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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.'"
This has the potential to be the first article about a Sony exec saying something that may not be tagged fud!
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
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.
./ 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?
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