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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."

35 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?

    1. Re:Linux in mind? by intermodal · · Score: 4, Informative

      Linux in mind. That means that the person/persons designing it are trying to make it easy to run linux on it. This does not make it linux-specific. If I buy a NIC with a variety of OSes listed on the box from WinXP down to MS-DOS, Win3.1, SCO Unix, and Linux, it is still designed with Linux in mind because compatibility was considered in its development and it means that it will work under linux (supposedly). The reason it was used in such a manner on this article heading (the /. one) is that most people here frankly couldn't care less about whether it'll run Windows or such. Though a teraflop PS3 as a BeBox...that'd be cool

      --
      In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
  2. Hrm.. by qurob · · Score: 5, Funny


    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?

    1. Re:Hrm.. by Doomdark · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Saddam was rumored to buy some to control missles or something?

      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
  3. 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 warpSpeed · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Think encryption.

      and nuclear explosion simmulations...

    2. Re:export controls? by Lord_Slepnir · · Score: 5, Funny
      create a crude missile guidance system.

      Actually, the atari 2600 had this. It was called missile commander i do believe.

  4. Thats it? by bytor4232 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Thats it? by Lord_Slepnir · · Score: 5, Funny
      Have you played the new Unreal 2003 demo yet? People already have toasters in their computers, so computers in their toasters isn't that far off.

      You saw it here first: The FIRST TOASTER VIRUS

      if(Toast_Present == 1)
      {
      Turn_On_Coils();
      While(Toast.OnFire() = 0)
      {
      if(Lever.Manual_Eject() == 1)Lever.Jam();
      if(Power.Unplug() == 1)Power.Source = reserve_battery;
      }
      Eject_Flaming_Toast_At_User();
      }

  5. lara? by edrugtrader · · Score: 4, Funny

    until they can get a 3D lara to give me a lap-dance, i'm not impressed.

    --
    MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
  6. Must be a good thing by JohnCC · · Score: 5, Funny

    A large international company trusted by millions can only be a good thing for the linux community...

  7. 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 slyfox · · Score: 5, Informative
      The article states that they have "taped-out" the design. However, when I visited IBM-Austin last December (I gave a presentation on my research) they were still in the high-level idea phase. There is no way they could have decided on the design and completed it so quickly. My guess is this is a "test chip", like the one they did for Power4. Power4's test chip tested some of the critical circuits and such, but it was not the final design.

      That said, it seemed like they were considering some pretty wild ideas. However, I remember hearing about plans for the Playstation 2 chip a couple of years before it shipped; at the time it was hard to fathom, but when it arrived it wasn't as big a leap as I thought it was going to be. (Though still quite impressive.)

      I expect the Playstation 3 will be just as impressive, but not earth-shattering. They key will be how easy it is to write programs that take advantage of the raw computational power.

    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.

  8. 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.

  9. Learn from the last Sony hype-fest. by Performer+Guy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. 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
    1. Re:Slashdot in mind by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
  11. 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...

    1. Re:A terraflop? by quantaman · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yeah, I'm thinking it's a typo and they meant gigaflop. I'm not sure about Intel and AMD but I know G4's have run at over a gigaflop for a few years, right now they have a peak of 15 (dual processor). So a cheap processor for the console market hitting a gigaflop sounds about right. That would also explain the "supercomputer on a chip," as one of the big things about the G4 was that the 1 gigaflop barrier meant it qualified as a supercomputer (and a military weapon:).

      --
      I stole this Sig
    2. Re:A terraflop? by guttentag · · Score: 4, Funny

      You misunderstood. A "terraflop" is a finishing combo in a top secret street fighter game that will be released with the PS3. This is different from the "teraflop" which refers to floating point ops.

  12. Sony is pretty funny by quantax · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  13. Re:1 TFLOP? by unicron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  14. 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 ? ;-)

  15. 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!
    1. Re:Moore's Law is not a law by Phil+Wilkins · · Score: 3, Informative

      4 multiply-accumulates, 1 divide. ...and with good reason. Transforming a vertex through the perspective transform takes 16 multiply-accumulates, and 3 divides. So a ratio of 4 fmacs to 1 fdiv unit is pretty optimal.

  16. 1 TFLOP CPU, 0 Tb/s memory bus by tshoppa · · Score: 3, Insightful
    What good is a 1 TFLOP CPU if you don't have a memory bus to support it? The mark of a true supercomputer is not CPU power, but truly massive memory bandwidth. (Low-latency memory doesn't hurt, but for big vector problems it doesn't always help.)

    Caches help for little problems, but you don't put a 1 TFLOP CPU onto a little problem.

  17. Re:1 TFLOP? by Skyshadow · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Of course, you were probably more easily amused as a kid. I seem to remember that a lot of games were always fooled by perfecting a single trick or strategy, then repeating it over and over.

    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.
  18. Programming for the PS3 by el_benito · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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
  19. Almost ready? I think not... by Thai-Pan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  20. Several things by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  21. Re:If you think the PS2 architecture is weird by Phil+Wilkins · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > 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!

  22. Re:If you think the PS2 architecture is weird by Phil+Wilkins · · Score: 3, Funny

    Testify brother Atari, testify!

    Now let me hear it from the vector display programmers out there... Someone give my Tempest brother some love!