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.'"
"This new game console will do one million cagillion ... billion calculations per second!"
Obviously Sony was sold on the technology after seeing how much benefit intel got from it.
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.
Can be found here.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
Will it have enough processing power to crack the XBox key? :P
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Rambus patent bitching is soooo 2001. All the cool Slashdotters are now bitching about In Soviet Russia jokes.
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.
While having super fast graphics/processors/etc is a very good thing (after all, it has to last at least 5 years before the PS4 comes out ;) ), here's my own wish list for the PS3:
1. Backwards compatible with the PSOne and PS2. Plenty of great games for those systems still out there, and I still like to play them.
2. Hard drive. This will be needed for the online games (which I don't care about) and add-ons (which I do). While there are games like RPG Maker 2 coming out which use the memory card, I'm more interested in seeing a PC like mod-community surround the PS3 - something we don't have now.
That, and I just don't like memory cards. I must have 20 PSOne memory cards (and most of those backed up to the PC through some third party units). I'd like to be able to swap save games with my friends just by connecting to them online.
3. Built in Ethernet/Modem: I'm assuming that come 2005 we'll still mostly be connecting via 56K modems in some areas, so let's assume that's going to be the case. I don't need a "$10 a month for a central line" - I don't play online that often, and I'd rather just have a few good friends who aren't assholes connect to my PS3 over the 'Net to play.
4. With the Ethernet/Modem, I want a CDDB system for my CD's to store them on the HDD.
5. And, of course, I want a Linux disk to be orderable with the system - just for those of us who like to tinker.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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.
"Cell, which is expected to come out in late 2004 or early 2005"..."will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz."
- First off I don't know if I like the fact that the word "north" was put in there - IMHO I think the wording could have been better.
Anyway my initial impression was "Cool in 1 -2 years there will be a new PS console as long as it stays backwards compatible like the PS2 I should be alright" but then I started thinking - with the Linux Kit for the PS2 and the ethernet adapter etc... the PS2 is really starting to get close to just becoming another "choice" as far as a pc (personal computer).
Example: John Doe doesn't own a computer. John Doe buys a PS2 with all the accessories - and can now surf the web, send email, code, run nix apps, and play video games - exactly what the average computer home user does (with the linux exception of course)
So if the PS3 is really going to be this "crazy fast machine of death to all other consoles" then would it surprise anyone if Sony started it's own line of Computers/Console crossovers? Where do you draw the line on what difines Computer and what defines Console with the wall beginning to crumble?
Ave Molech Setting
...is if the PS3 will be easier to program than the PS2? My impression of the PSX history was that it did well because it was the 3dfx of consoles. That is, like Glide on PCs, the PSX development tools made tossing 3D games together fairly easy, relative to the Saturn and possibly even the N64. Naturally, those that wanted to squeeze the very most out of the system found the tricks (by getting "down to the metal", so to speak) that would pull off things that weren't necessarily possible through the standard dev tools. This satisfied a great number of developers, as they could get be as deep or as shallow with the graphics as they wanted.
:^) Possibly off-topic, but this is a story about the PS3 tech...
Now, the PS2 comes out and everyone talks about how difficult it is to program for. Sure, we may be past that, but some devs definitely gave the impression of being turned off by Sony's new system and thought Sony had done a poor job the second time around in providing good dev tools. Naturally, the ability to get down and dirty with the hardware is still there, but perhaps those that didn't want to get too deep into the programming couldn't toss off games quite as easily as they had with the PSX. (Aside: Less shovelware might be a good thing for a console, come to think of it. But I digress...) I'd be interested to know if people still consider the PS2 to be a difficult system to work with.
Now, the PS3 is in the works and has this nebulous "cell" technology. If two processors were hard to work with in the PS2 (and Saturn and Jaguar) then how the hell can adding more be better, right? What I'd like to be hearing, if I were a game dev, is not that the system is going to be the most powerful thing to hit the industry but rather that it's powerful and easy to start programming for as soon as the dev kit arrives. If there is a high level system that allows you to just toss jobs as this group of cells and get them to do lots of dirty work for you without a lot of hand-holding, then that might very well be cool. But if every game programmer has to learn to corral a horde or CPUs into doing things in parallel, then it sounds like a losing prospect.
Ok, that's enough. Just wanted to get that out there.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
You've got it backwards actually. Servers tend to have lots of random access, so they need low latency. Modern games tend to stream a lot of data, so bandwidth becomes more important. There is a reason why the P4/RDRAM combo excelled at Quake 3 Arena; oodles of bandwidth.
Streaming applications: bandwidth is the most important
Apps with lots of random memory access: latency is far more important.
The Sony PlayStation 5, a 2,048-bit console featuring a 45-Ghz trinary processor, CineReal graphics booster with 2-gig biotexturing, and an RSP connector for 360-degree online-immersion play. See the specs at Playstation 5
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur