Kutaragi Admits Sony Hardware In Decline

An anonymous reader writes "In a surprising admission, Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken Kutaragi acknowledged that Sony's strength in game hardware might be in decline. BetaNews has the article, which reports on Sony's PS3 struggle for the holiday season." From the article: "In an extraordinary public statement of regret and despair over having to postpone his company's PlayStation 3 debut in Europe and Australia until March, and to limit availability elsewhere to only 500,000 units come November, Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken Kutaragi is quoted by Reuters as having told reporters, 'If you asked me if Sony's strength in hardware was in decline, right now I guess I would have to say that might be true.'"

Comments

Wow!!

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

This has the potential to be the first article about a Sony exec saying something that may not be tagged fud!

Re:Wow!!

[MilenCent]

Oh it's still FUD. It's just aimed at his own head!

Sony's problem

[Yvan256]

They think they're the #1 in electronics and gaming, but they're no more important than Toshiba, Hitachi, etc.

Given their obsession with proprietary Sony software (ATRAC comes to mind) and hardware (miniDisc, memory stick - when we already have too many flash standards already, UMD, etc), the general public is less likely to choose Sony in the first place.

Then add PR fiascos like the rootkit, the PS3 delays, the PS3 price tag and the latest "Blu-Ray doesn't look much better than DVDs" comments I've read, Sony better do something before it's too late.

However, seeing their new "Four PSP movies locked in a single 1/2GB memory stick that you have to unlock and then still only play them on the PSP" idea, I have no hope left for them.

Re:Sony's problem

[JonnyCalcutta]

right on
i bought
a DVD-ROM drive from them not too long ago
its still working fine

i will always buy Sony

Go ahead

[Tsiangkun]

Ask me if I care.

I'm still in shock really. I was anticipating the PS3 for years, and then in just a few months, SONY destroyed any desire I have to do business with them ever again.

I don't know about you, but in my house Wii have already decided what Wii think of the PS3. They could have a mere dozenPS3 ready by november, and it wouldn't change a thing for me.

I discriminate against companies infected with DRM

Just the Opposite really

[adam31]

The One positive PS3 has is its hardware. Its the software, sales, and marketing departments that are killing PS3. Did you watch E3? That was the longest continuous WTF I've ever seen. Powerpoint? Massive Crabs? Card monsters? The devkits they're giving developers are supposedly a total nightmare, with SDKs that take days to get working... And then sales goes and picks the magic number we all know.

But the hardware underneath it all is brilliant. Cell is a pretty sweet piece of chip for video games. RSX is good enough. Blu-Ray has 25 GB of storage, which should be enough for the next 5 years of games. A hard drive removes the artificial limitation of streaming bandwidth from building seamless worlds. Wireless controllers, Wifi internet, 1080p... tilt is tilt, even if a gimmick-- all these options are there for devs.

If only the rest of Sony could get their shit together, the box would sell itself.

Re:Just the Opposite really

[Rycross]

Interesting about the dev kits. Do you have some sources for the problems, because a friend of mine didn't seem to have any troubles at all devving for the PS3. He seemed a bit confused when I mentioned this rumor.

I'm not trying to troll or spread FUD or anything. I'm genuinly interested where there have been problems.

Obligitory: I'm leaning towards Wii myself. I'll have to see the whole package Nintendo delivers.

Re:Just the Opposite really

[UbuntuDupe]

I'm sorry, but I don't think you fully appreciate how vital the Cell processor is in order to facilitate real-time weapon changing. I guess you just don't understand the internal architecture of console systems.

Re:Just the Opposite really

[masklinn]

Dunno, most of the feedback about the devkits indicate that it's extremely complex and the tools are akin to PS2's devkits tools: they suck, and you have to create your own.

From what I've read, for this generation, the Microsoft devkits are the absolute best (in simplicity, functionality and features, I guess MS' experience with Visual Studio helped a lot there), then comes Nintendo (the devkits are OK, and the fact that the Wii is fairly similar to the GC allows companies to reuse GC knowledge), and dead end is Sony with much more difficult to use and less featureful devkits. I guess companies which developped a lot for the PS2 are used to it though.

But it seems that what sucked the most about the PS3 devkits were the second-to-last iteration: seems like they were extremely noisy ("vacuum cleaner") while the final iteration is extremely silent.

Re:Just the Opposite really

[Anonymous Coward]

Cell is a pretty sweet piece of chip for video games

Actually, I'd personally argue that the Cell is pretty crappy for videogames; its a very powerful processor that can do a massive number of floating point operations but doesn't really address the fundamental performance problems that exist in Videogames.

In videogames (like most applications) 5% of the code takes up about 90% of the processing power; take scene graph management as an example, most of the effort to manage your scene graph (to determine which objects to be rendered) is doing matrix-matrix multiplications, vector-matrix multiplications, and vector cross/dot products to determine whether the bounding sphere is within an arbitrary box, segmenting the box, and then testing whether the bounding sphere is within the 8 new arbitrary boxes. On the Cell processor each matrix multiplication will result in 64 floating point multiplications and 48 floating point additions (with an aditional 128 integer multiplications and 64 integer additions if the programmer is dumb), each vector matrix multiplication results in 16 floating point multiplications and 12 floating point additions (with an additional 32 integer multiplications and 16 integer additions if the programmer is dumb) and so on; if you were truly designing a "games processor" you would include far more vector instructions (with the possiblility of a hardware based matrix multiplication) to greatly reduce the ammount cycles needed to handle these types of operations.

The reason Sony didn't do this is that this would reduce the clock speed that they could run the processor at (in theory, a matrix multiplication could do 64 floating point multiplications at the same time, which would use a lot of energy, which would produce a lot of heat, which would mean that you couldn't run it at nearly the same speed) and thus reduce the speed at which you could run generic code; the fact is that Sony and Toshiba have already said that the Cell was designed to be included in their entire electronics line, the only reason it is the CPU in the PS3 is that they had to spend the money to develop a CPU for the PS3 anyways and they could use that money to develop a generic multimedia processor instead.

Trust me, Sony could have developed a much more powerful CPU (for gaming) at a fraction of the cost if they wanted to; PS3 early adopters are paying extra money so that Sony can use the Cell in future TVs to upscale a 480p image to 1080p.

Re:Just the Opposite really

[ravenshrike]

I have yet to see any quoted source on the insane complexity of the devkits. Nowhere. The closest thing I've seen actually quoted is that it's difficult, but not near the shittyness that was the PS2 Emotion Engine.

Re:Just the Opposite really

[BeeBeard]

You raise some great points about how Sony at least knew enough to sandwich together some pretty interesting hardware for their upcoming console, but how in the world can you claim that the PS3 is being "killed" when it hasn't even been released yet? Rather than engage in endless debates about who will be king of the mountain after the PS3 arrives, the thing to do here is to just wait until the PS3 is out and the dust settles.

Trust me, there are plenty of ways to kill a console that don't involve unfounded PR moves and minor devkit problems. How about having *no* developers even making games for it? That was the case with the Sega Saturn, which I owned and loved. There was a time when it was the hottest thing on the block, too. But the Saturn soon turned into a kind of cautionary tale about how you really need to get some grassroots developer support before you even think about releasing a new machine. Sony has done that.

Will it be enough to topple Microsoft and Nintendo? Who can say?--I'm no fortune teller either. But what we shouldn't do is assume that because Sony has completely dropped the ball in other markets, that they will likewise fail in the console arena. Still skeptical? Look at Microsoft: Their operating systems range from mediocre to absolute garbage, their office suites are pretty nice, and their console systems are now wildly popular. If we had just considered Microsoft's past history with operating systems, could we have accurately predicted the success of the Xbox? It's doubtful. There was a time years back when ./ ran almost nothing but anti-Microsoft stories, and a lot of that general enmity translated into some early Xbox-hating. Now, Sony is the new punching bag. Will we all make the same mistake again?

Re:Just the Opposite really

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the PS3 devkit (as of SDK 092) is that the software just isn't good enough to let developers work efficiently with them. For example to update the flash ROM of the kit (one with each new SDK version) you have to copy it to a usb storage device, power down the kit, reboot the kit and insert the key *at the right moment*, that's just stupid (both 360, PS2 and previous versions of the PS3 devkit would let you do this by network). The Sony dev forums are full of posts from developers trying to recover from bricked kits.

And speaking of the dev forums, developers are getting really pissed off, the tone as been changing lately. These forums are usually really polite and politically correct, but we're starting to see some really snarky comments from veteran developers like David Etherton (who's doing both PS3& 360 development and had done a lot of PS2 dev). There's even a guy from Insomniac (a Sony 1st party) who basically declaring Sony dead by their own incompetence. Basically what most of the devs are saying is that the tools and the doc suck and everybody is on his own trying to get something working, and Sony doesn't seem eager to help. For example, IBM is working on some compiler technology to enable arbitrary code to run on the SPUs, Sony's answer to that is that it's not the most efficient way to use the SPUs so they flat out refuse to integrate any of that in the PS3 tools.

The Cell is an interesting processor, but in a multiplatform context it's just isn't what the devs need. It used to be that on PS2 some of the low-level engine guys and the graphic guys would have to get really intimate with the machine to get it working correctly, that's only a few people. But right now with the PS3 if your game is planning on using the SPUs for anything other than graphic stuff you'll have to train your entire team to use it since none of the C/C++ code you'd usually write will work well (if it event works) on it. This cannot happen, there's not enough low-level guys in this industry. The PS3 also has 8 cells, 1 is disabled to improve yields, that leaves 7, 1 is reserved by Sony that leaves you with 6, and 1 other can be requested by the OS at any time. They also lock 96MB of memory for the system (32 in VRAM, 64 in main RAM), that's like 19% of the memory. That leaves you with what good be a good machine but the architecture is really stream oriented, and most game code just doesn't fit that paradigm.

And the RSX is getting humiliated by the 360's chip, it just isn't funny how much slower that chip is. On paper they look a bit similar but the reality is that the 360's chip is faster at context switching and can pipeline state changes this gives it a a real big advantage with real work game scenes (compared to useless tech demos and benchmarks). And since it uses unified shaders engine the performance is pretty much always balanced, quite unlike the the RSX. And we won't even start talking about the moronic RAMDACs in the PS3, we've compared the output quality of the PS3 and 360 with the same image side by side with identical TVs, the PS3 has an enormous ammount of ringing arround edges in 720p, the 360 has a much better image quality.

And back to tools, on one side you have Microsoft with Visual Studio 2005 with a custom compiler full of special 360 extensions for better performance, a ton of optimized libraries, great documentation and PIX. PIX is like to coolest tool ever invented to debug and profile graphic performance, the PC version is not so good because it can't exposed the low-level stuff but the 360 version is completely out of this world. None of our graphic programmer does it's primary work on PC because of it.

On the other side you have Sony with a custom version of GCC and GDB as your debugger, custom only the fact that it targets Cell because otherwise it's pretty much the same thing, and the SPU version has tons of problems with dead code removal (which due to the SPU limited memory size, is frigging important). Now I like free software but GCC just isn

Re:They seem to be good at software

[Stormwatch]

It takes some l33t sk1ll2 to make a piece of software which acts as both spyware and DRM at once, and then install it on a person's computer without their approval. Thanks, Sony. You took the art form to a new level.

Actually, their DRM/malware was licensed. They're not even good at being bad!

If I were Microsoft right now...

[Mr. Samuel]

...I'd be planning every conceivable way to capitalize on Sony's situation. A small, highly advertised price drop, a pack-in game with every console, or whatever it takes.

Yeah, Nintendo wants to create the mass appeal console, but I'm not certain that they'll crack the mainstream market yet. I'd say the Christmas season is Microsoft's to lose.

Only things to do!

[monopole]

1.Raise Prices
2.Add more proprietary hardware
3.Add more DRM, not playing Blu-Ray isn't enough. Destroying the disc (on the faint possibility that it is pirated) while installing a rootkit is preferred.
4.Add exploding batteries

Where's the positive news?

[ConfusedSelfHating]

For nearly every product there is negative news, as well as positive news. Where is the positive news for the Sony PS3?

It seems that for the price they want to charge ($499/$599) everyone wants an amazing system. If the Wii ends up only having five good games, it's a pretty cheap system so people won't complain. If the PS3 has only five good games, Sony needs to fireproof their headquarters. The Xbox 360 at $299/$399 is still considered too expensive for most people, most people who like the idea of buying the 360 want a $100 price drop (I'm not saying we'll get it, but we would like it).

Sony has created a console which gives very little room to manuever. It would only be successful under the following circumstances:
- the Wii is a failure
- the Xbox 360 is a failure
- people are happy to pay $700 for a console + game + HD cables
- manufacturing is successful at producing large numbers of PS3s

I think Microsoft will drop the price of the Xbox 360 pretty soon to increase their install base. I think quite a lot of people will buy the Wii whether it's $170 or $225. There are a lot of complaints from people who own PS2s about the high PS3 price. Their manufacturing has been less than successful in producing the number of PS3s in the time frame needed.

Personally I will purchase the Xbox 360 when I can get 65 nm version with a hard drive for $300. I wasn't really impressed by the footage of the Wii (IGN has a 20 minute demonstration on their website), but they may release games that appeal to me. The PS3 may be a good deal when it hits $300 for the premium version, but that will be about 3 years from now and there will be new consoles being released.

If anyone has positive news about the PS3, could they please post it.

hardware or manufacturing?

[R5900]

I don't what the original japanese text is, but this translation is actually different:

Said Kutaragi: "If asked whether Sony's level of manufacturing technology declined, I have to admit it under the present circumstance. But Sony intends to prove its technical capabilities by manufacturing the necessary number of blue lasers from now on."

I reckon that actual PS3 hardware is actually very good. Cell is really impressive, if you use SPUs (I do everyday, and love them - would never be able to do 1/10th of what I'm doing with them on "another console"). On the other hand PPU is utter crap, but considering it's the exact same core used in "another console", it's probably not that relevant. RSX is a very decent GPU, despite not matching the ridiculous numbers announced at E3 2005.
The big issue is that Sony seems unable to manufacture the full system.
Disclaimer: I'm somehow biased since I work mostly on PS3. But things I have to complain about are on the software side, not hardware...