Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Playstation 3 CPU Almost Finished?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the more-polys-means-more-grand-theft-auto dept.

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."

17 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Linux in mind? by slutdot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  2. export controls? by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Does this mean that Japan will add export controls to this like they did with the PS2?

    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.

    1. Re:export controls? by aero6dof · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Guess what, it doesn't take a supercomputer to guide a missile. There is some (flawed) logic to prevent export of supercomputers, but missile guidance isn't one of them. Think encryption.

  3. If you think the PS2 architecture is weird by SkipToMyLou · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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]

  4. Late 2004? by qurob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Late 2004? by King_TJ · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, that was my thought too.... If they're saying it won't be finished until at least the end of 2004, and expected for official "launch" in 2005 - that's too long a wait for the next Playstation.

      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.

      If this "cell" gets used in a Playstation, I'd bet more on it being in a PS4 - with some other upgrade in-between as the PS3.

      I already sold my PS2 (at a considerable loss, even) due to lack of interest. When I first saw Gran Turismo 3 - I thought I had to have it. After owning it a while and buying 14 more games for it, I realized that Gran Turismo 3 was about as good as it gets. Most games have considerably worse graphics, and some have worse gameplay too. I get much more out of my Pentium 4 system. In another year, PS2 will look pretty pathetic next to the current crop of PCs.

    2. Re:Late 2004? by tgibbs · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Yeah, that was my thought too.... If they're saying it won't be finished until at least the end of 2004, and expected for official "launch" in 2005 - that's too long a wait for the next Playstation. 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.
      I wouldn't be surprised if Sony's goal in releasing this early info is to panic Microsoft into doing just that. The big appeal of consoles to consumers and developers is that they have long product lives relative to computers. Companies that rush the next generation to market too fast get a bad reputation with consumers and developers, as Sega discovered.

      If all goes well for the XBox, it may catch up to the PS2 in sales by the end of the year, and maybe in userbase by the end of the following year, so Sony has plenty of time. And if they panic Microsoft into releasing Xbox upgrades, they may have even longer....

    3. Re:Late 2004? by mosch · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Okay, pretend for a second (just for a second) that you're not a total computer geek who loves playing with his computer. I know that's a stretch, but you can do it, I have faith.

      For less than $400 you can buy a box that you hook to your receiver, you put games in and they work. They display on that nice big TV you already own, and you invite your friends over to drink some beers and play Blitz, and you all laugh your asses off as you take turns beating hookers with a bat in GTA3. When you get a new game, the only thing you do is put the disc in, and it works. You invite some friends over, trash talk each other, have a great time and in short, it's fucking awesome.

      Compare that to the PC solution, and remember that non-computer geeks don't build PCs out of whitebox parts that they bought off of pricewatch. They go to dell. They pick a middle of the road model from the Dimension line and it says it's $989. Then they upgrade to Microsoft Office, splurge on a 21" monitor and a cd burner, and suddenly it's a $2300 computer. Then they have to keep this computer updated, and upgrade drivers and all sorts of other annoying shit. When they're done, they can now play games against people who aren't in the same room as them, on a display that's half the size of your TV. To a lot of people, that sounds quite gay.

      In short, you should really try thinking before you make your arguments. Not everybody is you.

  5. Chip With linux in mind eh? by t0qer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:Chip With linux in mind eh? by t0qer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Oh yeah, i've been thinking about that alot in the last year....

      Thing is, if Gates actually programmed the XP kernel himself I think I could have more respect for him. I don't think he does anything anymore other than fly around buying up bikini babes at E3 shows and the like. I have to wonder if that man is totally detatched from coding now?

      Linus on the other hand continues his work into the linux kernel and makes tremendous contributions to the world in computer science with both his OS and the philosophy of open source. Sort of goes without saying.

      When it boils down to it, do you do it for yourself or the world? That is what these two mens moral fiber has been about. Bill is for himself, Linus isn't.

      I think if Linus ever had the oppertunity to influence a megacorp like sony from the inside it would benifit the world, with the side effect of benifiting sony. As long as they gave him "free reign" I think he would be kept happy.

      Imagine Linus turning sony into an "Open Source" megacorp. Every product, from camera's to robots would be completly open source. The current programming teams would have to learn to swim or sink, which is sorta bad but it would weed out the uglies.

      Well, that's me retort. Fire away.

  6. Slashdot in mind by ucblockhead · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Reportedly, this chip is being engineered with Linux in mind."
    Translation: the marketing guys mention Linux to get slashdot coverage.
    --
    The cake is a pie
  7. A terraflop? by wilburdg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  8. Moore's Law by archnerd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  9. Great ... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the article:
    "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 :), 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.

    How long do we have to wait for Gran Turismo to show-case the PS3 ? ;-)

  10. Moore's Law is not a law by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Moore's law is NOT a law, at best it's an observation that has so far been consistent.

    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!
  11. Can it run BSD? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  12. Re:1 TFLOP? by Kevin+Stevens · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No one said ANYTHING about 1 trillion triangles being pushed out. This is pure micro-operations were talking about. I will bet you cant even add 1.0 + 1.0 a trillion times on this new processor. Triangles need to go down the graphics pipeline, and there are three points on a triangle. Since this is a processor, and not a GPU, the processing time will have to be divided up among all the application's functions. Not even a hype crazed marketing exec. would try and claim a trillion triangles per second.