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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.
In a bluetooth piconet you can only connect 8 devices. So that means 7 controllers and 1 console.
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
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.
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.
According to the specs sheet, they are using Bluetooth 2.0+EDR which fixes the refresh rate problem, amongst other things.
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...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
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.
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.