Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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?
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.
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.
Exactly, even if PS3 does poorly, they have huge laptop battery sales to Apple and Dell to make up for it.
Lets see what's In the box...
Nothing!
Stu-paaaaaaaad! You're so Stu-paaaaaaaaaad!
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.
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.