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Sony, IBM Announce Cell Workstation For PS3 Dev
Thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for its article discussing the little-heralded Sony announcement of a Sony and IBM co-developed, Cell-based workstation for PlayStation 3 (and other) content creation. The article explains: "The workstation, which will ship before the end of the year, will feature an architecture based on the parallel processing Cell chip [also to be used in the PlayStation 3], and will be designed to power digital content creation for movies, television and videogames." GI.Biz also quotes an un-named industry figure as suggesting: "Microsoft should be really worried by this... They've been touting Xbox 2 to their partners and talking about the kind of content they want to see created on the platform - more polygons, higher resolutions, more effects - and our response has been that the tools to create this stuff for games don't really exist yet. Now Sony has effectively created those tools."
Better technology does not always translate to better video games. I'm sure what ever Nintendo or Microsoft use for their next gen architecture will be comparable to the PS3. As for home media centers, I bet Sony will eventually wipe the floor with Microsoft.
the cosmos in 20 words or less: thumbuki.com
They're announcing the dev kits that should ship 'sometime' before the end of the year.
Personally I see it as the Sony PR FUD machien is running again: "no no, our machine will be much more powerful than theirs".
It worked the last time they were going to show up a year late to the next hardware generation. Why not go back to the well?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
"...digital content from the Cell workstations (whose proposed role reminds us of the market position occupied by Silicon Graphics workstations in the early nineties, before their performance was overtaken by x86 PC systems and PowerPC Macintosh systems)"
And why is modelling your business strategy after a defunct market segment (e.g. Silicon Graphics workstations) a good thing? There is a reason why SG went out of business, people! Because it eventually became cheaper to buy plain old PCs! As much as I like Sony, I think Microsoft has the right tack here, by focusing on the software tools side with XNA, not trying to re-create a specialized hardware market segment for graphics development. With the pace of PC chip development, this will always be a losing game.
It is not really so much about designing a pipeline to push polygons and textures for a generic target as it is about how to find the optimal pipeline and vertex/texture/feature balance so that content can be created to fit perfectly to take the most advantage of the machine.
On a PC you generally can't determine an exact balance and load for rendering so you more or less have to create art that can scale with the machine but on consoles you don't have to do that and you can work with a known target.
The best-looking console games are always the result of a lot of time spent with the real hardware.
"...will feature an architecture based on the parallel processing Cell chip [also to be used in the PlayStation 3], and will be designed to power digital content creation for movies, television and videogames."
Sounds like a G5 to me. Maybe Microsoft should...hang on, they already did.
The GI.biz article tried to make out having same OS on DevKit is a big deal. It aint. As a console programmer, I've found DevKit OS makes very little difference to host OS. Any embedded systems programmer will tell you this is called "cross-compiling". The PS2 dev kit is actually running Linux, but most folks use Windows to develop the software.
Its kinda cool to have a new player in the workstation market however. Should give Apple a run for their money...
"My cat's breath smells like cat food." - The Tao of Ralph Wiggum.