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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."
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.
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.
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!
It's not about the fact that the PS3 can push 1 TFLOP, it's about the fact that the PS3 can push 1 TFLOP while being small and relatively affordable that makes it bleeding edge technology.
I for one am getting kind of tired of all these technology pushes in gaming consoles while the games continue to go down hill in terms of enjoyability. Now, it may just be my age at the time, but when I remember back to being a kid and playing Nintendo, I remember more than half the games I ever played were REALLY, REALLY fun to play. I'm 23 years old and I can talk forever about old school Nintendo with friends that can remember the days. Too often these days we judge games based on their technological feats, giving a game credit for crap like "volumetric fog" and "real time shadows", etc. but we hardly ever just say "That game is just plain fun".
I think it may be time to pick up a Gamecube, especially with 3 old school classics getting a revamp(Metroid, Zelda, Starfox). Maybe then I can relive that joy from childhood.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
You are correct in that it was determined to be higher than 24fps. I believe 24fps was the minimum for producing smooth convincing motion. As for what the human eye can see, it was also determined that while people can't see every frame at 100fps, they were able to distinguish between 100fps and 60fps. I'm not worried about it hitting over 60fps in a game console though because my TV is NTSC which limits it to that. I am interested in increased processing power that can bring about far more complex scenes that are locked at 60fps so you don't be a jerky slowdown.
Don't mean to burst your bubble, but I imagine Sony marketing is chasing bigger fish than the fickle Slashdot crowd.
1 trillion triangles!
To put things in perspective the GeForce 4 TI 4600 can do maybe 15 - 20 MILLION triangles per second.
So, PS3 will be as fast as 50,000 GeForce 4's running in parallel?
Justin Dubs
Caches help for little problems, but you don't put a 1 TFLOP CPU onto a little problem.
3 words: Super Monkey Balls. Fun as all hell.
We demand that games not only look good, but they play good.
Microsoft will already have at least 2 more X-Box upgrades on the shelves by then.... virtually guaranteeing it will dominate over the outdated PS2
Consoles dont work like that. The SNES had about a 7 year long run, the Original Playstation had about 6 years. You dont upgrade consoles every year like MS would like, people wont blow $300 every 18 months on a console when their old one still works fine.
MS _WONT_ be releasing upgrades for the XBox til the next line of console upgrades in 2005, and thats if they want to seriously piss off their customers, because that would be about 4 years with their console.
To me, Crash Bandicoot is every bit as fun as Super Mario (not to mention that it has great attitude), Morrowind kicks Phantasy Star's ass and Grand Theft Auto III... well, there's nothing that really compares.
So, basically, I completely disagree with the idea that games aren't as good as they used to be. *Some* games are worthless tech showcases (I call these "Jurrasic Park games"), but then those were always around, weren't they?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
You know, at this point, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Slashdot coverage actually does register on marketing radar. Sure, the number of Slashdotters is pretty small compared to the total target market of the PS3 (or any other major piece of geekware) but we're early adopters, a big enough crowd to provide a spike in early sales figures; we're also, more importantly, the sorts of people others come to for advice on what geekware to buy.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"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
and nuclear explosion simmulations...
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.
Because everyone's definition of a FLOP is different. The top500.org uses Linpack. But none of the manufacturers do because a Linpack FLOP is much harder to achieve than a "paper design" FLOP. Look at Apple's claim of a 15GFLOP G4. There is no way that a G4 with PC133 memory can even sustain 0.25 GFLOPs under Linpack but is that stopping them from claiming multi-GFLOP performance? Of course not! Sales & Marketing always has the last say in these types of things.
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.
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.
> the PS2 has irked a lot of console developers because it's an entirely different beast and doesn't behave like a PC
Noooo, the PS2 irked a lot of ex-pc developers, because it wasn't a PC, and the poor lickle PC developers got very worried when they discovered they weren't in Kansas anymore, and big unka Bill wasn't holding their hand.
Existing console developers were already used to strange machines. You think the PS2's weird, you should have seen the Saturn, or the SNES (especially when you added in the SuperFX).
Load balance 16 parallel cores? BRING IT ON!
Well. Considering that 8-bit computers were enough to send Voyager and Pioneer through millions of kms of space, precisely enough to still do close encounters with planets, and considering V-2 (II world war) were able to hit targets hundreds of KMs away with no computers (but brilliant engineering resulting in sophisticated non-electronic controlling system), one does NOT really need anything resembling super computer for controlling missiles.
Others have pointed out that the Saddam-and-superchips was mostly marketing hype, which is true enough... but there's really no need for super computers or chips for calculating missiles' flight paths. There are needs in nuclear simulations, but once again, first nuclear weapons were developed with reasonably modest computational resources.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes