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PS3 Performance Downgraded Again
Heartless Gamer writes "The PS3's performance has been downgraded again, according to the Inquirer." From the article: "We can't tell you why the GPU lost nearly 10% of it's clock, it could be an NVidia screwup, or it could be Sony/Cell. Either way, it just became much less of an overwhelming value, but you get a DRM infected drive for 'free' either way." Interesting, but keep in mind this is The Inquirer. 9 out of 10 doctors recommend salt with their articles. Relatedly, the choice comments from Penny Arcade this past weekend about Sony's console are wandering around the internets today. From that article: "We've already talked about it, there's no chance we're buying a PS3 at launch."
Is it possible that a single day pass without more bad news for Sony? Looks like it is about time to short-sell their stock.
Disclaimer: I work for Sony...
Given the crap the Inquirer has already talked about PS3, I'd take their article here with a pinch of salt roughly the size of Jupiter.
Game dev and music blog
maybe this downgrade will affect the PS3 price to make it more competetive compared to Wii and 360?
If you aren't far left by the age of 18 you have no heart. If you aren't far right by 30 you have no brain.
The P3 might become a flop of E.T proportions.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It's the games that matter. Too bad Sony was banking on being the big performer. Well, the decision is sealed, I think. Wii for me.
"When will you realize that Penny Arcade just isn't funny?"
If you click the link, you'll see it's not a cartoon but a comment made by one of the peeps at Penny Arcade. So, you're right, Penny Arcade isn't funny when it's not presenting a joke.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
"We've already talked about it, there's no chance we're buying a PS3 at launch."
Ouch. That's not good for Sony. You may or may not know who Gabe and Tycho are, but if you do know them, you know they also run PAX. Which is a very large user-centric games show. (Unlike E3).
These guys are hardcore gamers, that's not the kind of comment you want from guys that have this much clout.
I repeat. Ouch.
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
directly from the article...
You teh sux0r 2 sae teh PS3 is not going to teh r0x0r! Yew lie, yew 360 luvr. U teh sux! U maek thing up, go die!!!1111one!1!!!1 heheheheh
This is part of a larger Sony initiative. Lower expectations across the board, with all demographics. Once expectations have hit rock bottom, it's easy to exceed them! Imagine if Sony were to drop the price by $50 or increase clock speed by 5%.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
We can't tell you why the GPU lost nearly 10% of it's clock, it could be an NVidia screwup, or it could be Sony/Cell. Have they checked for a rootkit?
SURPRISE!!
Blerg.
I kept getting this strange error
404 Proof Not Found
In other breaking news, lettuce causes brain cancer, and a wolverine's sneeze travels faster than the speed of sound. A leprechaun told me so.
I think they're hillarious, personally, but I'm not entirely convinced that a blog entry about one of the guys behind Penny Arcade making an off-hand comment about how much something sucks is really worthwhile for anything. If Gabe or Tycho makes your decisions for you, sorry, but you're one of the sheeple.
There's decent articles on Slashdot, don't get me wrong, but there's also a billion stories along the lines of "friend-of-a-friend-of-a-pundit thinks X," where X is some arbitrary opinion or rumor. These articles are good for about one thing, which is instant, reactionary thought, which then fosters more of the same across all of Slashdot.
I mean, where's the angle on "PS3 sux rofl" that we haven't covered yet on Slashdot? What discussion is this article going to generate that hasn't already been generated? What information in this article is it important or even interesting to disseminate?
To translate into editorspeak, you bought tomatoes three months ago. They're rotten, they taste like shit, and they're attracting gnats. Why in god's name are you putting them into your omelette?
You know, that kind of guy who threw his theatrical versions of Star Wars away to make room for the new versions because advertising told him so.
I don't think that PS3 games will be more fun than PS2 games.
Wii games _will_ be more fun since it's a completely new concept how to play. Look at the DS with the two screens and the touch screen. First they'd all laugh at it and pre-ordered a PSP. I havent seen a PSP on the streets. But sure some DS owners in trains and such.
Disclaimer: I own almost every old and new console system. But I'll skip on PS3.
The PA tards have trashed tons of great games, they bitched and moaned about how shitty the PS2 was even though it wasn't, and they jizz all over games that are fucking terrible. Hard core gamers aren't stupid enough to buy or not buy things based on the say-so of two people.
No surprise. I'm not sure who Jen-Hsun Huang pissed off over there, but somebody at the Inq really hates Nvidia.
Speaking of... Whatever happened to that whole Rydermark image quality "hack" that looked an awful lot like a hasty Photoshop filter on the screenshot?
This sig intentionally left blank.
The thing about it is that Sony will downgrade their hardware as often as they want and STILL we will hear trash talk from the Execs and higher-ups about how their hardware is going to outperform and outsell the other consoles. And they'll back up this arrogance by not moving their price point an inch. Sony seems to think that the PS2 success will drive PS3 sales. Most serious video game enthusiasts seem to think otherwise. Sony needs to wake up and start doing some serious damage control after the PAX incident, with Gabe and Tycho endorsing the "Wii60" over the PS3.
comment made by one of the peeps at Penny Arcade
Sentient marshmallow chicks? Or is that some use of peep as a noun that I am not aware of?
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Why are people surprised? Sony did the exact same thing with the PSX (not the original PlayStation) and PSP. Promised out of the world specs and features but in the end, they quietly chopped back features and hardware shortly before launch. The PSX had many features removed and the PSP CPU had its clockrate slashed by a significant amount. If this story is true, it would just be the latest chapter in the story of Sony's broken promises.
Heya la'! u speak scouse?
Hi-diddly-ho, neighbor-ino, are they still looking for translators/beta testers in Sony?
I was going to apply for that job (as Spanish is my native tongue), unfortunately I am in the middle of my PhD. I hope there is still job available from sony in one year... of course, because I am not from anywhere insdie the EU mi emplyoer would need to get the work permit (something I doubt they would do). Of course I believe I can work for one year after finishing so I may very well be there.
Hah.. its a small world after all.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I know TFA is from the Inquirer, not the most authoritive source of news, but I recall reading something on a game web site back in June from a Sony insider that stated there was more bad news than just a drop in Cell processor speed from 3.5 to 3.2 GHz and hinted that there was a problem with RSX speeds as well. Regardless, a drop of 50 MHz sounds worse than it really is, but Sony can hardly afford any more bad publicity.
I guess we'll know soon enough if the report is bunk or not...
Exactly, even if PS3 does poorly, they have huge laptop battery sales to Apple and Dell to make up for it.
Someone's a little bitter...
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Sony just needed to cut cost to pay for the pending exploding battery law suits.
Peeps is slang from the mid-nineties that was cool for about 2 weeks. Now it's used exclusively by preppy white people who wish/think they were/are "hip" and/or cool. Also sometimes used by wiggers (for lack of a just as descriptive yet less offensive term).
Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
How about instead of trolling, you try this fun little exercise: find good news about the PS3.
I dare you.
Launch titles don't count.
The only "good news" Google News found about the PS3 was the already-reported story about running Folding@Home on it. Everything else is negative.
Zonk isn't the one portraying the PS3 in a poor light. Sony's doing that all on their own.
A PS3 isn't like a car or a house or a stock portfolio, something where you need to plan carefully.
The PS3 will come out when it will come out, at whatever price, with whatever performance. I don't particularly like Sony, but their engineers and marketing department aren't exactly stupid either. And the PS2 also turned out to perform far less well than promised, yet was a big success.
Theinquirer is a grade A shit for brains website. I suggest you take no more inquirer news submissions since they are mostly just rumors and flat out lies. Where is the source for this "news" ?? Sony is about to start production and I highly doubt they are making any changes this far into development (read: development is done, manufacturing is beginning)
With all the negative publicity recently, it is easy to imagine that the Inquirer is simply getting on the PS3-bash bandwagon.
Someone said: Looks like it is about time to short-sell their stock
... while all their top execs and engineers are fleeing the company. A wiser choice would be Honda, Toyota (missed the curve on that), or even GM, but buying Ford now is just as nuts as buying Sony is.
To which NineNine said: You go ahead and do that. I'll be buying.
To which myself, a different person who has many investments and who has been investing for 30 years say:
I wouldn't recommend it. I've owned Sony. I've made money off of owning Sony stock. I sold my Sony stock and bought Nintendo a few months back, and quite frankly, I have seen absolutely no reason to change my basic decision. Sony just plain isn't getting it - but Nintendo is. And it's not just the gaming platforms, quite frankly, it's the total corporation.
You probably want to buy Ford
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
would that be a peta-flop?
Pita or peta I can't remeber. but it's big!
Since Asus have already started putting PS3's together some months ago; if this story is true, would it mean that we'll end up with normal PS3's and slower ones with a GPU running 10% slower?
In light of this recent downgrade, will PS3 be able to run Duke Nukem Forever? We'll just have to wait and see...
if there specific information on the GPU changes besides just the core clock speed?
Yeah, yeah, offtopic, I know.
Why would anybody buy GM? Seems to me from this side of the Atlantic that that company's lucky to still be in business at all, and is pissing away money at a phenomenal rate due to a killer combination of huge operational costs, shit products, and consumer tastes shifting-away from the stone-age pick-up trucks and over to the sort of small, economical cars they've been failing to make any profit out of in Europe for I don't know how long.
The only reason I could see for buying GM would be if they get bought out by Renault/Nissan, as was the talk not long ago.
dividend play, and hope that as Ford fails GM picks up the pieces and spins off Saturn.
I'm not going near it personally.
Lets see what's In the box...
Nothing!
Stu-paaaaaaaad! You're so Stu-paaaaaaaaaad!
The first thing I am going to do is to wipe that harddrive and try to tweak a decent linux distro to run on it. Afterall gcc can already compile code for the Cell processor. At first Sony has announced that the PS3 was running linux and now it looks like it'll ship with some limited and DRM crippled version. Whoever manages to come out with a DRM-free and open PS3 Linux will be the new hero.
I still think they should make a game, somewhat like Lego Star Wars, where everything is Peeps, Chocolate Bunnies, and Rubber Duckies.
I can see it now:
Luke Peepstalker: You can't be my father, I'm an edible marshmallow chick!
Darth Ducky: Luke, search inside your soft marshmallow heart, you know that I am your father! Plus, see these nifty red devil horns? I'm a Devil Duckie too!
Luke: Noo!
[Darth chops off Luke's yellow marshmallow hand and eats it. Yum!]
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I get the impression that the GPU clock speed drops are more to do with heat issues than any other technical problem. The PS3 doesnt really look that cooling friendly, especially if we're to believe the PSU is inside the case.
The problem is that programming games on the Cell is hard. Remember when Sony dropped the Aibo and dropped out of robotics and AI research? That was partially because all the bright people were needed to make the PS3 work. Non-shared memory multiprocessors with modest per-CPU memory are very hard to program. Their history, from the ILLIAC IV to the BBN Butterfly to the Ncube, has not been impressive. Whole new approaches are needed. In time for the game developers to be ready for the Xmas shopping season.
That's the problem. Sony needs a miracle of programming on a very short timetable.
Microsoft, however, does not. The XBox 360 is just a 3-CPU shared memory computer. It's quite conventional.
Progress is being made, but realistically, the games available for the PS3 at launch will probably be doing too much in the main CPU and the Cell processors will be underutilized.
On the hardware front, if Sony is making changes to the hardware spec this late, there's a good chance they will miss the holiday season. It's September already. As of late August, PS3 manufacturing hadn't even started. For the holiday season, merchandise has to be in the stores by November 1. And that's after shipping and warehousing. Realistically, Sony has about six weeks to freeze the product, get manufacturing running, and get product out in volume.
It's probably too late for this year. They might manage a small-volume prelaunch, like Microsoft did last year.
Sony's moneymaker for this holiday season will be the PS2, which, at $129, is going to look very attractive to parents.
You're right, of course they don't want to sell a system for $600. They want to sell it for $1000 or however much a blu-ray player costs. What they're doing is trying to saturate the market with thier new (and expensive) next generation media.
I think you're ascribing far too much marketting insight to Sony. Their incredibly awful public comments suggest that the opposite is true.
Furthermore, they could have achieved the goals you mentioned by launching the PS3 at a far lower price with a pluggable DVD drive alone, and offer the BlueRay drive as an upgrade later on. This would have given them even higher market penetration for world domination by BlueRay, since a cinema devotee is far more likely to buy a BlueRay upgrade drive than a gamer is likely to pay $600 up front for a games console with a drive he doesn't need.
The reality is that Sony live in a different world to everyone else, in thinking that $600 is acceptable. It's beyond the threshold.
PSP's initial specs were upgraded. They started out by only planning to have 8MB of RAM, which was later upgraded to 32MB. Additionally, the 256bit bus in the second graphics core was upgraded to a 512bit bus. Beyond that, in firmware upgrades, PSP now has the ability to run more music and video formats, and now has a web browser with flash support.
The CPU is still 333 MHz as a peak without overclocking. It's designed to run at different speeds in order to optimize battery life. Sony's offical SKU allows it to run at 222 MHz, 266MHz, and 333MHz. At the moment, there's nothing really stopping developers from using 33MHz (in fact in all likelyhood there have been games released running at that speed), other then them wanting to conserve battery life. For instance, many homebrew applications either by default run at 333MHz or have an option to do so to increase performance.
You have to remember something here: this is The Inquirer. (No, I'm not confusing this with the British tabloid The National Enquirer.) Basically all this site does is make shit up in order to increase hits to their site. This is just the latest in a string of false information on that site about the PS3, it's Cell processor, and it's RSX graphics chip.
When will you realize that Penny Arcade just isn't funny?
Probably when it stops being hilarious.
Hey, it's no skin off our collective noses if your sense of humour isn't sophisticated enough to appreciate it.
Considering the expense of making the best game and that fewer and fewer games are exclusive to one platform or another, aren't we just going to see ports for the most part? Can any serious game maker really just focus on one platform? Not from the press I've been reading.
If that's true, we aren't likely to see much difference between one platform and the next. How much effort will a developer put into tweaking their game for the features of any one box? As long as the consoles are fairly close, I'm not sure Medal of Honor 3 is really going to be any different on the Xbox or PS3. Perhaps the Wii will let me aim at the Nazis with my wand, I don't know. I am pretty sure I have some titles for the original Xbox that were ports and never really took full advantage of the hardware.
Have I missed something? Will we really see something on the PS3 that can't be seen anywhere else? Perhaps the seven or eight people in America that own 1080p capable HDTVs will see something wonderful.
_____________
A weapon unused is a useless weapon.
Sony expects to have 700,000 units available on the newly reclassified "Dwarf planet" Pluto on launch.
The average consumer doesn't care about or understand hardware specs. The things that still matter the most will be the games and the price of the console and games. The PS3, despite its high price will still sell out the initial shipment unless something horribly wrong with the console gets past QC. But I think that the biggest benefactor of that sell out will be the PS2. A lot of average consumers will want a PS3, but not being able to find one, they may just opt for the other, much cheaper, Sony console. So this holiday season may well be a very good one for the PS2 and PS2 games. Again, I'm talking about average consumers, not hardcore gamers. Nintendo has a pretty good shot at these people, I'm not so sure about Microsoft yet. But I think Sony will definitely get some of their money, just not as much as they might like.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
please buy nintendo, not because it's the best one, but because it isn't made by an evil empire doing everything they can to make our lives misrable.
Nothing carries clout like Uranus.
It's like they have a link directly to Zonk's brain and can peer inside at will.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I for one welcome our new Sony Peep Overlords, even if they're only 90 percent as filling as advertised on the package!
Hilarious, yes. Sophisticated... um... not always.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Did they upgrade the price to compensate?
-- dR.fuZZo
while The average consumer doesn't care about hardware specs they do care when their new BR can not play 50g disks. They do care about price, hardcore games may not. But lets not wave the average consumer isnt going to blink at all the bad press Sony has, not daily but hourly; along with a big price tag. Their price point is a tough hurdle their bad PR is salt in the wound. Sony pulls out of Robotic Dog market Sony pulls out of Plasma market PS3 sepcs downgraded BlueRay wont play some movies BlueRay wont paly over 50g (yet, possibly with new Firmware it will) The list goes on so chill out fan boys. They obviously have problems.
Isn't the Ford and GM thing kind of a race to the bottom? GM is currently in serious trouble and is in no position to be buying anyone. What really amazes me is that they haven't brought out the new Camaro yet, but I think they decided that what with it having an independent rear suspension, no one will ever buy another Corvette. (Chevy's been detuning the Camaro for ages, because it typically has the same engine block and heads as the 'vette.) Every company that wants to be taken seriously needs a sports car in its line, because it draws attention... And the vette is too spendy for the camaro crowd. Ford's still got the rustang, it's a piece of shit now (as it has been since the end of the reign of the Mach 1) but people still think it's sporty, and that's good enough. And of course, some companies (like Chrysler) have been making everything sporty rather than having one badass vehicle. The Japanese are going this route too; The Altima with the 3.5 liter motor has what, 300 horsepower? That's not necessary any more than the 340HP in the dodge magnum... but it's fun :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This comment is not flamebait. It is not seeking to offend anyone, but only express a point of view, a point of view that I happen to agree with as it is factual... unlike the misguided opinion that this is flamebait.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is it possible that a single day pass without more bad news for Sony?
No, it's not possible. Because even if a day passed when nothing bad occured to Sony, The Inquirer and/or Zonk would just make some bad news up and publish that.
Sony dropping clockrates on their product at the last minute would hardly be surprising or out of character-- witness the PSP, whose 333 MHz CPU was quietly underclocked to max out at 222 MHz before release (apparently they just couldn't keep that battery life up?). But do you notice, this Inquirer article offers no source whatsoever? They don't even go to the usual formality of tossing off an "an anonymous source told us...". And I for one am not finding any articles about this clockrate drop anywhere which don't source the Inquirer. Don't you think that's interesting?
You'd think that for an article in which fully half the text is devoted to gramatically questionable ranting about "fanbois" and the author's theories that Sony is attempting to "backstab" him with astroturf "whispering campaigns", the guy could have taken half a sentence to explain where his apparently earth-shattering news about a 50 Mhz clockrate drop came from.
Seems sony's not giving it their best at all. Microsoft i believe has so far won this battle, you cant say they havent,lots of wicked titles and been out on shleves for just under a year now. If sony doesnt try they will lose the war completley, especially at their price. Plus by this x-mas i bet the 360 will get a pricecut slightly and there will be an even larger choice of titles (Gears of war, Just cause and more).
These guys are hardcore gamers, that's not the kind of comment you want from guys that have this much clout.
Of course, having read PA for some time, I seem to pretty clearly remember them strongly endorsing the Sega Dreamcast over the Sony PS2, and later strongly endorsing the Sony PSP over the Nintendo DS.
It doesn't seem to have helped in either of those cases.
Gabe and Tycho are an extremely good barometer of what the "average gamer" thinks-- they speak their mind, they aren't afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes, and they aren't afraid to change their minds when it's appropriate (witness their reversal on the Nintendo DS, or how they went from mocking the XBox relentlessly when it came out to going in on licensing deals with Microsoft by the time the 360 hit). But I'm not sure they're terribly influential since, after all, most of their "clout" comes from their ability to say exactly what everyone else was already wanting to say. In this case they seem to be reflecting public opinion, not shaping it. I think Gabe and Tycho's comments, in that barometer-of-the-public sense, tell us pretty clearly that Sony is botching the PS3 launch and nobody wants to pay the prices Sony is charging. But we all already knew that, so I don't really think that Sony's PR disaster with the PS3 could possibly get any worse because of this.
We were kinda um... smoke testing the Cell with Folding@home, so they had to slow em down a bit.
;)
Not the first nor likely the last we'll fry until they improve the cooling.
The first part is just speculation
.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Alt 2.5 - 185hp
Alt 3.5 - 260hp
Z has the most - 365hp
The 2.5 liter is enough to take on V6s with its high torque.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
... just another drop in the ocean of the PS3's bad publicity. The practical problem is that with the launch titles finalling soon, the developers, who have only had the final hardware specs for a few weeks themselves, are now having to put extra effort to optimization - effort that they'd much rather spend on other things.
260 isn't bad, it's only 16 less than the 276 HP of the 3.5 liter with VVT on intake only, the 298 HP 3.5 liter has continuously variable intake and I think staged variable exhaust valve timing. The 350Z, the top-end Skyline V35, and the G35 Coupe all have the same engine with the same maximum output: 298 HP. Interestingly they dropped the V8 from the skyline ... and now the top end model with the "8" in the name has the same V6, but now it has an 8-speed CVT. How that works I'm not sure, if it's a CVT, it should have infinite speeds, right? Something tells me that most CVTs aren't CV. (There was a prototype CVT used in a new york subway train that used belts and conical pulleys, it was honestly continuous.)
Personally I think that Nissan is falling down on this whole Z car thing. The lightest one is 3,339 lb. That's only like 75lb less than the 300ZX which itself was too heavy. Either that, or they need substantially more power; I'd like to see a twin-turbo model. I did a little research on the current model of skyline today and used babelfish to translate some specs, which showed me some neat things:
Anyway, there's no stock Nissan in any country with over 305 HP, and that's the Titan. Some would say that there has never been one with more than 320 HP, and that's the Nismo 470R or whatever that Nismo Skyline was called.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Isn't this comment insightful? How many hardcore gamers do you know out there? And how much of the market involves them? Does a console success depends on hardcore gamers buying it? Or does it depends on enough sold products? Also these guys said that they won't buy it in the release date, and did not seem to mean that they will not ever buy it.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Oh, don't worry -- the GT-R is coming to the US. It's just not here quite yet because Nissan has to finish making it butt-ugly first.
In other words, you're right: Nissan does hate us!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I don't know how many times I have stated this but Sony's marketing staff continues to kill Sony. If downgrading the PS3 isn't a sign that Sony's marketing staff likes to cut itself with razor blades, then perhaps manufacturing lithium-ion batteries with such low and dangerous standards is a sign that Sony has lost focus on the quality of their products and only seaks to market at much of their products as they possibly can.
Just because McDonnalds is the largest fast food restaurant chain does not mean that the food at McDonnalds is good enough for consumption based on the number of quarter-pounders that were sold.
The more they delay their products and the more the downgrade them or remove features that consumers had hoped for, the more likely no one will be interested in their products. Microsoft is going down the same road to self-destruction. Rather than releasing Vista three years ago, they kept delaying it. Now look at what is happening to them.
If Sony is ever going to be successful, they need to stop thinking about their wallets and start thinking about innovative ideas. And if the patent lawyers don't like that, then they can just suck it!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
"When will you realize that Penny Arcade just isn't funny?"
Rephrase: Penny Arcade isn't just funny.
"unless it returns to it's prior days of creativity" == "unless it returns to it is prior days of creativity", which I hope you will agree makes no sense. "Its" is the possessive -- the same as "yours", "theirs", "ours", "his", "hers", etc. "It's" is a contraction, meaning "it is".
Most people out side of Japan may not notice the market share for NDSL is way better than PSP; and XBOX, XBOX 360 doing poorly. Now days, a lot of people don't really care about performance of the game console, but the game titles. That means IF Sony can get all the big titles, then they can win the war.
As far as the "all my friends are talking about buying the Wii" comments, I'll see your comment and raise you a "no one I know is talking about buying a Wii."
This entire thread is wasted on opinionated trolling. Regardless of your personal regard for the PS3, I have little doubt that Sony will sell every PS3 it manufactures in the first year.
Not because of all the news you and a few hundred other thousand people may have read on the intarweb, but because of the hundred million people who own a PS2.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
As the author of the article that this topic is on, I can tell you two things about the negative publicity about Sony. Sony needs to:
1) Stop screwing up
2) Stop screwing their customers
3) Stop screwing journalists
With this easy three step program, Sony will stop being the butt of jokes on, well everything they do.
-Charlie
I'm sure Sony is scraping at anything they can to reduce power.
Anyone recall how much of a heat problem the Xbox 360 has? While it's not blazing hot, the unit does get quite toasty and requires a beefy fan to keep both GPU and CPU happy. The lowest reported power usage I've sen on the net is 136w, almost double that of the Xbox!
Now look at the PS3:
RSX = the same hardware (256MB GDDR3, 16/24/24 pipes, 50w) as a 7900 GT. With the stated clock speeds (higher than a 7900 GT), and the rwequired increase in voltage, that puts power usage at about 60-65w.
CELL = 8 cores with estimated power requirements of about 4w each (that estimate is probebly too low for the PPE, but may be a smidge high for the SPEs, so it evens out). That's at least 32w just for CELL (more if they can't mass-produce Cell for 1.1v).
Now add in the the system board (256MB ram, bridges and chipsets, other components) for an additional 30-40w, and suddenly the PS3 (125-145w total) is looking as hot as the Xbox 360.
In addition to the same power issues as the Xbox 360, the PS3 also has the lovely problem of getting losses from the powersupply out of the case (%15 of total power is reasonable for a cheap 12v-only supply). This brings the total power dissapated by the PS3 case to 140-160w! That's more than most mainstream PCs!
So, it's no surprise to me that Sony may be tweaking the clock speeds. Despite estimates showing operation above 4 GHz, Cell has been throttled back to a reasonable 3.2 GHz to reduce voltage and frequency. RSX is next on the chopping block. Why not reduce the speed, if you can also reduce the supply voltage? That could cut the power usage of RSX down to as low as 50w.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
A speed bump for the PS3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_bump