NVidia Eyes Playstation 3?

Thanks to CNN for their article discussing nVidia's possible overtures to Sony regarding the PS3. The piece points out that "ATI beat out nVidia earlier this month for the right to provide the graphics chip for Microsoft's next game machine. That followed ATI's March announcement that it had struck a technology development deal with Nintendo." It then quotes analyst Erach Dasai as suggesting: "The reality is nVidia is not sitting in a vacuum. They are in discussions with Sony for the PS3", although elsewhere, the article cites "...cost concerns [for developing graphics chips out-of-house], combined with Sony's do-it-ourself history, that has some other analysts a bit more skeptical that nVidia will be able to win a PS3 contract."

Comments

Done deal, actually.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a done deal. Unlike the Xbox arrangement however, Sony aren't licensing the entire core. They're interested in the rasterizing hardware, including the pixel shaders and the combiners. Geometry ("vertex shaders" and "T&L" in the higher level graphic world) for PS3 will still be done with proprietary Sony silicon. This lowers the procurement cost and allows for better integration with the cell architecture.

Tell them a little birdy told you.

Re:Done deal, actually.

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, the section not being licensed is as complex as your average CPU and takes up a huge portion of the die for the small body of functions contributed. Don't be surprised if nvidia ditches it in later generation graphics chipsets as well: a general purpose DSP would work every bit as well without all the heat and speed scale limitations that kind of a half-breed design generates.

Re:Done deal, actually.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and NVidia employees have never tried to manipulate or insider trade their company stock before... Follow the money...

A few things.

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

Why would Sony want to share the wealth? In-house development, as they've done in the past, must be more profitable. This got me thinking...(cue music)

Why did Microsoft strike a deal with ATI and not just buy the company? Also, which company is larger (based on profit and liquid assets), Sony or Microsoft. It seems that if Sony can develop their graphics cards in-house, Microsoft should be large enough to do the same.

Re:A few things.

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphics technology is advanting at a scary rate; the R&D costs are HUGE. Any company would avoid taking on that burden (and risk!) if they could license the technology for a reasonable price.

Microsoft is taking manufacturing in house for the majority of the Xbox 2 components however. For the more straightforward parts, all the commodity hardware markup has been eating them alive. Xbox has been a significant money loser to date.

Re:A few things.

[NanoGator]

"Why did Microsoft strike a deal with ATI and not just buy the company?"

Why spend the extra money instead of just licensing a new chip? Microsoft is a business trying to make money, they're not the Borg.

Re:A few things.

[kzadot]

It seems that if Sony can develop their graphics cards in-house, Microsoft should be large enough to do the same.

Its very little to do with size. Sony have had a long tradition of circuit design, they were one of the first licensees of the transistor, and that was back in the 40s I think. Microsoft have been writing software for a few years now, but their hardware experience is limited to mice and keyboards and only recently the x-box.

Re:A few things.

[Babbster]

You're going to get burned as a heretic if you're not careful.

Seriously, though, it's a common misconception that Microsoft wants to buy every company. The truth is that they mainly buy companies that they think they can get for a song and parlay into multi-thousand percent gains on their investment. ATI isn't such a company, particularly since they've not only just about owned the OEM video card market for years but in fact are in the lead (slim though it may be) in the technology race over Nvidia at the moment.

Even more on-topic, I would question in a PR sense a Sony decision to partner with Nvidia at this stage. To the casual observer, it could be interpreted as scooping up Microsoft's scraps..."How good could Nvidia be if Microsoft threw them overboard?"

Re:A few things.

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is that they mainly buy companies that they think they can get for a song and parlay into multi-thousand percent gains on their investment.

Um, like how much did they pay for Hotmail.

Re:A few things.

[I KNOW MARTIAL ARTS]

400 million dollars.

Re:A few things.

[Anonymous Coward]

all the commodity hardware markup has been eating them alive

Wait, I thought it was a matter of religious dogma on Slashdot that commodity hardware is always the cheaper way to go.

Re:A few things.

[Kibo]

I think gamers in particular are resistant to that sort of marketing. Not that there isn't brand loyalty, but for gamers where it appears it seems to be a particularly intense zealotry. In the form of "Brand X can do no wrong. Your ACME brand games & console, and your mother all eat my bung! PS -- You might not recognize your mom, I shaved her back."

And the gamers who don't pitch their tent in any specific camp, seem to go by what looks best/plays best/or has the best story. I'm sure this is related to building a new game library from scratch with every new generation (yes I know about the playstation, but the people I know with sony gear, don't really play the older titles, and in fact tend to sell them or trade them in.)

Re:A few things.

[PainKilleR-CE]

For consumers commodity hardware often is the cheaper way to go. However, for a console manufacturer, you're often dealing with the same hardware (or hardware with the same functionality) for a significant time period. Eventually people don't want to make that hardware any more, and there's a markup just to keep someone producing 2 or 3-year old hardware (especially hard drives, CPUs, GPUs). When was the last time you could find a 700MHz Intel CPU fairly easily? How long will it be before the low-end GeForce 4 cards are the same price as any given GeForce 3 or GeForce 2 card? The prices can only go down so much before the company that makes those products can't make any money by producing them, and if they're no longer mass-producing them, they're going to charge you for the cost of keeping a production line dedicated to the old product.

If you produce the hardware in house, you can utilize technology advances to reduce cost of making the same part, rather than increasing speed or making new parts (which is what drives commodity hardware costs down, and eventually drives hardware out of the market). Furthermore, you can reduce the complexity of your system.

gpu?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Their magical "100 times more powerful than a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 CPU" cell chip won't be enough to handle all the graphics?

Re:gpu?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't usually use a general purpose CPU for rasterizing. The simplest dedicated rasterizer can beat the pants off of a general purpose CPU while consuming a fraction of the power or throwing off all that heat.

What happened to the "Cell" processor?

[Sean Johnson]

I thought IBM was already developing some 'cell" processor for the PS3. This is wierd stuff man!

Re:What happened to the "Cell" processor?

[Anonymous Coward]

I before E, except in the word 'weird'.

Re:What happened to the "Cell" processor?

[Kevin Stevens]

The "Cell" processor is just that- A processor, a general purpose processor, not a GPU- graphics processing unit.

Hmm

[dafoomie]

Does this mean anti-aliasing will work this time?

Benchmarking PS2s?

[Babbster]

Only if all games use the same filenames.

Re:directx

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when was direct X needed for consoles? Maybe I'm a bit ignorant in this department, but wouldn't DX only be used by the consoles running a windows OS? (Dreamcast, Xbox, etc.)

What would Sony care if they didn't have a license for DX10? OpenGL all the way...

Re:directx

[Anonymous Coward]

AH, So I was right and you are an idiot... ok, all clear!

So.. OpenGL

[noselasd]

Might that imply we can use OpenGL for developing on PS3 ? ...drool..

Re:So.. OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenGL has been available to PS2 developers for some time - although there was quite a delay in getting it out.

Besides which, why would OpenGL be something to drool over? At the end of the day, it is just an API, it doesn't magically make the hardware do anything else that it wouldn't be able to do anyway. As long as there is a functionally equivilent API, developers will be fine (when PS2 first launched there wasn't, which is why the games looked really crap, instead of just crap).

Staying alive

[GenusP]

Even though NVidia is huge right now, ATI is slowly taking over the market. This contract is "do-or-die" time for NVidia and they are going to do everything in their power to get it. If they don't, who knows how long they'll be able to compete in the market.

Re:Staying alive

[PainKilleR-CE]

In some ways, the XBox contract is what put nVidia behind in the PC 3D graphics market. ATI's been in that market a lot longer, and bought their way into the console market with the GameCube. On the other hand, nVidia's eroded ATI's dominance in the OEM PC market, even getting into Apple's computers (where ATI had 100% of the market for quite a while). The only place nVidia's really having problems is with their high-end 3D chips, and they should be able to concentrate more on that if they aren't getting jerked around by Microsoft for a few years.

Re:directx

[mcgroarty]

x10 compatible? Does this mean I can finally watch those supermodels breaking into my basement, or does it just mean more popups?

nBox

[DeadBugs]

NVIDIA should just build their own console. They are already a well know name among gamers. They could use their own GPU and NForce Chipset, use a less expensive AMD processor and a Custom Linux OS making the box cheaper to produce than the XBOX. Many game developers are already using NVIDIA Cg shader programming so creating and or porting games for an NVIDA console should be pretty easy.

Re:nBox

[The Munger]

While I do think they have a large degree of brand-name recognition, it would typically be with the console crowd where the only knowledge they might have is that their chips were used in the XBox, and perhaps that you put them in those fancy desktop PC thingies. Also, while they have the GPU and a chipset, there's a fair bit more they'd have to worry about that they have no experience with as a company such as storage and controllers.

Could you really expect the company that bought you the beast known as the GeForce FX5800 to design a controller for the masses? Did you see the size of that thing?

Consider what it takes to get into the console market. Who are the two companies that have managed to enter the console market 'late': Sony and Microsoft. They've got more than a few pennies to rub together. They can afford to sink money into a 5 year project with a fair chance of failure. Microsoft committed to a XBox 2 before the XBox was even released. They know they have to slug away at the problem to make it work - and they can afford to lose. nVidia on the other hand, does not have the resources to attack such a monumental task.

That said, I'd love to see what they'd come up with.