Slashdot Mirror
Playstation 3 Gathering Components
briancnorton writes "Cnet has a story about how Sony has licensed some Rambus connection technology for the playstation 3. One technology is for chip-to-chip communications and the other for chip-to-RAM at over 100 Gbps. These are all parts of the 'Cell' processor system that is supposed to do over '1 trillion mathematical calculations per second.'"
So will the principled slashdotters put their money with their mouths are and not buy a PS3?
Or a PS2, as there's been Rambus tech in there from day 1.
With product sales and licensing fees in jeopardy, Rambus launched into its second life, as a litigant. Starting in 2000, the company began to seek patent royalties and pursue lawsuits against Micron, Infineon and other memory companies. The company said that patents it filed in 1990 entitled it to royalty payments on all of the SDRAM and DDR DRAM ever sold.
Lovely. Let's all go out and throw support to this wonderful company!
Seriously, though, I'm in the market for a new computer right now. I'm looking for a high end machine, but I refuse to buy one with RDRAM. It's just too expensive and not effective enough. Thankfully, you can now buy high-end DDR based Pentiums at Dell.
Rambus sucks.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Its great that these rumors of the PS3 are leaking out to get people excited, but we certainly won't be seeing the unit for a good while yet.
Console development is damn expensive (and getting worse each time around), and there is a *lot* of life left in the PS2. Hell, they're still selling PSOnes at a good clip!
I would expect Sony to milk the PS2 for all its worth before updating the hardware (and forcing updates from those developing for it, always a hassle). The only thing that would make them move more quickly is to one-up an opponent. And even then, they may wait; its the games that make money, and there are some pretty damn good games for the PS2.
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
I think it makes sense to use a "proprietary" technology like RAMBUS for consoles..
The main drawback to RAMBUS on a PC architecture, IMHO, is the tight grip on manufacturing, and the possible inability to get parts at a reasonable cost (not that it was really reasonable in the first place).
When's the last time you upgraded the RAM in your console?
S
Remember the cinematic effects rendering and the 'groundbreaking emotion engine' in the PS2 up till its launch? And then it barely leapfrogged the Dreamcast in terms of performance.
It was actually *much* better than the Dreamcast, but it required a different mindset in order to work with the hardware. The graphics hardware in the Dreamcast was very similar to that of the PC, whereas that of the PS2 was much stranger to the uninitiated.
Here's hoping that Sony funnels a reasonable percentage of the PS3's power toward making thing headache-free for developers, instead of even more complex.