gflop. More or less and P3 or Athlon chip above 850mhz can do 1 Gflop in real world tests (specifically according to SiSoft Sandra).
Second the classification of a G4 as a "wepaon" or a "supercomputer" is not correct. The way that is done is based off of theortical operations per seconds (be they interger or floating point). In 1998 that was 2,000 MTOPS (million theoritical operations per second) or 2 Gflops if you want to look at it that way. That has since changed and currently the US can export up to 190,000 MTOPS computers to "Tier-3" countries (countries judged unsafe in terms of non-proliferation of mass destruction weapons) which are places like China, Russia, and most of the Middle-East.
Finally, Sony probably is telling the truth about Tflop perofrmance.... Sort of. I'm betting that the chip wiill have a theoritical max of 1 Tflop, which is not unheard of, provided we are talking about speical DSP operations for graphics type stuff. The GeForce 4 4600 gets about 1.23 Trillion ops per second according to nVidia. Thing is, the GeForce 4 is a graphics DSP, all it does is push pixels. It's subunits do things very fast, but can do only that one thing (ie vertex shaders ONLY do vertex transforms, not general work). A P4/G4, on the other hand, can do anything. It can do all the same kinds of calculations a GeForce 4 can, but can also do all the calculations any other DSP or system can, given enough time.
For a long time we've had the ability to design specialised chips that ar much faster, but more limited, than general purpose CPUs. That's the whole reason for ahaving a 3d accelerator. You just can't make a CPU that fast yet, it would take hundreds of CPUs working together to equal the power of a GPU, HOWEVER that GPU is good only for graphics. You still need a CPU for general purpose calculation.
In a video game console, the lines often become a bit more blurred. One chip may do many different things. Some of the functions traditonally on the GPU in computers might be on the same chip that happens to do CPU work as well.
Well I guess it is time for the PS3 hype machine to get rolling. But there is so little actual detail in this article that I wouldn't have even posted it.
The jist of the article is we have a new super cool, super fast, totally rad something or other you just have to have. And your just going to have to trust us on this too because we aren't going to go into detail at all
these are actual things rather than ZDnet speculation
... the fact that that joke was made, or the fact that I understood it :P.
Common AC, its a known troll. No way am I modding his crap up so he becomes visable and has positive karma.
the PS3 cpu is a collaboration between Sony and IBM that uses the huge (100 million +) demand of the PS3 to subsidize the low cost design and production (spread over all those game consoles) of an extrordinary CPU that we wouldn't otherwise gt our hands on (like Deep Blue's cpu(s), IBM's $million$ chess demo). IBM intends (and announced when the CPU contract was let) to use this CPU as the foundation of powerful workstations and servers that WILL RUN LINUX.
Slashdotters should note that this is a clever strategy to use game consoles to break the Wintel oligarchy and give us a CPU that will blow away anything on Intel's current roadmap. I can't wait...
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
Moore's Law is not a law, it's a marketing scheme.
I saw last week a very nice talk by Dr. Stephen Boyd from Stanford University. He explained very clearly what Moore's law is: an expectation for consumers/chip designers and a target for chip producers.
Because of the observed trend (the chip density doubled every 18 months at first), it became the trend to follow.
It became a marketing sheme. To be able to sell your chip making process, it HAS to track Moore's Law. It is not a prediction, not an observation; it is a compelling target. It also allows designers to design their chips based on technology that ISN'T AVAILABLE yet.
Personnaly, I think Moore's law is the reason the technology grew so quickly in the last 20 years or so.
Of about 1000 of these units on one cable network? Oh great, another excuse for them to raise prices on cablemodems!
Standard User - 40.00 per month
Business User - 90.00 per month
PS/3 User - 250.00 per month
The ETRAX 100LX from AXIS Communications
("cris" architecture) was designed to run
Linux. AXIS took an existing CPU design
without an MMU, and added a MMU that would
be well-suited to the Linux memory manager
code.
And why not? It's easy and useful.
Make pages at least 4 kB. Use a traditional
tree structure with 2 or 3 levels. Make each
page table occupy exactly one page. Have a
dirty bit and an accessed bit. Be able to do
an atomic page table entry update. Make the
cache physically tagged and indexed. Keep the
cache coherent. Enforce write protection even
when in supervisory mode.
Linux can handle pretty much anything from
the VAX to a SPARC, but some designs are way
faster than others.
When the PS2 came out, I remember seeing street signs for the PS9! What happened to that?
Remember the commercials where they showed a virtual world where anything can happen, but you need a PS9 to do it. Well I'm waiting till that comes out, forget about ps3. Hopefully I'm not dead yet when it comes out.
Besides that tidbit, being a hobbyist game developer, I'm hoping the PS3 would be more developer friendly. I doubt any small time developer would pay 1g for any dev kits, least I know I'm not. The dreamcast was a good system to develop for because you can burn CDRs of your own program and can run it on your friend's Dreamcast. PS2 Linux is great for development, too bad I can't just develop something and show others what I wrote just by burning a cd and distributing to them.
A PS3 cluster would be great as Maya/Blender render farm.
If Sony is going to ship PS3 machines in 1U/2U 19" rack, I know my company would be interested in a PS3 cluster for rendering and other heavy stuff.
.sig: No such file or directory
The title should be "Good/Bad News For Linux." If you are going to emulate a known troll, do it right!
Hay, how would you know tps12's sexual orientation, are you dating him?
So the new CPU for the PS3 is the Apple G4?! As anyone that has seen Apple's ads can tell you, they are bonafide supercomputers.
If one examines premodernist materialism, one is faced with a choice: either accept neoconstructivist capitalist theory or conclude that academe is intrinsically impossible. In a sense, Sartre's model of premodernist materialism suggests that art has intrinsic meaning. The subject is interpolated into a constructivism that includes narrativity as a whole.
"Society is part of the dialectic of culture," says Marx; however, according to Hanfkopf[1] , it is not so much society that is part of the dialectic of culture, but rather the rubicon, and some would say the absurdity, of society. It could be said that the main theme of the works of Spelling is not narrative, but prenarrative. The example of premodernist materialism prevalent in Spelling's Melrose Place is also evident in Models, Inc..
However, the characteristic theme of Dahmus's[2] critique of postcultural materialism is the role of the observer as writer. De Selby[3] states that we have to choose between premodernist materialism and capitalist discourse.
It could be said that Bataille uses the term 'neoconstructivist capitalist theory' to denote the common ground between sexuality and class. Marx suggests the use of premodernist materialism to deconstruct the status quo. However, neoconstructivist capitalist theory holds that art is capable of intent, given that truth is distinct from art. The primary theme of the works of Gaiman is not narrative, but subnarrative.
Thus, Sontag's analysis of constructivism suggests that reality serves to oppress the proletariat. Marx promotes the use of the neotextual paradigm of expression to attack and analyse society. 2. Gaiman and premodernist materialism
"Truth is dead," says Derrida. Therefore, if neoconstructivist capitalist theory holds, we have to choose between premodernist materialism and dialectic libertarianism. Foucault suggests the use of neoconstructivist capitalist theory to challenge capitalism.
If one examines constructivism, one is faced with a choice: either reject neoconstructivist capitalist theory or conclude that the significance of the observer is social comment. However, Debord uses the term 'postsemanticist textual theory' to denote the role of the participant as artist. The premise of premodernist materialism implies that consensus must come from communication.
Therefore, the subject is contextualised into a neoconstructivist capitalist theory that includes narrativity as a reality. The main theme of Cameron's[4] model of Lacanist obscurity is not, in fact, appropriation, but preappropriation.
In a sense, Sargeant[5] suggests that the works of Eco are not postmodern. Marx's analysis of premodernist materialism holds that the law is capable of significance, but only if the premise of constructivism is valid; if that is not the case, Sontag's model of premodernist materialism is one of "cultural nationalism", and hence fundamentally used in the service of the status quo. Thus, the characteristic theme of the works of Eco is a mythopoetical whole. If Baudrillardist simulation holds, we have to choose between premodernist materialism and neodeconstructive construction.
But Sartre uses the term 'constructivism' to denote not narrative, as Lyotardist narrative suggests, but prenarrative. Derrida promotes the use of neoconstructivist capitalist theory to modify class. 3. Modernist discourse and Sontagist camp
"Society is part of the dialectic of reality," says Lyotard. Thus, Debord's essay on constructivism states that the goal of the writer is deconstruction. The main theme of Brophy's[6] model of semanticist structuralism is a self-sufficient totality.
"Sexual identity is intrinsically dead," says Bataille; however, according to Hanfkopf[7] , it is not so much sexual identity that is intrinsically dead, but rather the paradigm, and eventually the genre, of sexual identity. But the subject is interpolated into a Sontagist camp that includes language as a reality. An abundance of discourses concerning the dialectic of neodialectic society exist.
However, the primary theme of the works of Eco is the role of the observer as writer. The subject is contextualised into a premodernist materialism that includes culture as a totality.
In a sense, several appropriations concerning constructivism may be revealed. The subject is interpolated into a Sontagist camp that includes consciousness as a whole.
Therefore, constructivism holds that art is part of the genre of truth, given that language is interchangeable with consciousness. The subject is contextualised into a Sontagist camp that includes sexuality as a paradox. 4. Eco and premodernist materialism
In the works of Eco, a predominant concept is the concept of textual culture. Thus, the paradigm, and subsequent futility, of Sontagist camp depicted in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum emerges again in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, although in a more mythopoetical sense. Many theories concerning the collapse, and therefore the failure, of premodernist sexuality exist.
The main theme of la Tournier's[8] critique of constructivism is the role of the artist as poet. In a sense, the premise of premodernist materialism implies that narrative is a product of the masses. Dahmus[9] suggests that we have to choose between Sontagist camp and preconceptual cultural theory.
Thus, constructivism holds that language may be used to reinforce class divisions. If postcapitalist discourse holds, we have to choose between constructivism and semanticist precultural theory.
But the subject is interpolated into a premodernist materialism that includes culture as a totality. Derrida suggests the use of materialist narrative to deconstruct outmoded perceptions of society.
In a sense, Abian[10] implies that we have to choose between premodernist materialism and subsemiotic desituationism. Bataille promotes the use of constructivism to analyse and read truth. 1. Hanfkopf, R. (1997) Constructivism in the works of Cage. University of Georgia Press
2. Dahmus, V. G. ed. (1988) Reassessing Surrealism: Premodernist materialism in the works of Gaiman. Schlangekraft
3. de Selby, D. F. G. (1994) Constructivism, socialism and capitalist predialectic theory. University of Michigan Press
4. Cameron, Y. ed. (1971) The Narrative of Defining characteristic: Premodernist materialism in the works of Eco. Schlangekraft
5. Sargeant, F. I. W. (1985) Constructivism and premodernist materialism. Harvard University Press
6. Brophy, L. D. ed. (1993) Consensuses of Failure: Postcapitalist libertarianism, socialism and constructivism. University of Georgia Press
7. Hanfkopf, Y. (1972) Premodernist materialism and constructivism. And/Or Press
8. la Tournier, M. S. O. ed. (1985) The Absurdity of Context: Constructivism and premodernist materialism. University of Michigan Press
9. Dahmus, A. O. (1996) Premodernist materialism and constructivism. Panic Button Books
10. Abian, L. S. D. ed. (1974) Expressions of Stasis: Constructivism, socialism and poststructural dialectic theory. And/Or Press
Why bother.
cripes, and we thot taco was a moron!
A very skillful troll, well done
Dude, I'm sure this would have gotten posted without having to resort to a cheap-ass "LINUX!!" angle.
Besides, I want the chip to be engineered with GAMES in mind. GAMES. I don't want a playstation to play linux, I want to play goddamn GRAND THEFT AUTO 4 (or 5, or whatever). I want massive fucking fill rates and photorealistic heaving bosums.
nothing to see here, just marketoid gibberish...
A few small things to remember, that makes the difference between good and bad design are:
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
It sounds like, from the article, that the system will be similar in concept to FGPA--flexible, configurable chunks of data processing power connected in any of a hundred ways for a given functionality (SIMD, SDMI).
It's the next step towards "the great SIMD" processor model that seems to be the most viable paradigm in future processor development.
I know Amiga didn't do this on one chip but the concept of having 'multiple processing cores' was what made the actual Amigas so cool (well that and a well done OS for the time). You had a main processing core that was a base 88K chip plus separate processors to handle the video and audio load. Made for a machine that ran circles around its contemporary competitors despite its slow main proc.
Isn't the new incarnation of Amigacorp planning on coming out with hardware again? A guy can dream..
Click here for a bad joke that that reminds me of.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I'm already not crazy about having more than a couple soldering points on something I can hardly afford. For my original Playstation I had to figure out exactly how much to drink to calm my shaking hands but not too much as to distort my accuracy. And there were only like 4 or 5 places to solder. Then my roommate at the time decided it would be hilarious to push my arm when I'd get close to a solder point. That was a fun day.
Now I have a V7 (new version) PS2 and I'm too chicken to mess with these new-fangled hardly-tested (or so I hear) modchips. *sigh* So much for imports.
The terraflop statistic is a little hard for me to swallow.
The SIMD math on a P4 is less than 3% of the die, and it's something like 2*4*2.5Ghz=20gigaflops theoretical. (retiring two instructions per clock, 4 elements at a time, 2.5 Ghz clock, not practical due to memory slowness, but possible. Don't do any divisions though, and multiplications will halve this. even if avoiding underflow.) Now 100%/3%=33, so you have 660gigaflops theoretically using today's technology differently. Add two years and stir.
Now you still need cache, but with a bunch of these processing elements doing mostly graphics you can stream data from one to the next and get away with a small "scratch pad" memory on chip. They'll have a few execution cores because being able to do two 16 element SIMD instructions isn't as useful as eight 4 element SIMD instructions.
Still won't be very useful for cryptography though, this is all floating point performance.
you had to add the little linux bit in at the end didn't you. Can't finish one fucking article without making a stupid remark like "I hope it is ported to linux" or "I will wait until it is released for linux". Well guess what: FUCK YOU. Get a real fucking operating system aka Windows 2000 you ass munching whore. Linux is a piece of shit for serving and as a workstation, GET OVER IT. Linux is dying, now stop trying to bring in your little side comments which have absolutely nothing to do with the article since it does not mention linux anywhere in that whole thing you whore.
Apple is in need of a new chip. They have been hinting that OSX can run on Intel...why not a new chip from friend IBM? It meets their criteria for a media center computer.
Alan Cox's recent diary entries included a couple of brief trips to mysterious meetings in Japan, and Redhat's CTO was mentioned as attending at least one.
(Just as long as we're speculating...)
I have a bunch of the newer games..
FF7, Grand turismo 3, etc.
The output on the ps2 and xbox still seem like crap compared to the good ol dreamcast.
And I am running gold line HD componet progressive scan to my widescreen.
Dreamcast had the nice lil vga adapters. Gave nice
picture. PS2 and Xbox do not have that, they look horrid.
In the last generation, Nintendo and Microsoft were pretty close on Sony's heels to announce their new revolutionary systems. So now that Sony's hype machine has come forward, when are the competitors going to cast their hats in?
I believe that at least at the vaporware stage, there were four bidders in the market last time: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and VM Labs. Now the Nuon seems to be completely out of the picture, but when are the others going to come forward with their own mind-blowing specs?
The PS2 had a pretty much botched launch, but somehow they managed to come out ahead in the end. The first generation of titles, for the most part, sucked. Why didn't the competition pick up on this and just destroy them with superior games?
Wait, what's that you say? There was no competition?
Right, the PS2 was first to market by about a year, while still coming sufficiently later than the Dreamcast to demolish its technical specs. By the time the other consoles had come out, the PS2's library had begun its onslaught of second-generation games, winning game of the year awards left and right. When the PS2 came out, the PSX was still going strong, with lots of popular games still coming out every month. These figures more than made up for the technical difficulties with the PS2.
Well, they're doing it again. The PS3 is set to come out in late 2004, they say, which is still at the trailing end of this generation's lifetime. They'll likely be first to market by a significant amount of time, during which developers will flounder and make cruddy games for the PS3, and people will still be buying PS2 games. By the time competitors get their slightly more powerful systems out, the developers will hopefully have a good grasp on how to make the PS3 work, and (they hope) Sony will triumph again.
Of course, a zillion things could go wrong with this business plan, and it's more or less unprecedented for a company to stay in the lead for more than two generations, but that's my guess on what they're thinking right now.
PS9. Here's hoping for the future.
I just hope Sony takes their time with this and doesn't rush it. I can remember how many times the PS2's release date was pushed back, and perhaps that's partly why it was a success.
In a sense they are trying to race moore's law, and it could backlash. I can try to be as optimistic as I can with what little information has been revealed thus far about the PS3. But, like movie (s|pr)equels, if it isn't done right, it will lose appeal.
Looks like you got some bites, too.
Ultimately, Cell will provide a "much more interactive way of delivering content, including advertising, sports and entertainment such as video," to a wide range of Internet-ready devices.
If PS3 has anything to do with interactivity, content, advertising, sports, video or a wide range of internet-ready devices, then the client and it's "Cell" chip is almost irrelevant: It's all about the network.
How will Sony deliver content without approval from Jack and Hilary? How will Sony get network bandwidth without help from AOLTW, Sprint and Worldcom? How will Sony deliver any content without a payment-on-demand system? (No way any game publisher would trust their entire business to ads after two decades of more direct revenue.) And how will they make that payment-on-demand system work for children so PS3 can sell to someone besides the over-18 slow-adopter crowd? How about intercontinental gaming? Voice chat competing with traditional long distance? Videophoning? And what servers and network tech will they use?
These are the questions that will make or break future game consoles. Since the MPAA/RIAA won't touch client-side storage with a ten mile pole, clients of the future will be comodity boxes with a few cheap chips.
I think PS3 is going to be Sony's N64: Third time's a harm.
AFAIK it uses a binary-only driver for the DVD drive. Sorry :(
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
he PS3 chip will have near "supercomputer capabilities"
cough cough (Apple G3 advertisement)
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong - but it doesn't change the fact that advancing PC graphics and sound will force console makers to update their units more quickly than in the past.
Don't forget, X-Box is made by Microsoft - a name you *may* be familiar with as having more to do with PCs than console games. X-Box is based on PC technology. It's pretty easy for them to update it and re-release it every year or so, if they like. Practically a no-brainer, R&D wise.
Also, the demographic of people most into playing console games is also attending high school or college. Nowdays, a PC is pretty much a requirement for schooling. Therefore, I don't think you have so much an issue of people saying "Gee, do I fork out all the money for a PC to play games, or do I just use this $400 console with my TV?" as you have "Do I spend the $400 on upgrading my PC I got for school, or do I get the console?"
If you're so computer illiterate that you can't install a new CD-ROM based game on a PC, then fine - you're a good candidate for a game console. Does that mean you absolutely won't replace it if better, newer ones come out quicker than once every 4 or 5 years?
I hope it comes with a box of tissue. ^_^