Slashdot Mirror
PlayStation 3 Unveiled
The PlayStation 3 was unveiled yesterday afternoon in a press conference at Sony Pictures Studio. The event was full of beautiful demonstrations, specifications, and talk of the games of tomorrow. The machine is certainly impressive, with backwards compatibility, support for up to seven Bluetooth controllers, multiple HD signals, and intimate interactions with the PSP. Coverage, screenshots, and specs available from 1up.com, Gamespot, Joystiq, NYT, Voodoo Extreme, Gamespy, BBC, GamesIndustry.biz, Engadget, Anandtech, Kotaku, Gamasutra, and CNN Money. The only downside I see so far? The controller. Update: 05/18 21:35 GMT by Z : Gamespot has up a comprehensive look at the console based on what is known so far.
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/614/614619p1.html
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
In a bluetooth piconet you can only connect 8 devices. So that means 7 controllers and 1 console.
The controllers are Bluetooth, you can have up to 7 of them as opposed to the 360's 4.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Sony has stated repeatedly that they were aiming for a machine that was 1000 times more powerful than the PS2, and with talk of a 4 or 8 cell machine, it looked like they might come at least respectably close to that figure.
But now we find out that it's only 35 times quicker than a PS2? It's a fair advance obviously, but it's a hell of a long way short of what we were promised. So I suspect that, as with the PS2, all the talk of real-time photo realistic graphics will turn out to be just that; talk.
It's a nice machine, sure, but evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
I'll boil it down: here's what you need to know.
* The hardware absolutely rocks. The tech demos they showed off were incredibly impressive, and it's very clear that Cell (programmed correctly) will be the most powerful platform out there.
* There's already signs of DRM and locking down the platform. There was a slide on "hardware security built-in" (they probably meant the way the Cell protects data when shuttling it off to another processor, but it's easy to get the double-meaning).
* As it stands right now, this thing is going to blow the doors off of Xbox 360. This is coming from an Xbox fan (I've got 30 titles lined up in the den). I'm a gamer, but I also love the best hardware. Barring what Nintendo introduces (and they could very well surprise us, despite the "graphics don't matter" marketing they've been doing), this is clearly going to be the most powerful console around.
I took the time out to compare and contrast between the Xbox 360 & PS3 and I came to to this conclusion.
Xbox 360 has a CPU FPS of 45 GFlops*
PS3 has a CPU FPS of 218 GFlops
Xbox 360 has a GPU FPS of around 955 GFlops**
PS3 has a GPU FPS of 1.8TFlops
Xbox 360 has a combined FPS of 1TFlops
PS3 has a combined FPS of 2.18TFlops
Xbox 360 has a DVD-ROM
PS3 has a BD-ROM
Xbox 360 is WiFi ready
PS3 is WiFi built-in
Xbox 360 has 3 x USB 2.0 ports
PS3 has 6 x USB 2.0 ports
Xbox 360 has support for 4 wireless controllers
PS3 has support for 7 wireless (Bluetooth) controllers
Xbox 360 uses Memory Units
PS3 uses MS Standard/Duo/Pro, SD standard/mini & Compact Flash Type I/II
Xbox 360 has support for select Xbox1 games
PS3 has support for PS1 & PS2 games
Xbox 360 has support for 1 720p & 1080i display
PS3 has support for 2 480p, 720p, 1080i & 1080p displays
Note:
* Derived from CPU Game Math Performance of 9 billion dot product operations per second
** Derived from subtracting published Overall System Floating-Point Performance of 1TFlops with derived from CPU Game Math Performance of 9 billion dot product operations per second
Source:
Wikipedia's PS3 Tech Specs
Official Xbox 360 Fact Sheet
Formula for Dot Product Operations Per Second to GFlops
The XBox 360 is like a Ferrari with 3 engines. The PS3 is like a Ferrari with 1 engine and 7 rockets strapped on.
The Playstation 3 will be backwards compatible with the Playstation 2
The Playstation 2 is backwards compatible with the Playstation.
Any chance that the Playstation 3 will be compatible *all the way back* to the Playstation?
There are some classic games that I would hate to lose.
From gamesindustry.biz
"Like Xbox 360, PS3 will have 512MB of RAM, but unlike its rival console, which has a unified memory architecture that shares RAM betwen the CPU and GPU, it will divide that up in much the same way that modern PCs do - with 256MB of very high speed XDR main RAM running at 3.2Ghz, and 256MB of GDDR graphics RAM running at 700Mhz."
Both have 512 MB but XBOX360s RAM is unified. I guess benchmarks will tell us if that causes a real difference or not
Oh please.
On modern wireless controllers, there is no such thing as wireless lag. Do the math.
And single frame precision? Gee.. Modern console games limit framerates to 30 fps. That means each frame is ~33 miliseconds. You honestly believe that controllers lag for anywhere near 33 ms?
That's an eternity to an SOL signal.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Did they even show the inside of a PS3 console? You can bet it is a pre-rendered CG video. Sony has done this time and time again, but gamers don't care. Just dangle some eye-candy in their face and they will _want_ to believe that it is rendered in real-time.
I very much doubt you will see any games support 1080p at first...and maybe not ever. Why spend the cycles rendering all that extra data that no one is going to see? I suspect that the developers would much rather use those cycles improving graphic quality or throwing more characters onto the screen at once than rendering double the data for no gain.
Almost no HDTVs support 1080p right now. And if you buy a nice HDTV today, are you going to replace it in five years? 1080p would be wasted on this generation of consoles, IMO.
You never used the Wavebird for Gamecube did you? It is controller perfection. Gets excellent battery life, doesn't lag, and has excellent range. I blame your issues on crappy third party controllers.
Get the specs from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_GameCube
They both lagged the XBox, but Nintendo still had some bragging rights over Sony. We'll see what the next generation brings, I guess.
Taft
I watched the whole press conference on gamespot. The battery life of the controllers was stated as 24 hours many time by the presentators.
What isn't being explained to the uninitated is that line for the Cell on '7 x SPE @ 3.2Ghz'.
The Cell isn't a single core: it's 8! The CPU (or PU as it is called) is a POWER5 core. It is connected to 7 APUs/SPEs (Attached Processor Units/Single Processing Elements (whatever you want to call them)). Each SPE is a limited CPU in its own right with its own local caches and memory. The PU acts as a controller, dispatching work to the APUs.
Each APU is essentially a very fast CPU optimized for moving data streams and calculations. Cell was designed to chew on large amounts of similar data very, very fast. It isn't a general purpose core like the POWER or Intel cores found in Xbox 360 or the original Xbox (or your PC for that matter).
Caches aren't everything. PCs and XBox depend on caches to maintain performance levels as in a mixed instruction stream it is tough to know what's going on. A cache miss in a general purpose core can (and is) expensive in terms of cycles. Cell (and the original PS/2) get around caching issues by simply not having them (or just enough to feed the processor) and rely heavily on moving data across a very wide and fast memory bus on demand, as needed and repeated as necessary. Dramatically simplifies the architecture and permits much more focused optimization of code. Programmers for PS/2 had to learn to live without caches and learn a new way of development since PC experience doesn't translate over into the PS/2 world and clearly not into the PS/3 world.
A big part of this contest between XBox 360 and PS/3 is seeing how programmers managed to take advantage of that parallel power. Multiple cores in XBox will be useless if they can't be taken advantage of. Same goes for Cell.
I think PS/3 has the advantage and will eventually win. I'm surprised at the specs as original discussions on the machine had indicated it would be fitted with FOUR Cell processors, not one. Perhaps the initial round of prototypes are single Celled (forgive the pun) to permit development and gaining familiarity with the hardware. Perhaps inside are empty slots for more chips.
Don't confuse PS/3 with a PC because it's not. It is designed to be a very fast SIMD media machine focusing on graphics, video and audio. It may suck as a general purpose server and perhaps a PC can hammer it on some benchmarks but if Cell performs half as good as the information on it speculates in the media realm, there isn't a PC (or Xbox) out there that can hope to keep up with it.
XDR is a Rambus technology. This doesn't make the PS3 evil by association imho, Sony chose the technology, they weren't forced by patent lawyers to use it.
According to the specs sheet, they are using Bluetooth 2.0+EDR which fixes the refresh rate problem, amongst other things.
Read more
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i =2417&p=3
As far as I understood it - PS3 WILL have a hdd.
Each device can only be Master in one piconet. And last I looked there were no chipsets that handled scatter-nets properly. (Ie having a device be master in one piconet and client in another.)
IOW if they wanted more than 7 devices they'd need multiple Bluetooth adaptors. And I believe they really don't expect more than 4 players per game. But this allows you to keep other devices (Eye-toy etc) hooked up while you play 4 player games.
Well, you're pretty lucky because logitech says the controller you have lasts 50 hours with 2 AA batteries. That's pretty good, but the info I've read about the PS3 controller mentionned inductive recharging, meaning you could play from 6AM to 11PM, put your controller on a pad without plugging anything in, wake up the next morning, pick it up for another 17 hours, every day of the week, for months. 50 hours seems about right for 2 AA batteries on your controller, my i-river 790 lasts about 40 hours on a AA battery.
Worst case scenario if you gotta play for 40 hours in a row, you'd probably plug in your controller to charge it via USB for hour 24 to 28 and then unplug it. Like I said, I'm unclear about how these will recharge.
This is quite insteresting. Unlike general purpose processors, which are often optimized for a set of specific benchmarks, the processor for a game console is actually designed to optimize the performance for a specific set of applications, i.e., 3D games. The most demanding applications driving the performance of high end PCs today also happen top be 3D games. I wonder if we are going to see a transition to back to simplified cores with higher clock speeds soon. Given the current trend to integrate multiple cores on a single processor die, a multi-core design with a large number of simple, high speed processors would be an interesting design trend.
The multi-threading feature of the Cell core may be ported over from the Power5 design as a way to deal with memory latency at high clock speeds.
I think it would be pretty safe to assume that the PowerPC core in the Xbox360 chip is very similar, if not the same design. Here is an IBM paper that shows, at least in the lab, they were able to run the cell processor above 4GHz.
Quick search made me come up with this press release. Right now a 52" DLP 720p/1080i television from toshiba runs about 3500$CAN, altough I've seen them as low as 3200$CAN. By april of next year I'd wager you'd be able to pick up a 52" 1080p DLP for less then 4000$CAN (roughly 3200$US).
Not exactly cheap, but you probably won't have to sell one of your kids to get one if you want it. Right now I'm using a 26" 720p/1080i CRT from toshiba, should be good enough to enjoy the new system at first, especially since I've read that most games probably will run at 720p instead of 1080p (I'd assume for the first generation at least).
But those picture that you pulled up, they are four USB 2.0 ports, there is two more on the back of the PS3. And there is what looks like THREE Ethernet ports! (Two of the ports are output, someone say LAN Party?!)
Here's a better picture of the front ports: Front
And a picture of the back of the PS3: Back
I think the USB layout is good for memory sticks. Better than stacking since some sticks are too chubby for that. And I'd imagine that some people would get right on the PC support, eventually.
No, 360 has 3x PPE's each with a VMX-128 vector unit and PS3 has 1x PPE and 8x SPE's. I fucking hate bullshit posts like yours.
While we know there is marketing hype involved, at least one demo was shown to be real-time. From the Gamespot article :
Why is it hard to believe that Sony, working on this project for the past 3 years or more, might just be able to best Microsoft's 18-month project? It should not be. While the specs might be a tad inflated, it's probably safe to say that the PS3 is a more graphically and computationally capable machine than the Xbox 360. What that means for market share remains to be seen.
Both MS and Sony are going to be pulling out all the stops. Nintendo is likely to step up to the plate as well. You know what? Competition is good.
The company I work for (I'm on lunch, lunch dammit) produces a video processing chip for TVs that will do 1080p for Samsung's upcoming line of 80" PDPs. We also have some projectors in the lab that can do 1080p.
1080p is coming sooner then you think..
> but one is apparently reserved in the PS/3 Cell for system use so that leaves 7 remaining for general purpose use
According to Anand's review, they're allowing for one of the SPE's to be defective, in order to increase yields, and disabling one of them in all of them regardless, so that the hardware is identical.
This is a pretty common practice in the industry, and the resulting chips are still plenty usable. Otherwise the PS3 would have real price and possibly even volume problems.
Speaking of volume, that's probably why they're not launching it this year: they don't want a repeat of the shortage fiasco of the PS2.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Actually polls show time and time again, that Pacman is the most widely known video game and video game character.
Holy moly. I just erased a huge rebuttal to what you just said after reading the good news. Last time I checked back in November (when Samsung's original 61" 1080p DLP was officially overdue), Samsung said that it was jacking up the price on its offerings from $6500 to $9000. How we're seeing price ranges from that company from $4500-$7000 for 1080p DLPs. We might actually see relief.
I was going to mention the price increase and couple it with the fact that all the LCoS sets including Sony's new SXRD are going to be going for >$10000, but this is good news. You might be right. It'd be nice to get a 1080p screen with some decent black levels as opposed to my current Sharp AQUOS set.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
No, that would be a waste of resources, and would cause ugly tearing on all televisions due to the nature of interlaced TV. Imagine the worst case, where every frame you are alternating a clear to black or white. If you draw at 60 hz, you get this extremely ugly image that is black and white striped. If you limit to 30, you get exactly what you want: solid white followed by solid black.
It's true that newer televisions (read: HD) will update at 60 hz, but games are not taking full advantage of this yet, in the general case.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.