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PS3 Production Starts In 2005 With XDR DRAM

Posted by simoniker on from the many-things-happening dept.

News for nerds writes "According to Mr. Goto @ Impress PC Watch (Japanese article), Rambus Developers Forum Japan 2004 was held this week in Tokyo to show the roadmap of XDR DRAM, the memory chip in the Sony PlayStation 3 console, and SCEI did the keynote speech; the next-gen interactive console will be able to render in real-time, unlike current pre-rendered content playback machines. XDR DRAM production start deadline is still set at mid-2005 by Toshiba, Elpida and Samsung, which means that production of PS3 itself starts in 2005 and the console will be shipped in late 2005 or early 2006, as Cell is already sampled. Mr. Goto has revealed another insider news; single XDR DRAM chip in PS3 was changed to 256Mbit from expected 512Mbit. It means either of the 2 scenarios - (1) Total memory in PS3 was reduced from 256MB to 128MB (2) Memory bandwidth in PS3 was raised from 25.6GB/sec to 51.2GB/sec (RADEON X800 XT has 35.8GB/sec). Since Toshiba put the same potential market forecast per bits at RDFJ 2004 as in 2003, (2) is likely."

3 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Could someone explain what the hell this means? by simoniker · · Score: 3, Informative

    I went and Babelfish-ed the article and have changed that sentence - as another commenter suggested, it was just suggesting that next-gen consoles like the PS2 can do real-time rendering, so there should be no (or less) need for pre-rendered intro sequences and suchlike.

  2. Re:Umm, help? by noselasd · · Score: 2, Informative

    Uhm, it's not a theory, its already done. Many, many times, in many games.

  3. Developers' point of view by News+for+nerds · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thanks Simoniker for changing my offensive line of techno-babble Engrish to simple "realtime-rendering", but the original sentence "share entire set of raw materials and content production environment in it" is meant for developers (naturally, because it's Rambus Developers Forum), explaining recyclability of objects, not promising higher image quality to consumers. It suggests the standardized protocol to share the same model/scene/animation/programming data between feature film, game, and other domains, without losing (programming) control, not only suggesting shift to in-game real-time rendering. But I couldn't crunch that nuance well into the short article.

    Anyway the juicy part of this news is not SCEI hype, but memory bandwidth and expected shipping schedule of PS3 itself.