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."

Comments

just the dev station

[johnjones]

this seems to me just to be the dev station like SONY gave out for the PS2
(they call it something like PS2Tool)

big deal or not ?

o BIG deal at least the hardware is sort of final (can be changed but not likely) that means they taped out and just need to do mass production

o NOT does not say anything about the device or that it includes silicon from the PS3 or just running an emulator

o lets face it you can use all of the tools to do graphics like they do in the movies and games at the moment Maya, 3DS Max and games engines are pretty good about seperating out the display from the AI, sound, physics

now can someone actually give details like a block diagram of the chip ?

regards

John Jones

Not needed

[PktLoss]

Building an engine around being able to do x,y & z doesnt nesesarily mean needing to have the equipment to do it all in front of you. Build your engine to be able to do it all, use a high end machine, and downsample your textures and such untill you get a machine that can handle the high rez copies.

Given the choice its always nicer to have the platform be available to you, but you can do a lot before you get to that point (assuming the specs are set in clay).

Re:While this is exciting news...

[kabocox]

As for home media centers, I bet Sony will eventually wipe the floor with Microsoft

I'm personnally betting that the PS4 would be Sony's grand attempt at a universal media server. PS3 is too soon. They are playing around with PVR products and have their eye on the home media center. IBM has their interests o.k. in being chip R&D and making the chips. Sony could do this by themselves, but it does make sense to partner with an MS rival. Nintendo is not rivaling MS in anything but game consoles. Nintendo is more likely to be bought than beat though. (Actually, it would have made alot of sense for MS to do that.) I think the XBox is MS's early attempt at game console/home media consoles.

These are just my personnal thoughts on the subject.

What OS

[polyp2000]

Hmm, IBM, Sony, new chip , not wanting to give M$ a lead ... I wonder what OS this thing will be running..

Could potentially be very very tasty.

nick...

Re:What OS

[AltaMannen]

My guess is Linux: Used in the ps2 tool, used for the original set of tools (which were quickly recompiled for windows), and it is cheap :) And IBM seems to like it too.

XNA

[Iscariot_]

Sony has released a dev kit, MS has got XNA in the works. The real company that should be worried is Nintendo... not Microsoft.

Re:While this is exciting news...

[gabe]

Microsoft did try to purchase Nintendo. They said no, and now we're afflicted with the Xbox.