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Playstation 3 Not A Video Game Machine
Gamespot has coverage of a pair of interviews with Ken Kutaragi in which he states that the PS3 isn't really a gaming console. Instead, it will be an all around device that will allow the owner to experience all sorts of different types of new entertainment. From the article: "The PS3 is the product we have been aiming for since the establishment of SCEI...We haven't been creating our [past] PlayStations for the sake of games. Our belief, and the motivation behind running our company, has been to [explore ways of] applying the power of computers to entertainment and enjoyment. We equipped the original PlayStation with a 3D graphics chip, and we equipped the PS2 with the Emotion engine. The PS3 isn't designed to lean towards games. It's not a computer for children. In the sense that our goal has been [to create] a computer that's meant for entertainment, you could say that the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2 had existed as steps towards the PlayStation 3."
And perhaps the tax authorities' definitions of said word?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Rumor has it that you'll need an add-on to play DVDs on the Revolution, which is fine with me. I already own 2 DVD players and when I starting looking to buy a next-gen console, I want something to play games, not manage my media collection. I'll buy dedicated devices for different tasks (e.g. movie playback, music playback, etc.). I doubt that Nintendo lost many sales by not having DVD playback in the GC and I doubt that MS gained many sales by having DVD playback in the XBox. Sony, on the other hand, probably did gain sales buy having DVD playback in the PS2 since DVD players were not as commonplace in the US when the PS2 launched. However, I think the PS3 having Blu-Ray playback will be even less of a factor than DVD playback was in the current generation.
"Kutaragi revealed that the PlayStation 3 will become an "entertainment supercomputer" for the home." ...yep, I love the words they use to market their products. Hell, the only entertainment you need powerful processing power for is gaming. The rest works perfectly fine on a Pentium II after all, as long you have a nice enough sound card. (unless there is some wierd video format that needs very powerful computers...)
And after all, there was Nintendo entertainment system becuse nintendo refused to call it a video game in the beginning becuse of the video game market crash IIRC. That didn't stop the fact that the NES was only used for games...
Sony to unveil PlayStation 2 New console system will reportedly feature graphics on par with "Toy Story"
I forgot how much they love to hype bullshit.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
Actually, this has gone round and round for years.
The Xbox was going to be the ultimate conversion device, that brought gaming and networked communication to a head, with possible movie and music delivery services. The PS2 was the same. Nintendo stayed away. Going Back a generation, The Dreamcast and Saturn were both convergent devices, with modems and browsers. The Playstation talked a good talk about becoming the center of you digital universe, but didn't do anything about it. Nintendo also stayed away. In the generation before, the Genesis had a modem and console-to-console communication services, as well as being one of the first devices to support a cable modem of sorts. By the end of it's life, it was going to become the center of your multimedia universe, to compete with 3DO, CDI, Pippin, Turbo Duo, and everyone else time forgot. Nintendo promised a modem and a CD player (the playstation, oddly enough), but didn't deliver. During the previous generation, the NES had the odd distinction of being the first console you could legally gamble upon, with a modem connection to a state lottery. It also had knitting machines and a whole host of useless accessories in Japan to help it become the Family Computer (FamiCom) it was named after. They also used ROB in the US to sell the machine as "more than a game machine," then promptly dumped the adorable useless thing. I don't recall any moves on the Mastersystem's part during this time, though remember that the mastersystem had games on both cards and cartridges, and nobody really discovered what they had planned for that expandability.
Before the NES, the line between consoles and computers was extremely blurry, with ATARI computers competing with ATARI consoles and Intellivisions competing with Colecovisions. Ok, I was too young to remember much of anything but Bullwinkle cartoons. But remember, back then these things basically were computers, with keyboards and recipe programs and typing applications. They were basically all omni machines, and if they weren't they promised the functionality that they could become one.
In other words, everyone is offering the omni machine. Everyone. It's marketing. Everyone knows that the PSP is about as useful as a movie player as your watch, but still they hype the possibility to sell more PSP's. Your living room monitor is a crappy screen to read text from, but people still like to hear that their console will connect to the internet and let them read their mail.
The FLOPS issue is not as big as you would think. Supercomputers are expensive primarily because they're custom, and use extra hardy equipment, not because there is a particular ops to cost ratio. Plus the PS3 is optimized to push as many FLOPS as quickly as possible through, for maximum graphics throughput, with really no eye to what to do with them. 8 chips on die with really long multiple pipelines working in tandem? Basically if this thing had to think out of order, that efficiency will quickly come crashing down, and I doubt it has a lot of registers, but on linear datasets with no dependencies this puppy will scream. My PC rates as 3 GigaFLOPS for the main CPU, and it's a few years old. And it can actually think. Add in clock cycles for the graphics processor and the other chips onboard, and I could see a modern computer with a modern graphics card ranking as 20 GigaFLOPS. Now with a few years yet to be released, and a development cycle designed almost exclusively to do ridiculous amounts of mechanical transformations to fixed data pipelines, and I could see 2 TeraFLOPS being possible. Much like Intel pushing the P4 MHz rating artificially high, this would be high for basically artificially engineered reasons, but it's definitely possible. By the time this ships, Blue Gene should have passed the PetaFLOP barrier. And as both of these are IBM's babies, they should have the technical knowhow.
When Nintendo teamed with SGI to create Project Reality, the specs they announced were truly insane. By the time they actually shipped that machine, the N64, the specs were still the same but because of the elapsed time they were just generally good.
The ______ Agenda
Here is some "insider" info for you (its all obvious anyways):
- Next-gen games will look only marginally better then current high-end PC games (Doom3, HL2, etc).
- This will be the *smallest* step between generations we have seen so far. (The current consoles are quite capable!)
- For devs, the biggest difference is that most games will need to have some sort of online play to remain competitive.
- Nintendo will distribute low-budget games online (billing service included). Expect Sony and MS to do the same.