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NVIDIA Interview on the PS3

Posted by Zonk on from the new-consoles-equate-to-teh-shiny dept.

Hack Jandy writes "NVIDIA will be the graphics provider for the next generation Sony Playstation 3. Xbitlabs got an interview with the corporate marketing director at NVIDIA to grab a few more tidbits concerning the next generation console. Some particular highlights; the PS3 will have a graphics engine an echelon higher than the GeForce 6xxx cards today ("most powerful GPU that we've ever created actually") and took NVIDIA over 2 years to design."

2 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. PS1/PS2 compatibility? by redelm · · Score: 2, Informative
    I'm presuming PS2 software compatibility is there. There was _no_ mention of how this is achieved technically or licencing.

    I don't know what GPU is in the PS2, but I thought that GPU emulation is an order of magnitude harder than CPU emulation. The primatives are different, particularly around vector operations.

  2. Re:Most powerful... whoopie. by Jerf · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's right, buy the hype....

    General purpose processors can't be as good at graphics as graphics cards, the optimizations are mutually exclusive in a lot of ways, especially in the physical world. If they are, virtually by definition they aren't very good CPUs.

    This isn't going to change. Searching a string for the next occurance of "</bleh>" isn't going to be well done by a GPU, but CPUs have to do that all the time and you can parallelize to your hearts content, but that need in the real world isn't going away.

    Despite the centralization trends towards CPUs, I expect we'll always have some form of GPU, right up to the day it's specialized to generate direct neural input to our simulated minds. We'll always want the extra performance and it is likely to always consist of highly specialized computations that have mutually exclusive optimizations to general purpose CPUs.