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Playstation 3 Already Won the Next Gen Battle?
damyan writes "The BBC are running an article that claims that the Playstation 3 has already won the next-gen battle, since 'The Informa Media Group predicts that Sony will sell more than 30 million PlayStation 3s in Europe by 2010. It puts Microsoft in second place with 10 million sales and Nintendo trailing in third with five million.' If only everyone could see that well into the future."
When you pay your 100 pounds (which doesn't seem too much to me, I have to say!), you get a 40G hard-drive, a 100-base-T ethernet network adapter, and Sony send you an online id so you can play networked games when you're not coding.
As for outdated, well it only runs kernel 2.2 but, frankly, who cares ? The "cool" bits are the vector units (which you have to code in assembly anyway) and the DMA engine.
I've posted about this before, but the PS2 is (when coded properly) a dataflow architecture. It has massive internal bandwidth, relatively little RAM, and 3 processors (Mips R3K, 2 vector units). The idea is to pull data from the RAM into the processors using DMA, work on the data, and DMA it to the rendering engine. You can chain DMA transactions, and the combination of the flexible DMA, the 3 processors, and the bandwidth is what makes the PS2. None of this is in any way dependent on the Linux kernel - all it's really there for is to create a self-hosting environment...
Simon.
The PS2 Linux kit includes a hard drive, that is part of the big price. Also a network adaptor (without modem), a keyboard and mouse, and a VGA output (that requires a sync on green monitor).
It's actually a 487Mhz PPC. The real keys are that clock-for-clock the PPC is better than the EE (MIPS R5900 as you mention), the CPU cache is much bigger (256k) on the PPC than the EE (8k), the system bus bandwidth is lower - EE is 128bit but only 150Mhz and RDRAM has a long setup time vs the 1T-SRAM used with the PPC - and core floating point performence is much better on the PPC than the EE (eg. physics, AI).
Most PS2 games are EE-limited. The VUs are great for medium (eg. skinning) and low (eg. transform, clipping, lighting) level vertex processing but that's only a relatively small piece of the total work done by a modern game. They have so little integer and flow control support that you can't do much higher level work on them even if you wanted to deal with writing such things in dual-issue microcode.
Graham