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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."
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.
until they can get a 3D lara to give me a lap-dance, i'm not impressed.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
A large international company trusted by millions can only be a good thing for the linux community...
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.
The cake is a pie
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...
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
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.
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.
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 ?
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!
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.
"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
You saw it here first: The FIRST TOASTER VIRUS
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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!