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PS3 8x More Power Hungry Than PS2
MonsieurCreosote writes "The Playstation 3 apparently demands eight times as much electricity as the Playstation 2, and more than twice as much as the Xbox 360. It also consumes much more power than a top-end PC gaming rig. It's not clear what's causing the massive drain, but Sony is now denying reports that the PS3 experienced overheating problems at the Tokyo Games Show last month. From the article: 'While an Intel Core 2 Duo PC with high-end graphics card chews politely on a 160 watt entré, the PlayStation 3 gorges itself on 380 watts... The extra power consumption of the PS3 over the PS2 suggests that we're not really getting much better at designing efficient systems, we're just pumping more 'fuel' into existing paradigms'. Are modern console hardware designers getting sloppy?"
Sony is obviously trying to extend from home electronics into the home heating business. Since most kids never move from their gaming consoles, these will remotely heat just the area immediatly around them, saving you tons on heading for kids who never use the rest of the house!
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Included in your $600 is a miniature power plant that runs on burning batteries.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
C'mon guys. This is getting ridiculous. First off, this is just a game console. I don't understand how ANYBODY could feel that strongly one way or another about a game console. It's a plastic and metal box for playing GAMES. Secondly, the quality of Slashdot "reporting" is getting really, really, really, REALLY bad. The ONLY reason I still come here is to interact with other similar people. The articles (like the constant "PS3 suxors" stuff that this article is) are worse than 50% of the personal blogs out there right now.
Are modern console hardware designers getting sloppy?
I don't think consumers care much about power consumption. If I can design something cheaper and faster, but hotter, and the consumer doesn't care, why wouldn't I do it? Lower bottom line. Higher profits. Booyah! More Ferraris for my garage.
It's called paying for the electricity.
...that trying to run 8 cores at once might be what's causing the power drain.
The real question is, of course, are any games going to actually make use of the eight cores? Video games aren't really known for being very parallel-friendly - you might make an excuse for five threads (logic, graphics, sound, controller I/O, and disk I/O), but generally they're fairly serial processes. While updating the game logic, you don't want to draw a frame using half-updated information.
Ultimately, you have to wonder if Sony's decision to go with the Cell and use Blu-Ray was really that intelligent - most of the cost and production problems can be traced to them, and they provide very little real benefit to the end-user.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
No we don't need another tax. It's called the power bill. You pay for it there. WTF is a "tax" going to accomplish, other than fattening the pockets of politicians, complicating our unbelievably complicated beuracracy even more, and making the poor even poorer?
There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
Max power rating of the PSU does not equal power used in normal operation
You've been trolled - most likely by someone paid by Microsoft
it's in my head
Why stop at 20X?
If you're making up numbers, you should go for something bigger, like 100X, or 1,000X. Or maybe even A Gajillion Times Faster.
No reason to lie.
If you dig down through the four layers of links to the original source, you will see that they came up with the 380 watt number by multiplying the amperage number with the wattage number on the power supply label. That gives you the peak draw that the power supply is capable of, and probably not even close to average consumption.
I have a 600 watt power supply in my PC, but even when I'm gaming it drinks in only 250 or so watts of power. The only time it gets even close to the 600 watt mark is for a fraction of a second after power up. I'll bet the PS3 only comes close to 380 watts for about the same amount of time right after powerup.
Here's the link to the original source before it went through a 4-blog telephone game:
http://www.jp.playstation.com/support/qa-591.html
Only if you consider a console with more processing power than older Cray Supercomputers for a fraction of the energy cost to be "sloppy". Let me put that in context to explain what I mean.
One of the things that Digital pioneered with its Alpha chips was the matter of clocking CPUs at incredibly high speeds (for the time); easily breeching 200MHz. With the fabrication technology of the time, however, such high speeds were found to have major issues with problems like metastability. By upping the amount of power applied to the chip, they found that they could force the logic to switch faster and thus reduce these issues. This research was the basis for modern chip design. The more power you apply, the faster you can clock the CPU. (With various caveats freely sprinkled in.)
Now put yourself in Sony's place. You decide you want to build the most powerful game console EVER; with cost being no barrier. So you go and pick up this super-computer-on-a-chip technology from IBM. (The Cell) You then ask NVidia for their latest GPU technology to combine with that processor. You then take a look at the system, to decide how high you should clock it. You decide to max out the GPU for MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE. (Who wouldn't?) So you're now chewing upwards of 100 watts just on your GPU. Then you decide that a power friendly 1.5GHz isn't going to cut it in this competitive race. (Especially if you've got spies over at Microsoft, who are reporting back 3GHz chips.) So you look at it, and decide to ramp up for MAXIMUM CPU PERFORMANCE. Now you've got 3GHz, but your CPU is also using 100+ watts.
So it's really no surprise that the PS3 is consuming so much power. The real issue is whether the super-computer-on-a-chip idea was really the way to go. Some people seem to think so. Some even believe that it's a requirement to hit 1080p resolutions. Only time will prove them out, though. In the meantime, Sony is banking on the consumers being taken with an uber-powerful system. If they'll purchase Aibos and HDTVs, they'll purchase a $600 PS3, right?
Separate Note: Of course, Sony keeps shooting themselves in the foot. This strategy *might* have worked reasonably well if confidence in Sony was still high. But with people boycotting them over everything from rootkits to Lik-Sang, PLUS Sony's extremely poor E3 presentations, PLUS their general arrogance when handling the public, I seriously doubt that they're going far this generation.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Care to provide any additional evidence ON THE background evidence to suggest that there is ANY suggestion that it wouldn't be possible to be a possibility?
;)
Sorry... I'll get me coat.
- The GPU
- The Cell processor
- The highly clocked Rambus XDR DRAM
IO devices like the hard drive and the Blu Ray drive are peanuts compared to those.If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Sure.
A BluRay Rewritable drive uses at most 30 watts. That's peak, and probably only used for a few seconds when spinning a CD-ROM up to 52x.
This entire story is pure FUD.
The PS3 has a 380 Watt PSU. There is no info here about what the actual power draw is likely to be at most times.
For comparison, my gaming PC has a 600 Watt PSU. IIRC, with my hardware, it should be peaking at about about 250 Watts while running games.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Simple floating point power of the SIMD units is easy enough to benchmark.
Core Duo has one SIMD unit. Cell has 10 (7 SPE and 3 AltiVec). You can
Google for this stuff fairly easily. It's even the same benchmarks.
In 5 years the Core Duo will be just as fast; and everyone will have bought a
new PC (or two) to get it. Sony has to put this chip out now, so that it will
still be relevant in the MIDDLE of the console lifecycle.
Better yet, simply educate consumers. They will prefer energy-efficient products, which will result in more energy-efficient products being introduced. Hooray for the free market!
Uh...yeah, you'd put tax on the power bill, so that you get charged a proportionate amount. I already pay $200+ a month in electricity for my little apartment. Power bills have nearly doubled over the past few years. All a tax does is make worse matters worse.
I once monitored my power usage - leaving just a single thing on while at work and killing all other circuits (even my refrigerator). I found my biggest power drains were the fridge, air conditioner, incandescent light bulbs, tv, and my stereo. My computer didn't even register compared to those (as it doesn't drain full power constantly). I now have my fridge set to a lower cooling level, I avoid the AC as much as possible (Houston sucks in that area), I use all-florescent lights, and I make sure the stereo is turned completely off when not in use. It helped a bit - I'm just under the $200 mark now.
I don't see the PS3 as being that horrid a power waster compared to other inefficient household appliances.
The tax could be spent on research into power saving technology, solar panels etc.
Oh, but it won't. You see, taxes are legislated with the suggestion or initial detail that the resulting funds be allocated to specific pet projects. Those pet projects are then typically cancelled or mothballed, and the funds go into the main cookie jar.
It's not a grim master plan by politicians to take our money - it's just the nature of taxation.
Also, as for climate change... the root cause of that has little to do with the efficiency of our power or our fossil fuels. The single biggest threat facing our planet is the fact that there are 6-billion-and-rising humans, consuming food, space, and water. Global warming is bad the the US, but on the whole not that terrible for the world. What IS bad is the rampant population explosion, deforestation by those same "poorest people" so that they can eat and breed (which is what people do - we are no different here), and the scourging of the oceans and jungles to pull every last morsel of fish and wildlife in order to feed families.
The answer is not to tax our power consumption. If I knew what the answer was, I'd gladly give it, but I guarantee it doesn't lie in taxation.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
The Cell has about 20x the processing power as a Core Duo with a high-end graphics card combined. Add nVidia's RSX.. you're looking at a system which has stayed within the budget (even less) for systems of today.
... that is either the dumbest or funniest thing I have read in a long time ...
Wow
The simple fact is that the Cell processor is (probably) very similar in performance to most processors that are similar in size and use a similar manufacturing process; the variations in design will allow for certain trade-offs in performance to be made, but the end result is bound to the same laws of physics as the other processors are.
Certainly, the Cell will (in the long run) outperform most mid-level PCs that are being released today (2GHz Core-Duo 2 and Geforce 7950GTX) but that is mainly because there will be a greater ammount of optimization for the PS3 than there will be for a PC (being that there are so many combinations of hardware for PCs). If you think the PS3 will outperform a high level PC though (think Quad-SLi) I've got a bridge to sell you.
Nope, no sig
> People ALREADY pay for their power usage.
> What part of this process are you not understanding?
I think you're missing the bit about sustainable energy consumption, and the need to encourage people to use less energy. It's not that people aren't paying - just that they're not paying enough to cover the damage that's being done, and to make energy consumption sustainable. There'd be nothing wrong with using the current amount of power if it came from wind, solar energy etc, but sadly it's not, because oil is economically more sensible, but less green. If oil were taxed to the extent that solar energy,wind etc became cheaper, then people would use less energy, and the energy they DID use would be less damaging. The knock-on effect of the massive take-up of other energy sources would make them cheaper and encourage research into more efficient versions.
How were these figures calculated? By taking the 127 from 100-127V range supported by the PSU and multiplying by 3A to get 381. 3 amps is what the FCC label says. But since the PS3 runs in Japan at 100V, the PS3 must demand at most 300 watts. At most. But that's just the PSU. It doesn't mean the device actually draws that power.
By way of illustration, the XBox 360 PSU run at 5 amps. 5 times 127V = 635 watts. So why no stories about the XBox demanding 635 watts? Why no stories that say the PS3 actually uses half the power of the 360? Because the XBox 360 consumes 160 watts in normal usage. It is entirely misleading to look at what the PSU can deliver to determine what the device actually uses.
The same will be true of the PS3. Unless some reputable site such as ARSTechnica, Toms Hardware etc. sticks a probe in the thing and states what power the thing draws this story should be treated as bollocks. Bollocks swallowed whole by Zonk as usual.
The actual root of this story is a someones blog entry. True story. And now the story has been repeated and repeated and repeated and now it's apparently become a fact without context. The only fact is, is that the PS3's power adapter runs has a peak power of 380W. It doesn't require that power at all times. To compare the PS3's max power consumption to max power of a single Core Duo CPU seems disingenuous at best. Remember, the PS3 is an entire system, Cell Processor, Video Card, and HDD... So it has the components of a computer and it consumes at computer-esque amount of power. Maybe I am the only person who doesn't see this power consumption as relevant. I get that it will increase my power bill by few dollars every month, maybe even a few more dollars that Xbox 360, but that's ok.
And this an irrelevant fact, but I'd be curious to see the power consumption levels or a non-core Xbox 360 powering a HDD, and also requiring another outlet for it's HD-DVD add-on. I'd be suprised if we didn't see that 200W's for a core system creeping up into the +300W range as well.
At any rate, this story seems like a non-story to me.
Care to read what you post when you use the Google? You might realize that you are essentially comparing apples and oranges.
The first paper is about adapting LIN/LAPACK to the cell processor. If you read carefully, they are running single precision for that "amazing" ~100 GFlops a second; double precision drops off quite considerably, roughly around 10 GFlops, although the scale of their graph makes it difficult to determine accurately (page 13). It should also be noted that they are tuning all of this in low level assembly for the cell processor.
For the second paper, you might start to wonder, why are the processors still considerably slower? Could it be that they are running MULTIPLE instances of LAPACK on the processors in the second paper? I think so! If you cared to read the discussion on page 6 instead of just looking at the "pretty pictures", perhaps you would've realized this. They are also comparing high level libraries; I wonder if the Xeon/Opteron might function slightly better if they were written in assembly like the Cell case, and not running an OS? Something tells me they might.
Hmm, it seems to me that those systems are rougly equivalent if you actually try to compare them on (roughly) the same test: LINPACK, double precision, single instance produces ~10 gigaflops in the Cell, ~12 gigaflops or so on the Opteron. Perhaps next time you will care to read the papers you're posting instead of just looking for pretty pictures.