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IBM's Radical Cell Processor
Rouslan Solomakhin writes "Forbes has recently posted an article on IBM's new revolutionary Cell processor. Cell is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality games with blazing-speed graphics. Applications in other areas are also considered." From the article: "Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM (with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five years."
No matter how good the Cell processor is, what about the GPU? Even though it's just rumours at this point, isn't their graphics card pretty much similar in specs to the one in the 360?
Why? Apple was a rather low-volume business for IBM.
Motion pictures made in the 1930s are also, technically, "movie quality", seeing as they're, well, movies....
What exactly does the reporter (and Sony) mean by that statement?
(Oh, yeah, I forgot: "well if they'll be the same quality as some of the movies Hollywood pumps out recently, I'm not buying it...")
The Cell won't be terribly well suited for AI either, so you probably don't have much to look forward to. Game AI is typically notoriously branch-heavy and often tends to be mostly integer code (seeing how it is mostly search problems and at worst a neural net or two, no heavy stuff like machine vision since all information is already available). Which the Cell is more or less worthless for.
It annoys me greatly that the Cell is getting the hype it does, not only it is very specialized and as such hard to use, it is not even very innovative. One of the very first proper vector computers, the ILLIAC IV, was based on pretty much exactly the same approach. The Cell would at any rate be absolutely horrible as a general computing chip.
The IEEE Spectrum magazine (surely a better source for Slashdot readers) predicts that Cell will be a winner in the multimedia space, noting that already its going into TVs made by Toshiba.
They also mention Linux on page 2.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
mistake?
a mistake is forgetting to tighten a bolt, or carry the two, resulting in problems down the line.
sony's rootkit was an intenional and corporate level decision. DRM itself has no justification for existence at all. When confronted with the fact that it does not stop piracy, executives often come clean by putting forth a "positively spun" statement which pans out to, and i paraphrase: "we want to deny the technologically unsavvy of flexibility theyre used to in order to screw them out of money we dont really deserve"
Sony's products arent that great either. most sony stuff i've owned has broken (not broken down.. literally broken like plates break), so i have no trouble with the idea of not buying their flimsy and anticonsumer products.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Don't be fooled by the prints you see of early pictures. The original negatives used for movies in the 1930s were high-resolution monochrome film. The prints you see of them today are marred by age, repeated copying and sometimes a mismatched frame-rate.
The restored print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis is exquisite. The resolution is far beyond anything a playstation will generate, and that's after reconstruction. The original 1927 negative would have been even better.
Metropolis frame
This is a low-resolution capture, but you can see how detailed and high-contrast the frames were. The vignetting around the edges is the major picture issue.
Of course, the effects in those early movies weren't often brilliant, but on a console effects are easy. It's the subtle shading and curves that challenge a playstation.
There are middle ground games that don't opt for realism, but at the same time aren't quite as "artsy" as something like Rez. The important thing is to get something that matches your gameplay. Viewtiful Joe(sp?) is a decent example, although the "art" concept was pushed even a little bit much here.
I'm reluctant to bring up Nintendo and all their Mario games, because people like to pick on them for using their franchise so frequently, but I generally enjoy all the mario games, and they've definitely got a well established style, which is non-realistic, but not all about its look either. It's on a basic level just a cartoony world, but it's flexible and able to improve as technology allows. The Mario in Mario Tennis is basically the same as the Mario from Mario 64, but smoother, and slightly more detailed. Better graphics, but if you subbed in the old Mario 64 mario, the game would still be just as fun. And then if you look at something like Super Mario Strikers(newer soccer game), they've shifted the artwork a bit, tailored towards the more "violent" gameplay. They gave yoshi an attitude.
These are just the opinions of a mario sports games fanboy though, so feel free to ignore.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I don't know why you are being castigated or being labelled some sort of fan boy
But you are exactly right, the PS2 was supposed to herald a new CPU architecture that would be in every PC by now.
I do hope it's true this time.
I'm tired of this architecture, I want bang for buck to live somewhere new for a while, jig things up a bit.
A shift in the industry would diverting the world's national product into the hands of the fittest.
Who will have OS's and applications ready the soonest for a radical shift like that ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
My impression is that the technology surrounding the x86, e.g., the system bus, etc., has had a lot more development geared towards whatever PC's are typically used for (like desktop and server stuff), whereas the PowerPC line, and certainly the Cell, have not. This would have been due to x86 having such a large market share and many companies and people targetting there development towards it. This resulted in the x86 system architectures outpacing smaller-share competitors and being able to deliver much more performance, as far as a desktop, server, or scientific user is concerned. So Apple, which produces computers mainly targetted towards the desktop, decided to go with x86 CPUs to finally stop being hamstrung by "the rest of the computer". Apple can design a basically good motherboard, but they're the only ones doing it for the PowerPC on the desktop. x86 has 20 companies doing it, and with that amount of effort and competition, the results are better.
Apple's other problem with selling computers is that low third-party software availability makes the hardware less attractive. I assume that while it won't necessarily be any easier to port a Windows/x86 program to OSX/x86, it won't be any harder. It will be easier though for them to put some kind of emulation layer in there to make it easier for Windows progams or "half-ported" programs to run, or at least have a virtual PC that will run Windows to run Windows programs (or dual-boot). Reports from friends who run current Macs though are that OS/X is not the most stable operating system. I believe it probably has a better general software architecture and code, just that it hasn't gotten as much testing or rigorous use due to the smaller size of Apple and its user base. Windows (surprisingly) seems much more stable than OS/X. So the wisdom of running Windows inside of a virtual PC inside OS/X is debatable. With the increase in market share for Apple that I think will be coming, their reliability may improve. I'd certainly prefer to work with a Unix-based system and clean OS API over the pile of closed spaghetti code that is Windows. I think they're counting on people deciding that an Apple computer that can run either OS/X or Windows is better than a non-Apple computer that can only run Windows.
(Sorry, that went offtopic).
My friend at a video game company has been saying everyone much prefers working on XBox 360 than the PS3, and the biggest complaint is no one really knows how to write the high performance code Sony boasts about. Also, he says Sony's developer support has gone down hill and Microsoft has been bending over backwards to help developers working on 360 games.
Anyone else in the game industry care to confirm/refute this?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
From a pedantic point of view, Sony has only released two consoles so far. How can you say they've lied out their ass about 3 consoles? Is it because you somehow know the new one doesn't measure up? Is it your special fanboy sixth sense that gives you the ability to know that?
Additionally, I don't remember PS1 being a disappointment at all. Toshinden was ready for PS1 at launch in JPN, and look great. It played well too, but it had 3-d fighters and 3-D backgrounds. By the time the US PS1 launch rolled around months later Battle Arena: Toshinden was ready with further improved graphics including use of transparency in the backgrounds (waterfall). Meanwhile on Saturn, they had Virtua Fighter which by the US release wasn't even texture mapped! Do you remember receiving your free "VF 1.5" CD in the mail from Sega? I do. And it still didn't look as good because the backgrounds were not 3-D and the platform itself couldn't even do transparency (it used stipples instead).
PS1 handily beat the competition on technical merit and games.
So I don't get your complaints there. Perhaps they are with PS2?
PS2 isn't as clear cut, but as a performance thing, I have to say it works for me, despite a truly bad architecture (very little VRAM) that could have sunk it. It is long in the tooth right now, but it is at the end of its life-cycle.
But is it a failure? Did Sony lie out their ass? Not that I noticed. Yea, they hyped it a bit. Who doesn't? There were references to Toy Story-graphics made, but Toy Story was the big thing at that time and MS made them also for Xbox. It was the first all-CG movie ever. Should I bitch at Bally-Midway because they made two TRON arcade games back when it was new, and neither was even 3D? That's a much more major failing at matching movies. Yes the two games were quite fun (one is a saught-after classic), so why complain?
I would note that except for Dolby Digital, PS2 has actually kept up with the times quite well. This was a platform that wasn't even advertised or planned to do 480p when it came out, and yet does 480p in a fair number of games now and even does 1080i in one (GT4)! It even bested Xbox in the Sim-racing graphics wars of 2005. GT4 definitely has better/fancier graphics than Forza (and has 1080i support while Forza maxes out at 480p), although Rallisport Challenge 2 is still the best looking racing game of its generation (maxes out at 480p, although it looks so good there's no way to complain). And the biggest/most fun racing game of 2005 turned out to be neither GT4 nor Forza but Burnout 3.
As to Sony claiming the CPU would be the new PC CPU, I don't remember that. I don't think Sony thought they would unseat x86. I do remember them saying the PS2 chipset (I'll call it the EE although it's really more than that) would be used in other things. For the most part this wasn't true, but they did ship a PVR using the EE in JPN (the PSX). They also attempted to license the chipset for use in TVs and set-top boxes, but no one took them up on it, probably wisely.
Sony also has plans to use the new (Cell) chipset in TVs/media devices again. Go back and find the Digital Reality Creation 2 announcement, it sounds a lot like it uses a Cell chipset.
Why they keep saying this stuff is basically because they partner with Toshiba to make a custom chipset for them (in this case they even built a new fab specifically for it). When you make that kind of investment, both companies tend to get thinking about how they could use the chip even more, thus making even more profit off a fixed asset (the fab). It is a Japanese tendency to wax poetic about the future of a significant new design/advance like this, and often it doesn't come true. I mean, you can't go buy an Asimo down at your Honda dealer, can you?
I like my 360. The games are almost universally awful, but the hardware is good. I have high hopes for it. But I also have high hopes for PS3. PS1 and PS2 have been very good consoles, and had plenty of titles worth buying the consoles for. So I expect PS3 will be good too. I have to say I find the $400-$500 price ridiculous, but then again, I did buy a 360 at that ridiculous price.
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