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PlayStation 3 Press Conference Tonight
The official unveiling of the PlayStation 3 is set to happen tonight, with folks such as the Guardian Gamesblog, Kotaku, and GamesAreFun live blogging the event as it happens. From the Guardian post: "The sign on the way into the Sony Press Conference is big - Wi-Fi access will be only available after the event. They lied - a quick wireless search has found me some access and now I'm on. The clock says 1.00pm but my body says 9pm. By the time Microsoft unveils the 360 again tonight I'll be ready for my cornflakes."
...the PlayStation3 and Revolution will absolutely crush Microsoft's empty offerings of "better graphics = better games" and the Xbox 360 will be a miserable failure in the long-term (I only say "long-term" because it's inevitable that there will be hordes of MS fanboys and frat-boy MTV idiots lining up the night before launch date for their Xboxen).
Sony exclusives? What Sony exclusives?
Third parties aren't forced to stay with one manufacturer, if they decide MS doesn't bully them as much and lets them make more money they'll jump ship before Sony even knows what's happening. Look at the SNES->PS1 transition, everyone ran away from Nintendo in a way noone would have imagined during the SNES generation.
My hunch says the Cell will be even more of a nightmare than the XB360's hardware. Sony claims the compiler will work around that but when you don't know the memory latencies since you're not sure what's stored on which Cell and which Cell is going to run your code you'll have to plan for a worst case scenario. Never mind debugging.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"the PS3 is cell, and heavily vectorized, an unknown architecture." ... systems but never 3 cpu, or 5 cpu systems. I have to wonder if one of the PPC cores is dedicated to some type of special task.
Cell is also PowerPC and vectorized architectures are actually pretty common. MMX, SSE, AltaVec, Cray supercomputers...
The three cores in the Xbox 360 kind of bug me. For some reason I think SMP should go up by powers of 2. I mean I have seen 2 cpu, 4 cpu, 8 cpu, 16cpu, 32 cpu
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Interesting... samne clock and ram size as the Xbox360 (if I recall correctly?) but 2.18 claimed teraflops versus 1.0 for the Xbox. Surprised not to see UMD in the list of supprted formats.
Where are you getting this info from? The 3 links in the article are unupdated, 1 line of hype and refusing to serve pages respectively, plus engadget and gizmondo are dead too.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
From FirstAdopter.com
AV Output
Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
HDMI: HDMI out x 2
Analog: AV MULTI OUT x 1
Digital audio: DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) x 1
Two HDMI out ports? If the PS3 can drive two displays, that would explain the support for the seven bluetooth controllers. I wonder what kind of performance hit that would mean, at 1080p x2
PS3: lanparty in a box!
a little more blunt than I would've been, but after seeing the information about the PS3 it's really true.
I know that the quality of games will end up being the real factor, but given Sony's track record I wouldn't expect anything but a good number of solid games. Plus the backwards compatibility will mean that the console will launch with a large number of great games anyways. I didn't pick up one of the current generation consoles (ps2, xbox) but now that I have a little more free time I think that I'll be getting one of these and from what I see my choice will be the PS3. Not only does it look to be the most powerful, but I'll be able to catch up on all of those PS2 games that I missed.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
On the one hand, you have a point. People came down harder on Microsoft than was justified by the quite reasonable specs they announced, with the system setup that looked pretty darned good.
On the other hand, that special was in many ways just plain insulting. It really gave The Wizard a run for it's money. Lucas would be proud.
It looks like neither of the two (Sorry Nintendo) major players have slipped up. Both are using sleek 'n sexy wireless controllers that may actually justify the cost of 1st party controllers. They both have detachable HDD options (remember kiddies, so did the PS2 and look where that went). Microsoft sensibly put their memory card ports back onto their machines, and Sony now appears to be supporting actual real memory cards. The PS3 also happens to look lickably good, whereas the Microsoft console looks much better than the Xbox (though kind of resembles a blob of ice cream).
On the other hands, both systems have achilles heels. They both are going to be a pain to develop for, what with multiple memory speeds, multiple processors, etc etc. One word: ouch. The 360 has all sorts of "Live" functionality requirements that will drive development costs up a bit, but more than that will drive developers up walls. The PS3's 8 processors-on-a-die looks like it's going to continue the PS2's legendary ease-of-programming and development [/scarcasm]. Backwards compatibility of the PS3 is a good trend, though it probably won't make or break the system. And not that I'm partial or anything, but I really wish the cameras had come standard with the consoles. It has to come standard if it's going to get used.
It looks like both systems are pretty easily matched. I eagerly await Nintendo's announcement.
Full Disclosure - I'll probably buy a PS3. If it comes out in a year and a half, that will be about the time that my latest PS2 craps out.
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