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PS3 Cell Processor 'Broken'?
D-Fly writes "Charlie Demerijian at the Inquirer got a look at some insider specs on the PS3, and says, Sony screwed up big time with the Cell processor; the memory read speed on the current Devkits is something like 3 orders of magnitude slower than the write speed; and is unlikely to improve much before the ship date. The slide from Sony pictured in the article is priceless: 'Local Memory Read Speed ~16Mbps, No this isn't a Typo.' Demerjian says when the PS3 comes out a full year after the XBox360, it's still going to be inferior: 'Someone screwed up so badly it looks like it will relegate the console to second place behind the 360.'" This is the Inquirer, so take with a grain of salt. Just the same, doesn't sound too good for Sony or IBM.
What is this 'local memory'? On-die cache? How the fuck can you screw that up to make it 16Mbit?
PS3 is way overkill for a console anyway. What are they thinking? Not everyone needs a console with 1GB of memory, huge HDD, which also doubles as a DVD Player/Entertainment center/Memory stick player (you betcha sony is already adding THAT feature), oh and can also play some games.
I'm all for Nintendo's new console. Its cheap, it will have amazing games AND they're not trying to make it the center of your digital home.
Microprocessor Online has some an interesting analysis. Pay attention to page 8, where the PS2 "Emotion Engine" processor is compared to the PS3 Cell processor. This is an analyst report for the industry of microprocessors.
If you really want to dig into the details of the Cell processor, check out Sony's resources. You have to agree to a bunch of things to get to the pdfs but there's a lot of information in them. Another place you can find information is IBM's resource site which contains a lot of stuff including the programming handbook.
My work here is dung.
there is no point in judgin a dev kit. x360 kits were shitty too.
[chinese democracy starts now
I'm aware that, in the past, The Inquirer has published questionable articles. However, they've certainly got a revealing picture to back it up here...unless they're outright lying and they photoshopped something, why should we take this story with a grain of salt?
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
welcome our new dev kit overlords.
sorry I don't even know how that applies here. It just needed to be said.
"This is the Inquirer, so take with a grain of salt."
Should read "This is a positive for Microsoft, so take with a grain of salt. Poke holes in the theory and continue the Jihad! Microsoft is evil! Thought is not needed, this is Slashdork!"
That Ken Kutaragi let his loser long-lost baby brother design the PS3 without looking at the thing or its price tag until it was unvieled?
Monstar L
Boy, it's a good thing it's not meant to be a gaming only system!
Yes, that was sarcasm.
tinfoilmedia
So what is the difference between the local memory 16MB/s and the main memory 25GB/s 'reading'?
I assume the local memory is not going to be used much for 'reading' and only main memory is going to be used.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I thought things might settle down after E3, silly me. I can't wait until xmas time, not because of the goodies that will be available, just so we can stop it with these fan boy/anti fan boy, gonzo journalistic articles that are constantly popping up.
Ah well, it's nothing a complete recall and price increase can't fix...
DevKit is broken, maybe whole line of it. What it means for final console? Nothing.
839*929
This reminds me, I am certain to be cruicified for not remembering this bit of trivia, but the PS3 is looking more and more like that car that Homer designed for his brother....
What was that called again?
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
I can't imagine why Sony would add the text "this is not a typo" underneath the below average local read speed unless they are planning to release the final PS3 public version with much higher read speeds. If you can program a game to run great with the low read barrier then wouldn't you expect it to run ever more efficiently with the gates wide open in a final/public ps3 release? my .02c
1/ They are dev kits, (with newer dev kits being shipped soon) 2/ It's the Inquirer, who have confirmed allegance to be Xbox fanboys and slag anything Sony..
i know it's far fetched, but think for a moment, if you were IBM, a major IT player with lots to gain if you make peace with microsoft (after years of a bitter relationship, see MSs monopoly trial's documents for more info), who would you prefer to help: microsoft or sony ?
i'd bet on MS. making a kick ass CPU for the 360 would make easier for IBM to extract sweeter deals from MS in other areas and to placate bill's wrath in what concerns IBM's linux business. if this means screwing up sony, so be it.
nintendo don't have to worry, since MS itself already said Wii is not a competitor, but a good secondary console for 360 owners. a complement to the bigger console.
all i know is that i couldn't care less for the PS3. living where i live, earning what i earn, i can barely afford a PS2, a PS3 is waaay out of my budget. all i can hope for is to be able to afford a Wii when it launches, but i'll have to ask someone to bring it from US in his/her bag to avoid the enourmous taxes brasil charges over imports.
What ? Me, worry ?
No it means the Inquirer is the digital equlivant of a rag.
I thought we had all boycotted Sony anyway! Or are we on another bandwagon this week?
The subject says it all. It's getting really tedious. Why just not wait for the release and then make comments?
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Noticed the logo on the bottom left of the slide. Maybe it should have read
DeviStation
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
The "Local Memory" is the memory attached to the RSX.
That the read performance for the Cell from this memory is dreadful is no surprise. This is exactly the same architecture that has been traditionally used in PCs. Reading graphics memory from the main processor is usually really really slow.
This memory is where you store textures and other graphics data. The main processor will usually have little need to read from this memory. If it does, then, as apparently Sony says, you just get the RSX to write to main memory instead.
This is a non-story. People have dealt with this for PC games for a long time.
I was just about to post the exact same thing. It amazes me that: /. editing kiddie troupe) seems to have no clue /., and it's constantly pointed out and constantly ignored
1) The poster had no clue
2) Zonk (and for that matter, the whole
3) This mistake happens _constantly_ on
4) Anyone with even a basic understanding of computers wouldn't make this mistake
Just more proof that "IT" != computer science
Does anyone ever bother reading the *IBM* documents for this? Never mind what Sony have managed to do to the cell processor, if you turn to the IBM CBEA developers handbook (page 75), you will see:
"Load and store operations (LS), 6 Clock cycles Latency". And that's the time it takes for the instruction to complete, not to be issued to memory.
(3.2Ghz / 6 cycles) * 16 bytes != 16MB/s
Personally, I'm gonna bet on IBM being right, seeing how they're the ones who made the bloody thing. I don't trust the inquirer anyway, but if those figures are true, the most likely answer is inefficiencies in their benchmarking programs, (Such as instruction starvation, a nasty side effect of using SPU's)
I've been hearing a lot of chatter about how the PS3 is difficult to program for, developers don't like it, Sony isn't providing quality libraries, blah, blah, blah. These exact same things were said about the PS2 when it first came out six years ago and it still managed to dominate its generation of console gaming. And it certainly wasn't true that developers avoided the PS2 in favor of XBOX or GameCube. As always the winner and losers of the console wars will be decided by the buying public, in the US, Japan, and Europe.
I think being too connected to the online debates about this stuff can make you lose sight of what the more average public thinks and bases their purchase decisions on. That's why the only real argument for the PS3's failure so far is the high price, not questions about performance or developer issues.
That's 16mb concurrent for each of the 8 spu's right?
How much memory are the CPU and the spu's going to be exchanging?
Most of the rendering will be done by the graphics card right?
Reading these posts shows one thing...
Sony can screw up (or rumor to screw up big time) and just about everyone is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but anything published on the internet that damns anything Microsoft does is accepted as the truth...
The Inquirer??!!!! I may have to visit this site less now, I can'r belive your waisting my time w/ an artical from the Inquirer.
It's a dev kit, first off, second off it's the inquirer, which was formed from register rejects and doesn't have BOFH, and third off, I saw a UC Berkeley benchmark with an emulated cell that would seem to indicate this is a production problem, not a design problem.
But seriously, WTF should I care? I really don't care which console wins the virtual pissing match in the "ooooh shiny" department, if I was one of the people that did, the PS3 is already into the realm where $500 video card purchases begin to look slightly reasonable.
I'll judge it by the games, when they're released or playable.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
So - much like Sonys overhype of their consoles then...
The The Inquirer article is rubbish and that slide is taken out of context. It seems to imply that the Cell can only read "Cell local memory" (whatever that is) at 16MB/s.
Memory transfer bandwidth between each SPU and its SPU Local Memory is something more like 25GB/s (gigabyte per second); sustained actual bandwidth between all SPUs is greater than 100GB/s; peak theoretical is greater than 200GB/s (assuming all 8 SPUs present for simplicity).
If you had access to the full version of the presentation (part of the full Sony PS3 SDK and technotes), you'd realise that that slide is part of a presentation about the RSX (the PS3's GPU). As such, when it refers to "Local Memory", it means RSX's Local Memory (eg graphics memory, video memory, VRAM or whatever you call it in fanboy/ps3/360-is-teh-suck websites). To be understood outside that context, the columns would be better labelled "Main System Memory" and "GPU Local Memory".
The Inquirer article seems to suggest that this figure of 16MB/s (megabyte per second, by the way, what the fuck is it with journalists swapping bits for bytes? why don't they get their shift/capslock keys fixed?) is some kind of show stopper. No it isn't. It simply means that the Cell processor has 16MB/s bandwidth when reading directly from memory-mapped GPU address space. So what? Unless you're planning on calling memcpy() or some shit to bring your data back then it doesn't really matter.
On RSX-initiated transfers you have 20GB/s bandwidth to do the same transfer (from RSX local to main system memory). Cell read bandwidth of GPU memory might as well have 0MB/s (ie no connection at all) and it wouldn't matter a bit.
alright, alright, I get it, Im not going to get a PS3. Maybe slashdot should stop posting these types of articles, otherwise Sony isnt sell any of them.
About two years ago I decided to leave my post as a reviewer/tester for Sony. I had close ties with them for over 4 years and I began to have major misgivings on the direction and quality (lack thereof) that was being pumped out. I have been around the gaming industry long enough to know the beginnings of massive problems and they began a few years back.
Everyone close to me in the industry said I was crazy and that this would all smooth out and Sony would easily retain its market share if not grow more. I wasn't buying it and stuck to my guns, I'm pretty happy about my decision almost daily since day 1 of E3 this year.
I was against UMD from the beginning, yet everyone claimed that the sales were stellar. Looks like they weren't and they are proprietary, expensive, unwieldy little discs that no one wants to deal with. The "cell" processor was without a dobt my turning point, I have ZERO faith in it or the architecture and it will not become this ubiquitous omnipresent processor as so many claim, even IBM has major problems with it and designing compilers and dev software for their own product. Control schemes have been radically changed from initial proposals, and too quickly to be properly tested... that is a bomb yet to go off. System price and dev costs that are just too high for our current economic situation as well as for widespread adoption. There are more issues, but top it all off with a new unproven media that is also expensive and offers no real consumer advantages and you have the high risk of a catastrophic failure that could hurt Sony and IBM even more than they are already hurting.
The best that can happen is that companies finally lose the DRM/proprietary/Closed nature of their consumer electronics. Stop treating customers as criminals and start to offer them affordable and accessible entertainment that is convenient. I'd actually prefer consoles to standardize and become built into consumer electronics so that developers and consumers can really get to work on a stable and long lasting platform. Imagine the possibilities. There is a lot to be said for standards.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Just more proof that "IT" != computer science
Oh come ooooooooon! The next thing you know you'll be claiming that picking up garbage != sanitation engineering.
KFG
Please people, this is supposed to be a techie site...
16 MB/s is still a ridiculously slow speed, granted, but aren't we the last people to mix up bit and bytes like computer ads frequently do?
This isn't the online IT arm of the National Enquirer, you know.
The Inq isn't always right, but what the do tend to have is a lot of news-breaking stuff that they're (well, Mike) is willing to publish regardless of the consequences when the corporate heads find out there's a leak. Thats' why Mike got eased out of The Register when it went more corporate to form the Inq in the first place.
Those who have been following it for a while will remember all the appearances of leaked memos from Compaq (ex-DEC) insiders who were willing to leak happily to someone of the old school who was interested in seeing how the whole fiasco was turning out. Compaq/HP even started internal witchhunts looking for the leakers.
Regardless, the only real problem people might have with the Inq is they can't distinguish between an opinion piece and direct reporting, or can't accept that while the information as presented might be correct, it doesn't ensure that interpretive parts also follow.
Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
Er, yes it is. The slide says 16MB/s, not 16Mbps, i.e. megabytes, not megabits... 16Mbps would be pretty slow!
So I read the article and comments with some interest. Above, adubey here refers to a wikipedia article which describes Cell "local memory" as software managed cache. A cache you cannot read from would indeed be a crippling failure.
However an AC here suggests that this local memory is local to the GPU, the topic of that particular presentation. The article text even seems to support this here:
suggesting that the RSX is the preferred tool for accessing this particular "local memory". A "cache" which is easily accessible from a completely different processor seems unlikely. If this is the case, then the whole issue is irrelevent, since data flow is primarily from CPU to GPU and not the other way round.So it seems to me more likely that the AC is correct, and that this story is based on an ignorant or willfull misunderstanding of the presentation.
Do they make grains of salt big enough for the Inquirer? "Look at me, grain the size of a planet..."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Awhile back someone had posted a link about the battle within Sony, where someone got passed over for promotion and was put in charge of the PS3 project.
I guess this was his revenge. The more I read about PS3 the more it becomes obvious that the platform is doomed, considering that the Wii will be on market this quarter.
It'd be better for Sony if they just scrapped the PS3 at this point.
At 16 mb/s... 'local' would mean the area of a city and surrounding villages. Your phone company defines where you can make calls for the 'local' rate.
Slag sony? True, after the (big breath).
- root kit debacle,
- DRM lobbying
- I think they covered when SONY had fake movie reviewers for their crap movies.
- the screwed up blurayp-hddvde forum.
- and laughable 'mini-movie' format they had for the psp.
But xbox fanboys? hardly. They slag on 'the vole' 'the beast' from redmond pretty hard too.
In conclusion, "you are teh suk"
Thank you.
Well, who cares. The SNES had a slower processor than the Genesis, but better graphics capablities, and you know who won that war. The graphics look amazing and the new games look interesting, so a small detail in spec's isn't going to ward me off. Sounds like another N64 vs PSX fight.
Other posts have already clearly shown how this story takes a fact completly out of context and then makes a stupid claim.
To recap, it is the same as AGP being slow to read from in a PC. It is write speed that matters. That is high.
Even if you do not understand all the technicall explenations all you got to do is ask yourselve. Would IBM screw up this badly?
You would think that on a geek site people would be able to use reason. What is more likely Sony/IBM/Toshiba screwing up next generation chip OR the tabloit newssite twisting the facts?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
i know it's far fetched, but think for a moment, if you were IBM, a major IT player with lots to gain if you make peace with microsoft (after years of a bitter relationship, see MSs monopoly trial's documents for more info), who would you prefer to help: microsoft or sony ?
i'd bet on MS. making a kick ass CPU for the 360 would make easier for IBM to extract sweeter deals from MS in other areas and to placate bill's wrath in what concerns IBM's linux business. if this means screwing up sony, so be it.
The reason IBM's relationship with MS was bitter was because IBM was simultaneously a competitor and a customer of Microsoft. It was a bitter relationship because IBM did have to do things to make MS happy that IBM would have rather not done. This is the kind of control MS has over every company that depends on their OS for sales, and IBM doesn't like it. They don't want to have to try to extract sweet deals from MS by dancing to their -- a competitor's -- tune.
IBM has for years been trying to extricate themselves from this situation. In recent years these efforts have become even more pronounced. They sold off their PC division, making all of MS's influence on the desktop irrelevent to them. That leaves MS in the server, and a major reason for IBM's investment in Linux is to fend off the advance of Windows into that space (proprietary Unix having proven ineffective at doing so).
So IBM really has no reason to make peace with MS, in so much as it doesn't stop MS from being IBM's customer. This is an arrangement I'm sure they much prefer -- MS is now buying from IBM instead of the other way around, and all they have to do to keep MS happy is provide the processors they want in the quantity they want just like every other customer.
Sony and MS are both just revenue streams as far as IBM's processor division is concerned. If there was any customer they were going to sabotage in order to benefit themselves in another space, it'd be Microsoft.
The enemies of Democracy are
I wonder why that is?
Oh, right, because it has its own bigger gas tank, and connecting to the motorycle's gas tank would be stupid and worthless.
Seriously, who are they kidding with this?
Those who can't do, manage.
Those who can't do or manage, teach.
Those who can't do, manage, or teach... write tech articles for Inquirer.
Demerjian says when the PS3 comes out a full year after the XBox360, it's still going to be inferior
Actually, it doesn't show that at all. What the slide does show, is that the PS3 has nearly twice the graphics memory bandwidth compared to the Xbox360. It is a significant advantage for the PS3.
First, it isn't the amount of cache you read it is the speed your processor can evict and replace information. Second, it doesn't have a wide pipeline with multithreaded SPE's. (It doesn't need a big cache).
: www-306.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs /D9439D04EA9B080B87256FC00075CC2D/%24file/MPR-Cell -details-article-021405.pdf+IBM+BlueGene+cell+proc essor&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
Check this out. http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:mgWF2jYEh-cJ
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I hope they cleaned up after themselves.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
And slashdot is the real thing???
Sorry for my ignorance, but what should/were people expecting the read speed be?
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
AGP is meant to be a one-way comm link -- fast one way, and reeeeal slow the other. PCI-Express is fast BOTH ways. I don't see anyone defending AGP (anymore).
IBM has sold off it's Desktop and Laptops.
Take a look at IBM's website and check out products. You have to dig to see anything about Windows. Linux and Unix are right on the front page.
Microsoft needed something better than what Intel or AMD offered for what is basically an embedded device. Microsoft could have gone with the X86 but didn't that left them with a few options. If they went with Intel they could have tried to make a game friendly version of the Xscale. And interesting idea but pretty risky. AMD has a family based on the Mips. Again high risk and AMD really doesn't have it's heart in the embedded space. They are pushing hard on the X64 right now. Sun's Sparc could have been very interesting, good floating point and IO but not well known in the embedded space. Also the company is not rolling in money. That leaves Freescale and IBM. Microsoft pretty much had no choice but IBM to supply what they needed.
As far as bad news for IBM? Unless all three systems tank totally IBM is in a Win/Win/Win situation. They are building the CPUs for all three consoles. I never thought I would see the day when DEC was bought by Compaq, Cadillac made a pick-up truck, and IBM was making the CPUs for video games! It must truly be the end of times.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... and consider it rampant rumor from a publication which is RARELY if EVER correct on tech news. Sorry, but their track record is about as good as MacOSRumors.com.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Yes Sony DRM and memory sticks suck, but come on guys, at least let the bloody thing come out first. Are so many people worried that this might actually turn out to be a good product like the PS2, and that they spent their gaming budget too early on the 360? As I remember when 360 came out, I (well my ex, merry Xmas, I still have it ha ha) didn't pay much more for the device when you think of what you needed (I still aint buying that f'in remote). I say let it come out, and we'll see if it does well. If not, then start bashing.... Also I don't mind it being a home entertainment box. As long as it plays OGG ;)
I'm getting sick of all the FUD directed at Sony and the PS3. What makes it worse, is that this is the third story on /., that smells so thick of FUD it isn't funny.
/. please try to use some judgement when authorising articles? It really isn't that hard. A slide doesn't tell the whole story. Even worse, that slide contains confidential information, which /. has allowed to be a link to be posted to here. You might be able to derive figures and get information from elsewhere, but the slide itself was confidential. For the sake of content, can we move on from the Sony FUD please? Otherwise I'll start refering to /. as $la$hdot just like M$.
Can the editors of
Someone screwed up so badly it looks like it will relegate the console to second place behind the 360.
I think they meant third after the Wii and 360. So I'm a troll - at least I have superior gaming tendencies.
... is why is it some people are so sensationalist and freak out at the slightest thing that looks strange to them (and that they obviously don't understand)?
Almost every console has some form of segmented or specialized memory with different access rates to it from different devices. Some of them aren't optimized because optimizing them is expensive and unnecessary. This holds true on (at least) XBox360, PS2, GameCube, and now PS3. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, and certainly isn't guaranteed to kill the platform.
Even if this is true, it wouldn't be the first time that developers have had to wrangle with funky hardware and still manage to get some impressive games out. The Saturn architecture made it a bear to program for and still it had some impressive games and the PS2 itself took some time to work out as well. So while, developers certainly won't be happy if Cell is gimped, they'll figure out something, they have to! I seriously doubt that the bosses at EA, Sega, or Konami are just going to ignore the PS3 because of this.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I'm so sick of this anti-sony microsoft-funded propaganda bullshit. Stop it.
Sony propaganda is much handier and always reminds me of chinese communism.
I am looking forward to the PS3, but the Cell processor has another major problem in terms of being a gen-purpose chip. IBM slashed the powerpc design and removed double precision from the cell. That may be fine for games and such, but for heavy duty computing, that is a huge limitation for the cell going beyond a 'dumb' component processor.
When you see "No this isn't a Typo" on the front page of slashdot, be very skeptical.
Someone screwed up so badly it looks like it will relegate the console to second place behind the 360.
I wouldn't be quick to call "Cell" broken. Don't forget the architecture is pretty different than what a normal PC is. Just like you
wouldn't compare the MHz of Cell to a Intel processor, don't be quick to jump on the statistics before you see what the machine can really do.
The E3 game demos, as unimpressive from gameplay standpoint, showed significant amount of CPU power involved: physics, high count polygon transforms, morphs, AI and so on.
That won't change the fact I'm bored with it and looking forward to Wii instead (360 is also a pretty decent choice, wanna get 'em both).
I love it when people make wild speculation and half-baked commentary on how non-released hardware that they had no hand designing in the first place will fail or be broken. When will we learn that endless speculation and palm-reading on console releases is useless? Perhaps it's a product of boredom or writers wanting to score a "I told you so" point or something. I think I'll still have to put my trust behind the countless engineers of the chips and design of the console instead of some random blogger or "industry expert".
This being the company that trashed my computer with their God damned rootkit, costing me $170.00, several hours of frustration, and a broken promise (to never "upgrade" Windows again or give MS any more money), this is a GOOD thing!
DIE, SONY, DIE!!!!!
If you want to read back data from the GPU when you just wrote it from either an SPU or main memory you shouldn't be working in 3d development. To try and speak to their level it would be like typing in and publishing a web page line by line ( to read back what you entered ) until you uploaded the whole thing.
You don't need to read back anything from the GPU. ( The RSX is the GPU, and the local memory here is mainly for textures you've upload and flush fairly often. )
Take a closer look at the linked image. The two top colums are CELL. Not RSX, CELL.
And the theoretical bandwidth numbers listed for CELL to main memory are those of the direct XDR interface. You'll note that the RSX has much lower numbers because it accesses main memory through a bridge bus (much like a graphics card on PCIe).
On the Cell, there is only one thing local memory can mean, and that is the local memory of each SPE.
NOTE: this can be a serious issue, because each SPE MUST read instructions and write results to the local memory. It is up to the main processor to load instructions into this memory from main memory, and to copy results from this local memory to main.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Damn I should have never let my brother make that car!! It almost left me homeless had it not been for my invention of the baby-talk machine.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
After reading the article, I realize that these are numbers for Cell and RSX local memory. Of course, our stupid submitter wanted to make us think this was the SPE's local memory, and purposefully put a DIRECT LINK to the photo in addition to the article link when he knew it would be taken out of context.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Zonk, how about printing updates / retractions when they're warned like this. Show some responsibility. How can anyone take you seriously at this point? If I wrote a blog entry saying your a page count whore, or you're "secretly" working on astroturfed Microsoft ads -- that would make front page too right? I mean you don't vet anything you post that's fine. At least update the story, so people know you fucked up. Personal opinions aside, I don't think you're very professional.
HEY! Someone is thinking for themselves! Git im!!!!
To go on this big rant about Sony finally reaping what they sow, only to see that other people who actually know what they are talking about explain that the slide means and why it was by design and doesn't really matter.
Short version: for some dumb reason "local memory" is a name for a specific type of memory in the system, not the memory local to the particular processor. In this case, "local memory" means memory on the RSX (graphics processor). So it is saying that reading back data from the RSX area is very slow.
The fix: don't bother. Just like on any other platform, there isn't a lot of reason to transfer data out of the GPU memory. Transfer it in when you need it, and when it isn't needed anymore, throw it away, only to reload it later.
This would only hurt you wanted to do processing on the graphics card and bring the results back to the rest of the system. That's unusual on any system, it would be extra unusual on PS3 because Cell already has 7 special execution units in the Cell that that do the kind of operations a GPU does very quickly.
PS3 is the most open of any major video gaming systems. It will come with Linux on it and you can make your own apps and games if you want. That's a big step for gaming consoles, they're always locked up tightly to ensure revenue streams. This is not a new thing from Sony, really Nintendo did the work developing that business model.
I have to say, for $600, it'd better be a little open. What a joke.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
"This is the Inquirer, so take it ( what Charlie Demerijian writes and Mike Magee Publishes) with a grain of salt.", warns Slashdot's 'Zonk'.
Well, now, THAT is HILARIOUS. Mike & Charlie are on the scene at Computex in Taiwan, digging out and publishing the information that actually makes news, as real journalists and publishers do, and Zonk, from the comfort of his bedroom, livingroom, whatever, deigns to warn us that what we read from Mike, Charlie and the staff should be taken with a grain of salt. Hey, Zonk, let us know if you ever decide to go into the news business, will ya? We gotta warn ya, though, it will be a lot different than being a pompous asshole.
"Someone screwed up so badly it looks like it will relegate the console to second place behind the 360"
wait a second. who says sony's getting second place? by all accounts i've read the winning combo is likely to be the 360 and wii. sounds more like sony's getting a third place.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Is it possible for a small company to get a hold of one of these pre-release PS3 dev kits? Are there any in-depth reviews it out there? Has SONY announced the official release date of the final (launch) dev kit yet?
It would seem to me that discussing specs w/o understanding what the developers can/will do with them is premature at best. What data is stored in this cache? How do we know that a 16m/s read time isn't plenty?
barack to the future?
Look at the bottom of the slide. The typo isn't with the capital 'M' but with the missing 'A'
If the lag time needs to be changed, they can still fix it.
If they need to lower the price to a reasonable $499 for a non-crippled version, they can still do it.
If they need to alter the Blu-Ray drive, that's why they're testing it.
Please refer to the front cover of your friendly Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, secure your towel in a comfortable position behind your head, and Don't Panic!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Either that, or a broken benchmark. Each Cell processor (Synergistic Processing Element -- SPE) shares its instruction fetch port with its data memory port. The SPE can buffer up 80 instructions at a time (2.5 fetch words), plus an additional 32 from a branch target. Fetch will stall if the memory system gets saturated with loads and stores. Properly written memory-intensive code includes explicit fetches to keep these buffers full. Incorrectly written code will cause problems. Still, that doesn't explain a 3 orders of magnitude drop.
If you look at the slides on the page I linked to above, you'll see the SPEs are not connected into the global address space. They connect to a private single ported memory, and to each other through two unidirectional rings. (The ring structure is not apparent from that diagram, but trust me, it's there.) These rings then connect to a DMA engine.
If you wade through this paper, you'll see that the Cell compiler implements a software cache. (The same paper also explains the instruction fetch mechanism mentioned above, BTW.) That is, it emulates a cache in software, using the DMA to actually move memory around. Depending on the nature of the benchmark and how it was written, it could be that the read benchmark spends all its time allocating stuff into this cache and waiting for it to arrive. Writes would be faster because the cache can "write behind" without having to wait for the allocation to happen, if the compiler is smart enough to know that the previous data will be entirely overwritten. So, if the benchmark goofed, then the results are meaningless.
Fact of the matter is that the SPEs are capable of reading 128 bits a cycle each (128 bytes / cycle across the 8 SPEs). Other benchmarks, such as the article recently posted to Slashdot about using Cell for scientific computation confirm that this thing hauls--and these are bandwidth-intensive tasks. The quoted paper did run some numbers on real silicon and showed numbers similar to their simulation results.
With all this in mind, I find it hard to believe that Cell is broken.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Bizarro-Slashdot?
Sounds eerily similar to an old April Fool's joke from Signetics.
http://www.ganssle.com/misc/wom.html
Maybe Local Memory stands for NAND, Main memory for RAM?
So my question to Sony is -- why did you not learn from past engineering mistakes? The console wars are starting anew, and your competitors have adjusted their strategies. Sony is stuck in the past, I'm afraid, and they already know they will forfeit a huge portion of marketshare because of it.
Game developers coded for Sony for the same reason people write Windows programs -- marketshare (as you stated). Sony can't really force people to code to a console that has less than 40% marketshare. In short, they will see any "exclusives" they have go to the market leader.
While the final decision is to be left to the market, the developers are already chiming in with their votes. Sony has a beast on their hands. They need to put a collar on it before it chews up their marketshare.
(Note that at the time of this article, the 7800GTX retailed for $599 and the price of the PS3 was unknown. The comment about $599 refers to the 7800GTX.)
In my opinion, the quote clearly states that the RSX is more powerful than the 7800. Even if you view it as ambiguous, the Inquirer still chose to run a story based on a misinterpretation of an unconfirmed quote which was posted on a message board by a user with no credentials. The original article is still uncorrected.
It's the Inquirer, who have confirmed allegance to be Xbox fanboys and slag anything Sony..
Can you provide examples of them "confirming" allegiance to the Xbox? Can you provide a single example?
Because I read The Inquirer quite often and I have never seen anything like that. Is it at all possible that you're just a lying little shit who didn't have any interesting points to make and so decided to make some stuff up?
Actually those are rhetorical questions. The Inquirer is very much anti-MS. Of course it's also anti-Sony, which may be what's confusing you. Try only reading websites which show the proper level of sycophancy towards large multi-national corporations - they may not upset you so much.
Why do you care if Sony are unfairly maligned anyway? If you worked for them or had stock in them it would be understandable, although then your opinions would be null and void. But you don't do you? You don't have any stake at all in Sony and yet here you are bullshitting on their behalf. What the fuck is going on in your mind? Do we even want to know?
You have to be nuts to pick a theoretical untried invention from a slow dinosaur company like IBM. What happened was the following.. .IBM and its execs probably gave a sweet deal on personal level to Sony execs.. who were eager to go alon g with plans regardless of how it woudl affect their company. The sony execs came out good IBM got money to build this crap and sony gots screwed and so will ibm shareholders in future because when things get ugly people will see ibm cant make a damm chip. The market will wipe out those who make bad decisions . I love the market process
A low read speed would make a difference if theyre going to do physics on the rsx. will they?
if this turns out to be true, everyone could enjoy a good session of "ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha".
Sony had previously convinced me to get a PS3 as soon as it comes, but now they are fucking up big time. Me? I'm going for the Wii + X360 combo pack.
It's there for a reason.
My flame:
"I'm sure you'll get a lot of these messages, but hell, you deserve it.
The slow read speed you noted in the slide is for Cell reading from the RSX's local memory. Such accesses are expected to be very slow. If you look at this USENIX article from one of the Linux DRI folks, you can see this quite easily:
DRI article
He shows how painfully slow it is to read from AGP or framebuffer memory (14 and 5 MB/sec, respectively), on a Rage 128 graphics card. For the CPU to framebuffer read, which is the equivalent to what we're talking about here, the read speed is 1/40th the write speed. At 16MB/sec read and 4GB/sec write, the PS3 is actually right in line with what can be expected of modern GPU architectures.
Reading from the framebuffer is just slow unless you have a unified memory architecture. The CPU and the GPU aren't cache-coherent, which means every access to framebuffer memory (or even AGP memory, which is actually a chunk of system memory allocated to the GPU) must be an uncached access. Uncached accesses are just plain slow, on any architecture.
The way your article is written, it makes it seem like Cell reads its local storage at 16 MB/sec. That is, of course, bollocks, since IBM has shown benchmarks of the Cell local storage achieving 98% efficiency. If you had any journalistic integrity at all, you'd post a retraction on your site, and a clarification of the technical issues involved."
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yea! Slashdot is catching up!
/. I am sure you saw it when it was only old news by 12 to 14 hours! ;)
This was on DIGG less than 24 hours ago!
Of course if you pay for your
The 256MB of RAM connected to the video card is really only good for vertex data and textures, so you are only left with 256MB to run the executables in. The practical implications of this information means that Linux will only be able to use 256MB of RAM.
But can't the Cell PPE use unused RSX memory as a swap file, copying data in and out of RSX memory using the RSX, just as many GameCube titles use much of the audio processor's RAM as a swap file?
You don't need to read back anything from the GPU
The Sims does, so that it can turn the pixels behind the pie menu into grayscale (pic). Or can/should that be handled with a shader now?
It's also a positive for Nintendo, a company that's pretty well liked around here. Hell, I own enough of their systems and games to appreciate their contribution to console gaming, and the fact that the Wii is going to be seriously innovative. That said, sure, people like sticking it to Microsoft whenever they can around here, but its not like people didn't beat the shit out of Sony for their ill-advised DRM'ed CD's, their ridiculous arrogance on the PS3's pricepoint, and their continued support of proprietary standards.
I said it was the most open.
n veiled/2100-1040_3-250632.html
Yes, it's crippled. It's basically Net Yaroze for PS3.
But it's more open than any other major platform.
You can stop at your Emotion Engine. That's Xbox fanboy dumbass bullshit. PS2 has Emotion Engine. You aren't happy with what it provided? Perhaps that's because you don't even understand what was promised!
Here's Seamus Blackey of Microsoft claiming Xbox will have Toy Story graphics. Graphics it didn't deliver.
http://netscape.com.com/Microsoft+got+game+Xbox+u
All this Emotion Engine hating is just misplaced Xbox fanboyism. Select something to hate, make up stuff to hate about it.
The boomerang controllers were not real. I have a friend who works at SCEA. He told me a long time ago. They never received a single operating boomerang controllers. Up until recently, they only had DualShock 2s, then they got the new DS3 you saw at E3.
Someone on the internet mocked up the boomerang days after Sony first showed it. He showed you couldn't even hold it and reach all the buttons.
It was just a mockup, it was never real.
Your list of proprietary stuff is hilarious.
AAC is proprietary to Dolby. You're thinking of ATRAC.
UMD was ultra retarded.
BluRay isn't a failure yet, nor is it any more or less proprietary than HD-DVD, or even DVD. You cannot make a DVD player without joining the DVDCCA. It's proprietary.
Memory Stick is no more or less proprietary than SD. The SD consortium are very controlling assholes. Note that MMC is a lot more open.
I agree Sony is doing very poorly lately, and are indeed moving at a glacial pace.
Final note, if you still think this slide reflects anything about what the hardware will leave to be desired, you truly do not understand the issue yet. This measurement is of an operation you never should do, and the slide underscores that. It simply will not be an issue.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
OK read the whole post and then comment ... this is an INQ *story* and this is nothing to be worried about. Knowing the kind of crap that INQ has posted in the past I would be very cautious believing this. Like people already said this is a dev kit that has only a resemblence to the final product and also I would really like to know where the heck INQ got ANY information because you still have to sign a nondisclosure agreement in order to get access to a PS3 devkit. 16mbps .... rolf those guys really pull numbers out of their arses.
This is par for the course
Where did I say the Linux wasn't crippled? I called it NetYaroze for the PS3.
NetYaroze (if you would investigate) didn't allow you access even to the CD-ROM drive. You only had the internal RAM to work with (actually, the PS2 Linux won't let you access the DVD drive either).
I state the Linux that comes with PS3 is similar to that, and then you want to say to me "hey dude, it's crippled."
No shit it's crippled.
Wii isn't even a little bit open. You simply cannot develop a single line of code for it without N permission. That's 100% closed.
I still don't get your Emotion Engine comment. Sony said it would have Emotion Engine. It has Emotion Engine. If you are a registered developer, you can develop for Emotion Engine (if you can get past the almost complete lack of tools). He said it would be there, it's there. He said it would have Toy Story graphics, it doesn't. But MS said the same BS. People forget that Toy Story was the touchstone of computer graphics at the time. If you wanted to say anything about computer graphics, you talked about Toy Story, to connect to the layman.
My quote is not wrong. It's just a different quote. Do you think I work at Netscape or Reuters so I can fake up a news story?
I dunno about banned in Iraq, the US banned shipment of it to Iraq. It required a change of the laws, since it had the kind of compute power (measured in FLOPS) that was considered useful to simulate nuclear explosions and thus develop a bomb. The story isn't bullshit, but perhaps some people didn't realize that all kinds of computers at that time had that kind of power. There were plenty of machines at that time that required exemptions from that law. Apple's G4's fell under the same restrictions. The law has been changed since, since that kind of compute power is pretty common now.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I have a working game console at home. Only one. It is an Atari 2600 with about 100 games. Last Friday I went to a friends and played on his Xbox 360. We played Ghost Recon. The graphics were good and the game was fun. There was just one issue. The Xbox kept locking up hard and had to be rebooted every 20 minuets or so. Maybe the heat issue I have read about. There was another issue he asked me to talk a look at. The Xbox could get to the internet but would not see is local network or computer (after following the MS supplies instructions) so he could not share his music with the Xbox. I looked at it as well (I am a network design guy). I could not get it to work. I can say I am not to surprised by all of this. It is what I have come to expect from MS. I am not sure why I thought their gaming systems would be any different. I was thinking about getting a 360. Now I think I will see how the PS3 is.....
it seems completely retarded to me that sony would release the ps3 with such MAJOR PROBLEM. i know m$ screwed up some things by rushing the 360 to market, but i doubt they were as bad as what this sounds like.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/ Ron Paul for President 2008 http://www.infowars.com/
People with little background in hardware-level programming and embedded systems are jumping on an out-of-context spec and contorting it. This number isn't what you think it is. It would be easy to show specs from other consoles that make people think "oh my goodness that's horribly slow" when in fact it is meaningless. Embedded systems programing is different than reading a PC hardware review site.
0. The PS2 at launch cost about the same as a DVD player at the time, and it was both a games console and a dvd player. If you had kids this was a no-brainer purchase no matter the income bracket you are in.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
"...looks like it will relegate the console to third place..."
Fixed it.
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
As some parent noted, there wasn't as much competition back then. Now they had Micosoft's Xbox 350 to compete with. Maybe they hype[rventilate] some extra with a 600 lb gorilla next to them.
Talk about a cell in the brain... :)
The article is about RSX<->Cell bandwidth, not SPU local stores. It's a non-issue for reasons explained in many other posts already. Even the title is wrong since it's not an issue with the Cell, but with the host system.
Ahh, so this is the rate at which the Cell can read RSX's local memory? That I'll believe. And I will equally agree "BFD!" The Cell does its work and dumps everything to main memory or the RSX's memory. RSX does its work and if it needs to communicate anything major back to the Cell, it does so through main memory. Makes perfect sense then.
I thought something seemed awful fishy. I thought the slide was summarizing performance of the Cell SPE and RSX, not the Cell's and RSX's ability to communicate with the RSX's local memory. If your statement's true, then this paragraph in TFA is full of it: (Emphasis mine.)
It all begins to make a lot more sense, though, if this is about accesses from Cell or RSX to memory local to RSX. I admit ignorance on the RSX's architecture. I just know in my bones that those numbers aren't for a Cell SPE talking to its local memory.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Dilbert have stopped reading Slashdot, and the PHB have started?
Wally would be an 'Editor'.
They did the processor for the 360, and the Wii, and the PS3. It's probably fairer to say this doesn't look good for the IBM guys that did the Cell architecture.
"Xbox fanboys"
Oh...wow...I'm not sure how to take that, as a low-blow or if I should just die of laughter, right now.
The Inq is far from Xbox fanboyism. Show me some proof. Perhaps one of our writers is slightly biased, but most of us stay away from consoles.
(I also noticed he's been modded up as insightful yet still has a score of 1...hmmmm...) troll much, or just get down-modded into oblivion?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
No one ever implied that IT = computer science. Look up the terms, they are very different fields. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with that quip. In fact, this has nothing to do with the article or its context. Keep your stereotypes to yourself. Mod parent down.
Why does this smell like a Microsoft FUD plant? We've already seen what the PS3 can do--it blows the 360 away. And why would anyone go into the technical details of memory and bus speed without going all the way and actually understanding what that memory is used for and why the Cell doesn't have to access it at all! It's bad enough that someone wrote this piece of FUD--it's worse that Slashdot gave it a headline.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
A while back, I wrote an article for IBM developerWorks. The article was on AltiVec, and I used examples that I worked out months in advance with an editor so we could run the article on April 1st. The article covered AltiVec optimization techniques, and used as an example RGB to HSV color conversions to "accelerate" the beach ball cursor on OS X... But only after a quick summary of how to optimize the idle loop.
The Inquirer bought it.
The PS3 giving the main CPU low-performance access to the graphics hardware's private memory is a non-issue. You normally don't even LOOK at the memory on the graphics hardware, and indeed, not all hardware makes it possible to do so from the main CPU. This is just stupid. It's not even a processor issue, it's a board-design question, but it's not a problem, because this is the case you never care about.
This is analagous to claiming that it's a serious flaw that the OCR on the console printer output is much slower than the main disks. You don't even USE it, and that it exists at all is probably never going to matter to anyone.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
- --- Group News
Mmmm sorta summer break for the game world. Everyones too concerned
with next gen. P.S. to slashdot/theinquerir(douches) - "Local Memory"
is the RSX memory, and the CPU shouldn't be reading from this directly
at all. Idiots.
Legacy, Loyalty, Love and Respect. FUCK THE REST.
- Fox Unit 2006 (aka The Joy & The Sorrow)
Old friendships never die. Remember that.
theinquerir? 8)
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
Slashdot has always been bad, but never this bad. Zonk is in an entirely different league of irresponsibility, unlike anything slashdot has ever seen.
All this is just speculation, the guy didnt see the actual console, just a powerpoint from some guy! Ill reserve my judgement for when multiple reliable outlets have the unit in their hands and can perform a meaningful analysis of it. I bought a xbox 360 and I can personally tell you that it over heats and has a power brick much larger than a PSP and DS combined that gets incredibly warm, why because I own one! Not because some stranger on a plane told me so. If you get an xbox 360 be prepared to spend an extra $20 for fans.
Well for a start off this seemed a little off. Theres 256 times the difference between read and write. This immediately indicates to me that either Sony faked everything its ever shown or this article is making something out to be much worse than it really is.
After reading other posts from what I gather read simply isnt a major requirment and will be barely noticable rather than the doom saying this article claims.
However, there was something that still lingered. He mentioned games looked object sparse (In a previous article, so before this issue ever came up.) and in this article he says 'RSX appears to be limited to setting up 275 Million triangles/second' Now is this connected to the issue of the small read speed and therefore not actually much of a problem at all? Or is this something entirely seperate and an actual debilitating factor?
Im hoping someone with more experience with these things can explain just what this is about.
(Id prefer if people dont respond with 'Its all about the games bitch!'. It no doubt is but im still interested in this from a purely technological point of view.)
That's why reading from AGP memory on a PC is slow, even though AGP memory is actually just a buffer in regular system memory.
Reading from "AGP memory" is uncached & slow, but not that slow. Readback from the GPU's local texture memory across the AGP port is what's really slow, because it's effectively a 33 MHz PCI bus in that direction. Though even that isn't anything like as slow as 16MB/s (once GPU vendors bothered to optimise that driver path at least).
it can just instruct the GPU to write the results to system memory
Quite true, and it's the obvious solution.
when does it make sense to run physics on the GPU? Well, when the GPU has more vector gigaflops than the CPU.
Try 1.8 TFLOPS vs 150 GFLOPS. Cell is great for doing vector crunching of physics transformations, but RSX has way more vector hardware (think 48 pipes instead of 7, plus assorted bilinear interpolation units at each end, comparison units etc etc). This is offset by RSX's lower clock and less-optimal architecture, but the GPU is still a very powerful cruncher.
RSX has its own 22 GB/sec bus seperate from Cell's 25 GB/sec bus
Except, of course, if it wrote to its local memory the Cell wouldn't be able to read it faster than 16 MB/s. Fine for non-gameplay physics, as with HavokFX, but if it wants to do physics that affects the player or AI, it has to use the CPU's main memory. Perhaps it could do some on each?
Of course the PS3 will be able to do physics, as least as well as the 360. Where it ends up processing that physics will likely depend on the game - if the game already uses the CPU heavily, the RSX may well be the better choice, at least for eye-candy effects. The differences in the programming model between CPU & GPU physics will (hopefully) be mostly hidden by evolving middleware physics libraries anyway.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Ironically called "Cell Factor".
Oh, and while you're right about AGP, you're wrong about physics on the PS3, as a sibling poster points out. GPU physics does not necessarily require CPU readback. Both platforms will have impressive physics middleware, PS3's RSX is quite capable of physics calculation, and Cell is in many ways more suited to it than the 360's CPU.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Resolution isn't what makes the graphics system. A live shot still looks more realistic than CG on a television. The big change was changing from a block transfer system to vectors and textures.
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/03/ 25/ps2_linux.html
/usr/doc/ps2gl-0.2.2. The web site has updates."
"These are Vector Unit demos, written to run solely on Vector Unit 1, with 16K data memory and 16K instruction memory. In the past couple of years Sony has run a demo contest with some nice equipment prizes. Make sure you don't miss Mike Day's "Universe," the 2003 winning entry in the U.S. professional competition.
Coding doesn't have to be this low level. If you would rather, see an OpenGL-clone project called ps2gl in
So you can access the vector units (emotion engine), and you can use OpenGL on the unit, but you think you can't make a full 3D game on it? I can't say as I how I agree. As to whether you can make a decent game on it, that's a matter of gameplay and taste. No API can restrict gameplay or taste, so I would assert it is theoretically possible to make a decent game on there too. So I would assert you can make a decent 3D game.
It seems that no one has, which bolsters your argument though.
I've used PS2 Linux, and it's very rudimentary. I won't argue with that.
We'll see about Wii. I like N, so I do have some hope they might allow development. But really it comes down to whether it will add value to the platform. At this time, I don't see how it will. As you say, time will tell.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Kerfuffle...
Ok so the video memory has a bandwidth of 16M/s which is slow, very slow.
Now people are saying that's just the video buffer so it doesn't matter that it's slow going back to the cpu...
But my understanding of the cell design is that it has 7 co-processors and that it's supposed to split all of it's calculations... especially graphical ones.
This parralel processing is what makes the cell teh awsome since each core is actually pretty slow.
Now because the graphics system is tied with the general computing unit it's possible that both will be used concurrently (in fact it seems clear that both will be running through the cell at the same time) now where do these calculations get output to and what are they useful for after they are resolved?
Now obviously I'm not a cpu designer but using the graphical subsytems for general calculations seems to imply that you need to be able to access the results, fast.
Can someone explain why this is wrong? Will the cell be able to write to general memory rather than graphical memory? Will it be able to differentiate between graphical calculations and other calculations?
Will all of the cells graphical output be run through the GPU as well?
It seems like most people's arguements about why this bandwidth thing isn't a big deal hinge on how things were done in the past, meanwhile all the talk about using the cell as a supercomputer outline why it isn't like things that came before.
The Inquirer mis-quoted me so severely and took my comments so extremely out of context, that I will never trust anything that is said at that site. In my opinion, it is the trashiest of trashy rags on the net.
It was actually a big wake up for me. It showed me the extent of how far some journalists will lie and bend the truth for some sensational advertiser bait.
Unfortunately, many journalists copy others word-for-word, so often copy the complete and utter drivel that some just make up or are not intellectually capable of correctly interpretting. I think "Nick Farrell" was the culprit of the train wreck which was my mis-quoting and then it seems the world of IT journo's then copied his shit verbatim or even "built on it", adding even more shit.
Who really cares? It's all the same. We are gluttons for keeping up with the Jone's of the world. Why do you think gas prices and SUV sales are still going up? Because it's good for us? Get a clue or buy a vowel. Whatever you need to get you through the day but don't fool yourself. As soon as 50 cent, and who knows how many Hollywood types get their grubby diamond encrusted hands on it we will all be right behind them in line to get our own. Stop kidding yourself. If the popular people say that its the biggest and the baddest on the block price won't be an option. regardless of what some dumb rag says about it. Some market (anal)ysts have also considered the X-Box 360 was priced to low anyway. It's all whether you are gonna be the one in line at 6am in the morning in his sleeping bag the night before the release date, the guy with the pre-order hoping and praying there will be enough systems for his order to go through or the other thousands bidding 3 times the retail price for systems on E-Bay. But it will sell. Me? I'll be the one watching the madness as every news service reports about the thousands of un-ruley fans trompling over each other to get their hands on one. Why because I made a deal with my wife that when the baby came (the ultimate VR game) I'd get rid of the games. (thought I got away with the PSP. I dunno how that happened?) Maybe once the boy gets bigger I'll get a X-Box 720 or a PS4 but this time out I'm sitting this one out. Flame away!
Well, I sometimes wish those people knew that too. But, alas, everyone thinks they can comment about hardware architectures or software development just because they once installed an anti-virus on mom's computer, or got a shitty job reading a tech support script. I suppose that's what the GP post was saying with that quip: people whose only knowledge about memory is that they can change the RAM sticks in a corporate computer feel qualified to discuss the RSX's memory architecture.
To be fair, I don't think it is an "IT" problem as such, as rather just a certain "I'm the greatest genius, you're all ignorant peasants" kind of nerd. He just knows that he knows everything, and is fully qualified to talk in depth about GPU pipeline architectures and memory controllers. He does tech support for an ISP, so he obviously knows everything about anything even vaguely computer related. (Verily, there's nothing under the Sun that couldn't be fixed by a trip through their helldesk script. E.g., Sony should have defragged their hard drive, reset their DSL modem and checked their network cable.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is just another Microsoft sponsored FUD warfare material.
Render to Texture is very nice -- maybe you've heard of it. =)
True, but can the RSX "render" a block of pixels in VRAM (including their alpha channels) to a main-RAM buffer verbatim, without any shading, stretching, interpolation, compositing, etc.?
Really? Don't you think the UINs would uniformly have to be rather large to make such an accusation?
I own an XBox and not a PS2, does that make me a shill?
-Stu