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Sony Says Nobody Will Ever Use All the Power of a PS3
Tighthead Prop writes "Sony executive Phil Harrison has made some brash comments about the Cell processor and the PlayStation 3. Harrison says that the current PS3 game lineup is using less than half of the machines power, adding that 'nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capacity.' Is he right? 'The major reason Harrison wants to hype up the "unlimited" potential of the PS3's architecture is to downplay comparisons between games running on Sony's console and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The two systems are not completely dissimilar: they both contain a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz, both have similarly-clocked GPUs, and both come with 512 MB of RAM.'"
Something about 640k of RAM...
"nothing to see here, please move along."
There's not going to be that many games coming out?
I always thought it was 640kb. Then again, I'm being pedantic about everything today.
It's natural law, all the available power of any machine will ultimately be used. The only real reason the PS3 full power may not be used will probably be linked to the 9 cores architecture and the inherent diffulty to use them all at once effciently.
Conclusion: they are trying to present a bad news as a good one, business as usual...
I'm not sure this is something I would want to brag about. If you made the system so complex that it was impossible to use to its fullest potential, then why did you make it so complex and/or powerful? Sounds like admitting to a lot of wasted effort.
Well, if it's not possible to use all the power in the PS3, there's no point in making a more powerful console in a few years time, right?
Hold on. Why sell a product with something the consumer will never use? Unless this is a rallying cry, why make consumers pay hundreds of dollars for something they aren't going to use?!
But Harrison could be correct depending on how he defines 'capacity.' In the world of computer science, one must be careful with the absolute of "never ever" but he hasn't defined capacity sufficiently. Now if he means there will never be a PS3 game capable of using it to the full capacity then he's probably right.
My work here is dung.
Ubisoft says Assassins Creed will have more intelligent AI in the 360 version simply because the three dedicated cores offer more raw horsepower that the PS3 doesn't have. You can also tell that the PS3 has run into some issues regarding the limit of 256MB of texture memory compared to the 360, most textures are all blurry and low res compared to their 360 counterparts. It's the PS2 hype all over again.
i thought they had all the hardware of a ps2 inside as well. so if you play a ps2 game - you use that half. if you play a ps3 game - you use the other half. interestingly enough both halves will consume all of your bank account.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
> The two systems are not completely dissimilar: they both contain a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz, both have similarly-clocked GPUs, and both come with 512 MB of RAM.
Except you know, one has 8 cores (7 usable) and a 50GB removable media disc, and the other has three, and a 4.7GB removable media disc.
I'm not going to spend extra money on extra power that "nobody will ever use".
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I'm pretty sure I could saturate the CPU and all 6 available SPE's with seismic data. Though it probably depends on the FSB and cache.. considering all the SPE's share the same 512k cache.
Even then, I still wouldn't be touching the GPU since it seems to be off limits from linux for a while
-metric
the first games coming out for a system rarely use all its potential, that takes a few years for the developers to get use to the new system. Maybe this is Sony's way of saying the ps3 won't be around in a few years or that most developers have left them to make games for the Wii/Xbox360 only.
Or maybe the PS3 is too difficult to develop games for, if no one can ever use all of its power? Has he considered that angle?
That unpossible!
while(1){ // im gonna be here a while
;
}
there ya go if there is no process monitoring then its gonna spike the CPU to 100% and stay that way.
Should have made it a bit less powerful and consequently cheaper then I suppose. They'd have sold more and make more money that way.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
nobody can seem to buy one in the first place....
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
you're probably right, I'm often wrong.
I just think in powers of two when dealing with memory, so that's what popped up, I always remembered it as about 1/2 MB.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
So why should i spend my money on something that i will not ever fully use?
Why?
BTW Phil; the head of the marketing department is on line 1 for you.
He wants to have a word with you...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Sony Says Nobody Wiill Ever Use PS3
Here, fixed that for you.May Peace Prevail On Earth
I think he meant "Nobody will use all the power to improve the storyline..."
If the PS3 dies the crib death it deserves
Case Study: Sega Dreamcast.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
It's kind of funny, Nintendo got lots of coverage when they renamed the Revolution to the Wii. Many saw it as a stupid/silly decision. But in the end, it seems to have worked out.
Sony seems to be getting similar press for stupid/silly decisions, but uh.. they don't seem to be working out. I do agree that the hardware is impressive, and the ability to run linux is great. Hopefully they won't kill it by too many boneheaded PR/Marketing/Business decisions.
Powered by Web3.5 RC 2
Also, I firmly believe that man will never attain flight, and there really isn't a market for these 'compywhatsit' things.
As long as they make available the Next-next generation PS4 available soon enough...
That is what had happened after the SNES-Genesis-etc days (From the N64 onwards), the "next gen" iteration life span has became shorter and shorter so developers just start to get familiar with the system when the Next-gen system gets out.
I will sound like the old-grandpa but I liked more when the game generations lasted longer, you could see really nice things done with the technology and the hardware had more "value" (see for example all the NES peripherals) as you *knew* the system will remain active for a long time and more games would likely come.
I won't buy the "eye toy" or the "maracas" or the "bongos" today for any system because I know that only 1 or two games would ever be available.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
If no one will ever be able to use its full potential, there is something wrong with the design of the system, something wrong with the developer tools, or they are overcharging us.
"No one will never be able to eat all of this 192 oz. strip steak. That's what makes it so good! Never mind the fact that the part of it you do eat won't be as good as the competition's 24 oz. You're getting a better deal because you're getting so much MORE of it!"
Ah, it's technology. It'll be maxed out in just a couple years if not sooner. Of course no current game is using more than 50% of it's power. It can take a couple years to develop a game. Those game companies get a dev. kit late in the game and have to push the game out on launch of the PS3. There's no chance to play with the system to find out what tricks will pull out the power of the PS3.
It's not until companies can spend time playing with the system and finding 'tricks' of squeezing power out of it, that they start to use close to 100% of it's power. It's also going to need developers to changer their designing style. With a hard-drive, content can be stored / saved in multiple manners, no longer just reading off a DVD/Blu-Ray disc.
Though, like all technology, it won't be long before it's maxed out and people will want something "better". Though, out of respect for the PS3 hardware, it should have quite a long shelf life.
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
Nothing new to see here folks, just a man talking out of his ass again. Nothing but hot air.
Consoles will get to the point where they are almost the same in architecture. The gamecube is based off of a PowerPC 'gekko' cpu, the Xbox360 is based off of a PowerPC architecture that is triple core? And now Sony's 'Cell' CPU is now based off of powerPC architecture. Before you know it these are all just typical PCs but in different cases!
However, in a funnier note. I believe Nintendo's next console will be a deck of playing cards simply because they keep re-hashing their flagship titles over and over again for each generation. SO they are reverting to the things they used to sell from the very, very beginning!
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Cue the "640k RAM" jokes...oh no, I'm too late, they've already begun.
Anyway, it seems to me that Sony are betting on the mystique of the Cell Processor to get people all excited about it and give it an edge over the 360. I don't think it'll work because people who know about the hardware aren't going to buy into the hype, and people that don't will make decisions based on how the games look, not the promised potential of how the games COULD look.
Because if I'm the average consumer the "Reality Synthesizer" may sound intriguing, but if I can get what is essentially the same thing (with a larger library of games) for shorter money, I'm going to go for that.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
The point is Sony has nothing that looks as good as Gears of War but the potential is there. So maybe next Christmas we'll get a game for the PS3 that actually looks as good as it plays, something that looks next gen.
Considering Sony has been hyping full 1080P support and presumably going after people with huge flatpanel televisions you would think there would have been more eye candy at launch. Even a Dead or Alive style fighter (remember how good that looked on the Dreamcast). Something to wow your firends with.
Harrison says that the current PS3 game lineup is using less than half of the machines power
Sounds like he's putting spin on a bad data bottleneck to the processor so the processor runs only half loaded.
The truth shall set you free!
It's really getting old.
It probably is difficult to fill a toilet to 100% capacity with fecal matter, so he's probably right.
If he's right and no one will ever use the damn thing to its full potential, what's so great about that?
It just means it's very difficult to program. That's not a good thing.
Reminds me of another piece of technology...
"Oh, yeah, it's extremely difficult to program Itanium."
That marketing slogan didn't work out very well for Intel.
So is he saying that no game developer has hit the wall w.r.t. performance with this machine. They never, ever had to leave something out, or make something not quite as pretty as they'd like because the machine couldn't handle it. sneBUeeLLeeSHeeITeeeze.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I'm sorry, but this is a little stupid on Sony's part. They put together the most expensive system on the market, and they brag that it only uses half it's capacity. I would much rather have it use almost all of its capacity but be much cheaper than have to donate a kidney to get one.
echo YOUR_OPINION >
I just wish Sony would use some of the untapped power to fix some of the serious functional flaws.
As well as the problems caused by the lack of scaling, it now seems that the PS2 emulation produces much worse image quality than a real PS2 on some PS2 games.
Just do a search for "ps2 ps3 jaggies" to find plenty of coverage of this issue (though strangely not on Slashdot yet).
I've not yet got a PS3 (I'm in the UK), but this is a deal-breaker for me if they can't fix it before the European launch.
I'm sure an PS/3 is so fast it can execute an infinite loop in less than a second
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
Inconceivable!!
And that person will get a visit from Centauri to join the Star League.
I was worried how I was going to afford a PS 4 in 5 years or so. Nice of Sony to tell us that the PS 4 will be completely unneccesarry, and all I have to save up for is the PS 3
I really doubt that any system has every part used to their full potential all at the same time. The exception may be some Vector processing super computers.
The simple reason is you will always run in to some bottle neck that on one component or the other.
If I was Sony I wouldn't be taking pride in this. I would be more impressed with a system that so well designed, documented, and implemented that I could take advantage of all of it's capabilities!
Sorry Sony what you are telling me is that the PS3 is too hard to program for or that it is poorly implemented.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If there's juice in the system, people are going to be using it. I, personally hope that someone writes a Linux distro for it that will allow it to become a kickass gaming system. Oh wait...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Considering what a bitch and a half Sony's development tools are to use, he's probably right. It won't be worth the pain and insanity necessary to hack around the Sony tools to eke out maximum power.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I for one welcome our new, vastly inefficient, overpriced, Linux-running overlords.
(Sorry. I couldn't help it.)
I had already heard their SDK was crap and lots of people were complaining about being unable to program for the PS3 decently, but I never thought they'd admit it themselves...
Well, since a pedant is concerned with minor details, and not everything is a minor detail, then you couldn't actually be pedantic about everything.
Using all it's power is easy, doing it effectively is the hard part. I've been known to bring a powerful serious system to it's knees doing the simplest of tasks. It seems all your really have to do is remove that i++. Now using all the PS3 system resources with efficient code that performs the desired operations only as much as needed...That may not happen. We'll likely see the PS4 before that.
[root@ps3 /]#:(){ :|:& };:
Same magazine also said that is you used the power of the additional processors in the PS3 (for integer calculations) then 18 PS3s will land you in the supercomputer top 500 list....
(Sorry, I can't provide a link...)
Oh shut up...
Phil Harrison states that developers are, obviously, just getting started in fully tapping the PS3 hardware, just like every other console ever made, and that Sony will be constantly updating the PS3 system software with new capabilities so no game will likely ever use EVERY SINGLE FEATURE in the monster of a console.
Shocking!
Guy, go away, the console world is tired of the FUD from people like you.
All you need is one badly programmed app with a couple of runaway processes and memory leaks. That will have your processor and memory running at 100% easily.
The actual quote was made by John Roach in the late 1970's, then CEO of Tandy Corporation. Roach stated that nobody would ever need more than 2K of RAM in a "home computer". This quote became infamous when Microsoft released it's first version of Altair BASIC, which required 4K of RAM, 2K more than the baseline configuration offered by MITS at the time. This Altair BASIC debacle was sometimes characterized as the first "code bloat" in history, which is most certainly false.
I believe him, since I will be using the PS3 mostly to watch movies and run emulated PS1 and 2 games....
I would bet that Folding@home could be made to use all of the PS3's power.
Everybody knows that games use their console's full potential only a few years after the console came out, so of course no game yet might be using its full potential but saying that it will never happen is plain silly.
You just got troll'd!
An IT manager wouldn't buy much more bandwidth than his company would be using at any one time, or else he isn't spending his budget efficiently by paying for something "no one will ever use 100% of". The same for processing power in a workstation or a server. If your hardware exceeds your actual needs- you paid too much.
Wow! The PS3 must be incredibly difficult to program for.
I wonder why they built it if it cannot be fully realized.
As long as they don't release drivers for the rest of the hardware (graphics etc) to the Linux community, then maybe he's right.
Make the secrets public, and I'm sure someone can come up with a use for all this power. Until then, the PS3 supposedly isn't much better than a cheap computer. There IS power hidden in the PS3, but they aren't making it easy to access.
If they are trying to sell this thing as a console, fine, but if they are trying to sell it as "more than a console" (i.e., a computer), then provide the required drivers and people will use it to its full potential, I promise.
The problem I can see is that they aren't being consistant with their marketing efforts. I feel like they keep flipflopping back and forth between claiming that this thing is a console, or a computer. (Is it something in between? Do we need a new word? Conputer? Compusole?)
that nobody will use the full potential of their Shelby GT, and Chevrolet announces that nobody will every use the full potential of their Corvette. It's just very difficult to find a place where you can drive that fast with all the accessories turned on and the radio cranked up to 11, and have it make sense to do it all at the same time.
Now, I'm sure there were lots of games that got closer to red-line on old hardware (like an Atari 2600), but back in the day, I'm also sure that more people drove their Ford Model A's closer to maximum output, also.
I think this statement would better be phrased as: PlayStation 3 has lots of untapped potential.
Sony will never use the full spin power that their marketting department is capable of.
What he really meant was that the full power of the PS3 would never be used to eliminate moronic statements coming out of Sony.
And he's dead right. We can see the truth of it in every public statement.
...as much capacity you want in all the wrong places. This I feel is like when some of the hardware go like "and with the new $foo memory interface, capacity is now increased by 40%" ...followed by benchmarks that show that the net gain was 2% because that's not where the bottleneck is. Many cores is great if you have something embarrasingly parallel. If you have a non-parallelizable task, then it's like pushing a square peg through a round hole (and talking about how great it'd be if the peg was round). And as for capacity... I think the 8800GTX shows there's plenty room left for improvement, it's not like the PS3 will have "top-of-the-line" graphics in a few years, full capacity or not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Nobody uses 100% of the power of their desktop computer either - and nobody complains about it. It would take a very, very tricky program to simultaneously max out the processors, graphics, memory, and disk bandwidth.
Nobody every uses 100% of the power of their car, either. Sure, you LIKE to have the 250 HP engine, but you only use it for 3 seconds on the on-ramp. And hopefully nobody uses the full power of their 800 watt home theatre system. The excess power is there for the momentary condition - not to use all of the time.
Not being able to utilize 100% of the computing power is inherent in the design of the Cell processor. Don't get me wrong, its a powerful chip, but its like any multi/distributed/multithreaded-processor. With the Cell it takes time to set up and tear down the configuration between the processors, and if there is no data to work on this very nanosecond then that processor is starved and is essentially spinning and waiting for something to do. The cell has some unique capabilities to configure its processor units in parallel or in a serial data flow through shared memory, but if the task can not be broken down into appropriate computational algorithms that keep every processor unit busy then you are simply not running at 100%.
Because it will be constrained by constant page file swap due to minuscule amount of memory!
/512 Mb today. I mean wouldn't mind , but most of the games ported from consoles look and play like shit , not in the last because of console memory limitation (crappy textures ,small environment, loading cells) . Couple of glaring examples of games ruined by memory constraints : thief 3 , Morrowind and Oblivion. Thief1-2 had huge seamless areas, thief 3 had loading screen after every tiny cell and maps were scaled down in order to fit it on xbox. Oblivion has lots of loading screens and textures absolutely blow - there are user made textures for Oblivion which put Bethesda to shame.
Seriously I can't get why "latest generation' consoles have so little memory -512 Mb shared between system and video is nothing. Typical gaming rig PC had 1 gb onboard and 256 video 5 years ago, and 2 GB
Is it because nobody will spend such amount of money to buy it?
I still love Atari.
2K Games/Take-Two/Rockstar
* Red Dead Revolver 2 ~Rockstar North, TBA~
Atlus
* Shin Megami Tensei 4 ~Atlus R&D1, TBA~
Capcom
* Devil May Cry 4 ~Capcom Studio 1, Q4 2007~
* Monster Hunter 3 ~Capcom Studio 1, 2008~
Eidos
* Age of Conan ~Funcom, Q3 2007~
* Untitled ~Action~ ~TBD, TBA~
Koei
* Blade Storm: Hundred Years War ~Omega Force, 2007~
* Fatal Inertia ~Koei Canada, 2007~
* Mahjong Taikai IV ~In-house, Nov. 22~
* Ni-Oh ~In-house, 2007~
Konami
* Bomberman ~Hudson, TBA~
* Coded Arms: Assault ~KCET, 2007~
* Gradius VI ~TBD, TBA~
* Mahjong Fight Club ~TBD, Launch~
* Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots ~Kojima Productions, Q4 2007~
* Rengoku: The End of the Century ~Hudson, TBA~
* Untitled ~RPG~ ~TBD, TBA~
* Untitled ~RPG~ ~Hudson, TBA~
Midway
* Unreal Tournament 2007 ~Epic, 2007~
Namco Bandai
* Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire ~BEC, Launch~
* Ridge Racer 7 ~In-house, Launch~
* Tekken 6 ~In-house, 2007~
* Untitled ~Anime Project~ ~TBD, TBA~
* Untitled ~Mech Action~ ~TBD, TBA~
* Untitled ~RPG~ ~TBD, TBA~
* Untitled ~Shooter~ ~TBD, TBA~
* Untitled ~Sports~ ~TBD, TBA~
Nippon Ichi Software
* Makai Wars ~In-house, TBA~
Sega Sammy
* Fifth Phantom Saga ~Sonic Team, TBA~
* Full Auto 2: Battlelines ~Pseudo, Launch~
* Guilty Gear BB ~Arc System Works, TBA~
* Miyazato Sega Golf Club ~AM1, Launch~
* Virtua Fighter 5 ~AM2, Q1 2007~
* Untitled ~RPG~ ~Obsidian, TBA~
Obviously, nobody will ever use more then 10% of PS3 brain!
My goodness people. Here we have a fairly inovative new designed "cell" processor designed by IBM toshiba and Sony. Of course its complexity more difficult to get run at full efficency, but the geek in me thinks the arcitecture is interesting. The compiler optimizations will come with time, like the PS2 whos games did end up looking significantly better over time.
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/
Since Apple went x86 and Itanium sank, there are very few companies even trying anything new in the cpu world. My hats off to them and I hope it works out well.
Sony Computer Entertainment
* Afrika ~Rhino Studios, 2007~
* Angel Rings ~Japan Studio, TBA~
* Ape Escape 4 ~Japan Studio, TBA~
* Blast Factor ~Bluepoint, TBA~ (PNP Download)
* Eight Days ~London Studio, TBA~
* The Eye of Judgment ~Japan Studio, Q1 2007~
* flOw ~thatgamecompany, TBA~ (PNP Download)
* Formula One 06 ~Studio Liverpool, Dec. 2006~
* Genji: Days of the Blade ~Game Republic, Launch~
* Getaway ~Team Soho, TBA~
* Go Sudoku ~TBA, TBA~ (PNP Download)
* Gran Turismo 5 ~Polyphony Digital, 2008~
* Gran Turismo: HD ~Polyphony Digital, TBA~
* Gretzky NHL '07 ~Page 44, TBA~
* Heavenly Sword ~Ninja Theory, Q1 2007~
* Hot Shots Golf 5 ~Clap Hanz, Q2 2007~
* Killzone ~Guerrilla, 2008~
* Lair ~Factor 5, Q2 2007~
* Lemmings 2 ~TBA, TBA~ (PNP Download)
* Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms ~Game Republic, 2007~
* Motorstorm ~Evolution, Q4 2006~
* My Summer Vacation 3 ~Japan Studio, Q2 2007~
* NBA '07 ~SCE San Diego, TBA~
* Ratchet & Clank: Next ~Insomniac, TBA~
* Resistence: Fall of Man ~Insomniac, Launch~
* SingStar ~London Studio, Q4 2006~
* Siren ~Japan Studio, TBA~
* Swizzleblocks ~TBA, TBA~ (PNP Download)
* Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom ~SOE, Q4 2006~
* Warhawk ~Incognito, Q2 2007~
* White Knight Story ~Level 5, Q4 2007~
* World Tour Soccer '07 ~London Studio, TBA~
* Untitled ~Action~ ~Media Molecule, TBA~
* Untitled ~Adventure~ ~Naughty Dog, 2007~
* Untitled ~MMORPG~ ~SOE Austin, TBA~
Square Enix
* Densha de GO! Online ~Taito, TBA~
* Extreme ~Taito, TBA~
* Final Fantasy XIII ~PDD1, 2007~
* Final Fantasy Versus XIII ~PDD1, 2008~
* Project Psychic ~Taito, TBA~
* Railfan ~Taito/Ongakukan, Dec. 21~
* Untitled ~MMORPG~ ~PDD3, TBA~
Tecmo
* Ninja Gaiden: Sigma ~Team Ninja, 2007~
* Untitled ~Action-Adventure~ ~TBD, TBA~
Misc. (No publisher)
* Mercenaries 2: World of Flames ~Pandemic, TBA~
* Redwood Falls ~Kuju, TBA~
* WarDevil: Enigma ~Digi-Guys, TBA~
Having said that, for such a nerd-oriented site, I can't believe some of the parsing going on here, and it must come down at least partially to latent Sony-hate (for whatever reason).
Let's just put the word 'Sony' aside, for ONE second. Just bear with me here.
The PS3's 3.2 GHz Cell processor, developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba and IBM ("STI"), is an implementation to dynamically assign physical processor cores to do different types of work independently. It has a PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible 3.2 GHz Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs), a seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to OS security, and an eighth disabled to improve production yields. The PPE, SPE's and other elements ("units") are connected via an Element Interconnect Bus which serves to connect all of the units in a ring-style bus. The PPE has a 512 KiB level 2 cache and one VMX vector unit. Each SPE is a RISC processor with 128 128-bit SIMD GPRs and superscalar functions. Each SPE contains 256 KiB of non-cached memory (local storage, "LS") that is shared by program code and work data. SPEs may access more data in the main memory using DMA. The floating point performance of the whole system (CPU + GPU) is reported to be 2 TFLOPS[74]. PlayStation 3's Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float and 15 GFLOPS double precision. The PS3 will ship with 256 MiB of Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed.
That is one deeply weird hunk of hardware. And its pretty fucking cool. Or at least, IBM seems to think so.
Someone has tried to dumb down an explanation like this to our boy Phil and he shat out this 'will never use the full potential' idiocy, which in turn riles all the nerds because its just such a lame thing to say, you can poke holes in it all day (such as, 'why build such a complicated beast if we will never be able to program it - equally idiotic).
So the statement is 100% true, and 100% meaningless.
Like the hamburger truck at the end of my street that claims Greatest Burgers in the Universe.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
no one will ever use 100% because the design is so hard to code for no one will bother to try and get 100% utilization its like coding for multithreaded, only 10X worse
...Of course this statement is true because no one will be using the PS3, period. I read this article thinking Sony wants to distance themselves from the 360 so they can standalone like the Wii. Therefore people will feel the need to pick up a PS3, in addition to the 360 and Wii they already own. It's not going to work Sony, you went on record saying you were the best and you were setting your sights on Microsoft. Stealing Nintendo's position of being separate from the pack is even worse than stealing their controller ideas.
Honestly, when Game Spot reports a major magazine wrote that the PS3, "just isn't that great", you have serious issues. These are the kind of media outlets that are supposed to be supporting you, not posting your eulogy.
The brash statements made Sony executive Phil Harrison are just more hyperbole from Sony trying to salvage their once great reputation. Those of us in the Internet Generation, or "Millennials", don't care about what Sony has done in the past; we care about who is doing good now. Meaning you have to bring your A-game every single time instead of resting our your forefather's laurels. Our friends don't like the PS3, they like the 360 and the Wii. And lets face it, the PS3 and the 360 are just alike, it's just the 360's overall execution is better.
Sony's hype will always be overshadowed by the haunting statement Time Magazine made about the PS3 having been beating by "something called a Wii.". Truth hurts, pal.
Any slashdotter will agree that Micro$oft is one of the greatest marketing companies of all times. They've put paid to companies far bigger than Sony (IBM anyone) and will continue to do so until some IT focused, consumer-orientated CEO decides to up his/her game.
Just junk food for thought...
Doesn't this mean that the system was just over engineered? And that paying the $$$ to buy one is silly, 'cuz you're paying for something you just can't use?
Has slashdot really become a single minded den of trolls? I used to read comments for the intelligent discussion. Now it's like everyone hopping on the "me too" wagon, dispite how baseless their arguments are.
All that the guy is saying in the article is that developers aren't using the full potential of the platform yet, and that games will continue to get more and more out of the console as time progresses.
This is true with any console.. Look at PS2 launch titles compared to current PS2 titles. Look at xbox360 launch titles compared to current 360 titles. As developers become more familiar with the hardware, the games get better. Sony was developing the ps3 up to the last minute, developers really only got maybe 3 months with final hardware before launch (and with only 3 months to go, no one is going to take a huge risk with redesigning how their game engine is structured). Even the best PS3 launch title, resistance: fall of man, has admitted that they have only used 2 of the available 6 SPUs.
The ps3's power does not lie in it's core processor, the core prosessor is fairly slow. It's power lies in the SPUs. Second and third generation games are going to use this power more effectively. Yes, the ps3 is harder to program for, but it also has more raw calculation power. It's a trade off.
There are other architectural differences that will be addressed by developers too. Like the PS2, the PS3 has a fairly small amount of texture ram. But that texture ram is faster than the 360, and the bus between main memory and texture memory is huge. So like the ps2, the ps3 is structured to stream textures into texture memory from main memory. In order to hit ps3 launch deadlines, i doubt anyone did this. Next wave of games they will, and that code will be in their engine for every game after that.
All of the comparisons between xbox360 and PS3 so far have been comparing multiplatform titles. Developers who do multiplatform titles, usually develop the game in windows, and then write hardware specific low level code. This code ports fairly well to the xbox360 due to it's similarity to pc/directx, but will not run very well on the ps3, because it does not take into account the SPUs, which are the core of the PS3's processing power.
PS3 exclusive games will start to appear, and they will really shine. And as more and more middleware companies begin to write ps3 specific code that utilizes the PS3's SPUs, you will see more and more ports that will start swinging in favor of the PS3. As games get bigger, more and more companies are using middleware for physics, sound, graphics and AI.
This is all that Harrison is saying, that right now developers are not utilizing the full power of the console, and that there will always be new discoveries to pull more power out of it. This is still happening with the PS3, and new VU tequniques are discovered.
It all depends on how processor intensive the firmware rootkits are, really.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
So, if we have this amazingly powerful thing, but it will nevr be used to full capacity, what use will we see of it? 90%? 65%? 17%? Have all these people just paid $700 or more for something they will only ever find to be equivalent to a PS2, Xbox-1, or what? Something between a PS2 and an Xbox 360? Something only slightly better than a 360?
"There's not going to be that many games coming out?"
Thanks for setting yourself up for that...
To be honest, no user will ever need more than 640KB of RAM. The entire PS3 is way over-featured!
Cell just isn't that suited to gaming.
With the GPU doing graphics, one core doing AI/Gameplay, another doing Physics, another doing Audio/Networking/Input you've pretty much got all the processing power you need. If you start spreading a game out across too many cores it's going to negatively effect the speed of the game due to the fact you're going to spend all your time trying to keep threads in sync. I'd argue that this is why Sony has it wrong and MS has it right. The GPU can handle graphics, then the 3 cores can be used as mentioned above - this seems the optimal division of work in a game engine. I'm convinced that 4 physical processing units at 4ghz would be better than 8 physical processing units at 3.2ghz so perhaps that would've been a better route for Sony if they really felt the need to beat the 360 on performance.
To me the Cell seems more suited to number crunching type applications, the sort where you can offload large amounts of data to each cell and let them go on their merry way processing these chunks without having to worry about whether every few bytes of data is in sync.
I honestly wonder if Sony management just assumed that the Playstation 3 would cell like the PS2 and PS1 and hence just insisted they use it as the tool to bring down the prices of Cell and BluRay regardless of whether they were fit for purpose or not.
I thought the PS3 had an all-new processor called the Cell, nothing to do with PPC but designed from scratch to be massively parellisable and distributed - a cluster in a box in fact. Was I dreaming? Or could it be that the story submitter took a bit of a knock in the maul or a ruck, or had a scrum come down on him, with consequent massive brain trauma and oxygen starvation? That's what happened to me - tighthead in the hardest postion on the damn pitch IMO, you can't even punch your oppo back... mind you this is Welsh borders school rugby I'm talking about. Much more important than just a came.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
With 2 distinct mahjong titles available coming out I don't see why everyone is down on the PS3. These will certainly utilize the hardware in the console, and the fact that they won't be available on the Wii or 360 will certainly tip the scales in Sony's favor.
After you installed extension board with PowerPC CPU in Amiga 1200, you'd never use whole computational power of the computer.
That is because it would send the native Motorola CPU to sleep and you'd be unable to run both in parallel. So even if you ran at 100% of the PPC, you still had some unused, unavailable MIPS under the hood.
It seems quite likely that the bizzare, weird construction of Cell plus some other really weird "features" of PS3 will make it nearly impossible, or plain impossible to use all of its power at once. Not that it wouldn't ever be needed, simply there will be no hacker skilled enough to employ all of it scattered over 8 sub-cores, GPU and so on.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
A) There aren;t good tools for programming with the cell, or
B) The developers have no real experience on using a cell.
Sorry, but they should be able to get more work out of the cell.
Perhaps the PS3 developers need a crash course on utilizing the cell.
Nobody is making consumers do anything.
People buy things all the time that they cannot fully utilize and I see force compelling them to do so. If you have the money to buy a Ferrari Enzo and split it in half because you have no idea how to buy a sports car, that is also your choice. If you want to drop a few thousand on a high-end personal computer to surf the web sites and traffic email, more power to you. In a free market, you can make and sell a product for whatever you want (generally) and consumers can pretty much spend their money however they damn well please. Is there something wrong with this?
I suppose some people like spending well over $600 on a super-computer (by current standards) gaming machine. At least they can run Folding@home and turn it into a winter space-heater.
Why bother.
I've written code that use all of a systems resource! take that.
Stupid infinite loops....
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Coding for this beast with full optimization of every element of the hardware is a nightmare (esp. making best use of the cell).
To join the roster of:
"The check is in the mail."
"I love you, too."
"640K oughta be enough for anybody."
"It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
If nobody will ever use all it's power - why didn't they just make the damn thing a little less powerful, and probably thereby cheaper?
...
This is like bragging your car has a top speed of 200 mph, when you live in an urban zone and the limit is 30
--
Bill Gates.
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation mounted a very good peace of hardware inside the Heart of Gold. They have also thought, that they don't need more CPU power. But Eddie almost collapsed when it came to calculate the ingredients of tea.
..YOU _chuck_ Norris..
(chucky, chucky; eight rubles..)
Sony makes the questionable assumption that we particularly care. The problem with this console won't be the power. The problem will be the ultimate relevance.
The major reason Harrison wants to hype up the "unlimited" potential of the PS3's architecture is to downplay comparisons between games running on Sony's console and Microsoft's Xbox 360...
Seems to me that at the same time, he is supporting the fact that now everybody with a PS3 has paid way too much money for a system whose potential can never be fully utilized. It's like buying a super-duper gaming PC for $2000 just to play minesweeper. Overpriced?
Looking at those specs, it seems my 4 year old PC is running at or better than the new console's stats. So are consoles just 5 years behind PCs? Granted my PC was about 1200 at the time, but now-a-days I could put it together for well less than 600. Then again I'm not as tech saavy as I was during the days of Pentium 1s so I could be missing something. Or I could be right, and it would explain why BF2 looks like ass on the PS2
I seriously hope you work for Sony if you're spending this much effort promoting the console online.
If I could run Matlab on it, I could use all its power.
the current PS3 game lineup is using less than half of the machines power, adding that 'nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capacity
So, when can we buy a version of the PS3 with half the power for less?
They could even offer an "upgrade" feature like mainframes (once upon a time, when you paid for more cycles, the IBM rep showed up, opened a locked door in the back, and flipped a switch to up the speed.) Given that anything we buy will be obsolete in a few years anyway, there probably won't ever be many games that need that much more power.
So now not only are you forced to pay for a BR drive you may not even want - you're paying for performance that's never going to be required.
That's funny, Mr. Owl told me it would take three games to fully utilize the core of a Sony Playstation 3.
when you don't use the full power. The Nintendo Wii would do just fine.
[PS3 Hardware Summary]
You can always load and run loads of stuff to bring any system to a crawl. (You can never have too much hard drive space and RAM and CPU power, right?) You could be using the power available very inefficiently, but it's still using the available power.
I hear that Gundam game runs like ass... It could be crappy code, it could be they used too many high-res textures? too many polygons in the models? who knows; but still from the reviews, it sounds like the PS3 is not powerful enough to run it.
You can upgrade PCs, but the available console RAM and video RAM is fixed and not ever going to change. ... Everquest II with even more detail, HDR lighting? How about Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with the high-res textures and terrain detail, etc. like you can do on a PC?
Developers will hit the ceiling (as they always do) as they make levels, environments, models, AI, and physics more and more complex and detailed. Just make a game that plays with graphics like Blizzards cinematics in real-time with hundreds of units all rendered like that.
He's right, the PS3 is severely limited in that nobody CAN use 100% of the CPU power of the CELL; or at least no game developer. To use the CELL, you need to specially structure and program your application (read: game) to take advantage of its supercomputing features. It's a processor with 9 cores: 1 controlling and 8 slaves, with slightly different functionality. You have to write your programs in such a way as to take advantage of that design specifically, or you'll flounder around half its true power.
To do this, you need to spend several hundred times more money for a team of supercomputing software applications engineers. In other words, you need to have a team of programmers like they use on the defense budget to write real-time heavy-detail 0.0001% error atomic bomb simulations and whatnot, which are freaking expensive. It's not going to happen.
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How can these consoles play these amazingly looking games with only 512mb of RAM? I mean I understand that PCs have OS overheads, etc. but I have played no game in the last year that didn't use at least half a gig..and they didn't look as good as some of those PS3 games do! so..what's up? Anyone care to enlighten me?
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
but he forgot to mention that the Xbox360 only has a 2 core Cell processor and the PS3 has a 7 core Cell processor, it's a huge difference; also the PS3 comes with a 50GB built in optical drive and the Xbox360 only comes with a 4.8GB built in optical drive. Those are two huge differences in hardware capabilities that are rarely highlighted in discusions about the two systems.
... should any of us pay for the full system? I guess it's a good thing that it's already subsidized...
Just use Java or .NET on it.
He says your friend doesn't work at EA Sports.
Freaking console griefers...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, no one will ever be able to use 100% of the PS3 power!
Regardless of what 100% really means...
How could this be a good thing?
Why would they say this at all?
Does this mean that Sony is admitting that they broke one of the golden rules of console development
by not making the PS3 easy to develop games for?
Does this mean Sony is admitting that the Xbox360 is easier to develop for?
Are they saying that the PS3 is so powerful no one could ever make use of all the PS3's potential?
If so, why make such a device?
This fly's right into the face of what made the PlayStation legacy so good.
Any one remember the lessons learned with the Sega Saturn?
Wasn't Sony on the leading edge of that curve, oh, so many years ago?
What is Sony really saying?
What is wrong with Sony?
With their bizarre marketing campaigns, root kits
and expensive low-res movies on UMD it's starting to look like Sony is going senile.
Saying no one will ever use all the power it has doesn't mean that different games won't use all of its capacity in any single dimension, such that all of its capacities will be used, just not all of them simultaneously.
Of course, at launch, consoles are often rather underutilized (a lot of the earlier PS2 titles were generally worse in terms of gameplay than PS1 versions of the same titles, but took a little advantage of the PS2 to get better graphics—this was, as I recall, particularly true of the first year of EA Sports games.) And, over time, the console gets more fully utilized as developers get more experience with it.
(Which is one reason why being first to market is important in consoles that are similar technologically, because having developers more familiar with making games on your console gives you better games with less innate power: OTOH, its an edge that tends to fade fairly rapidly with time.)
IBM BlueGene, closing in on the petaflop. You bet yer sweet bippie we're pushin' those processors 'til they SCREAM, and believe me it's a thing of beauty to behold (when it works - after all, it is a development project, a "work in progress" you might say).
After all, we don't use the PS3 - we just use the GOOD part, the cell processor. Lots of 'em! At the same time.
Even if I believed that you actually had a friend who worked at EA Sports who actually told you that load of crap (as others have noted, it would be more convincing if your invented story actually referred to the right company as the source of the PS3 graphics card), I'd just assume they were just inventing excuses for the typically lame EA Sports launch titles, like the entire first year of PS2 titles they made.
They released a next-gen Sega Saturn here, hardware, marketing and all.
Sony's running on fumes. Their marketing team STILL not fired and STILL making the same mistakes as with the PSP fake site and grafitti.
Sony: you're selling to the techy early adopters. Don't sell is shit, because we don't buy shit. I wonder if they even have a honest good thing to say about their products, if they come up with so much non-sense.
Didn't they disable one of the cells? That would definately keep you from using 100% of its capabilities.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
"No. Many sites, including IGN, misinterpreted the statement made by Jade. And no, there was never a huge fuss about RSX RAM. What is with these false accusations about the PS3, are you just trying to spread false information, or are you just high?"
If it's misinterpreted, can you please point to the clarification?
I won't use any because I will not own one!
Reason #32767 not to use VB6: Integers are 2 bytes... Think about it!
From a modern hardware perspective you never use ALL of a systems power at the same time but that does not mean you can replace any one component without lowering overall performance. All systems have at least one bottleneck, but most games encounter more than one, so you may be limited by the CPU, System bus, and then GPU. Which means beefing up any one component would not be worth it without beefing up several.
Think of it this way replacing 4mb L2 cash with 4 GB L2 cache would speed up most games, however spending that money on several components would be a better use for that same cash. The PS3 is designed to be flexible so you can use the cell to speed up rendering or AI as needed But that flexibility comes at the price of complexity, thus first gen games are using ~50% of the systems capabilities. However games will probably never use more than 80-90% of the systems resources at the same time so the graphics will get better they will not become twice as good.
PS: 3 games may all use 90% of the systems capabilities, but they will probably not use the same 90%.
I appreciated this immensely. Just wanted to give you some props.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I have two things in my mind when reading this: 1-It dissapoints to know that. We'll never see something good this gen, then [And 'good', I mean really good, something that shines over every game]. 2-I think no game has used the 100% power of a Console, ever.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
Base Pi? You're not being rational.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So it's not using the full potential? I guess competitors could say software written written for PS3 could be doing so much MORE with the resources and distance itself in the next-gen race.
Also, could Sony have then GONE with a lower spec system and saved money on their subsidizing?
So we'll never max out the resources of the PS3??? The PS3 owners playing "Full Auto 2" and "Fight Night 3" (and "Tiger Woods PGA 07" - as if anyone actually bought the PS3 to play golf) would suggest otherwise.
From a scan of the game reviews and support forums, Sony is just flinging hyperbole again.
In reality, people never use 100% of a systems power.
What would you do with as system that was pegged at 100% CPU usage, or 100% bandwidth usage, or 100% drive and/or swap file usage?
I bet you would start troubleshooting right away. And maybe upgrade that Wang Word Processor or the IBM PS/2 with Microchannel Technology to something with a little more punch.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
One of the drawbacks of suggesting this is that, by boasting it, it begs the question 'If you don't think anyone will ever use the machine's full capacity, why the hell did you overengineer it so badly?'
Just like we don't use all the power of our most powerful supercomputers, or that 640K would be enough for anybody... or that cartridges are the way of the future... or that CD-R discs have so much storage capacity they will never need to be replaced... give us a technology an we'll stress it to the point of having to develop even more technology to compensate for the constant explosion of data.
With the PS3 priced at six or seven hundred bucks, I'm inclined to agree with him.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
I wouldn't put it past their marketing firm.
What loves systems with idle resources & fast internet connections ?
It's definately not my grandmas pacemaker.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
"Uuuunnlimiteeeed POOOOWWEEERRRRRRR!!!!" So Palpatine is the head honcho at Sony? Now that explains all those rootkits & stuff.
I think this is the wrong Micro Channel for that sort of thing...
[UID-HeinzIntel]
He only said that because it isn't time to sell the PS4
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Remember, when the NES came out, the video game market was just recovering from a horrendous crash. (that, for a couple years, prevented Nintendo from gaining ground in America) No one knew how long the console would "last," so there was no reason not to try to squeeze everything out of it possible. (resulting in games like Battletoads which, to this day, look closer to the 16-bit games than 8-bit) Same even held true for the next generation. The future was fuzzy. Better to use incredible programming tricks to give the Genesis "Mode 7" effects or hack math coprocessors onto the cart than bet on something better being around the corner.
If you disagree with this, just ask yourself - would Starfox, with its horribly expensive hardware hacks, have EVER have been made if people were certain a polygon-based console was less than two years away?
But after the Saturn and Playstation came out, and the PSX became huge, suddenly the next generation started to be a sure thing. Why squeeze every drop of power when you can just wait a little longer and release a game on a superior system? I refer you, for example, to Shenmue - began development on the Saturn (as a Virtua Fighter spinoff), finally released on the Dreamcast. Or Dinosaur Planet / Starfox Adventures - first for N64, finally released on Gamecube. Ditto for Eternal Darkness. There are innumerable examples these days.
And SPEAKING of Shenmue, there's also a cautionary tale there. The Dreamcast was 2 years into its life. The PS2 was on the horizon, and Sony was fudding endlessly to try to get people to save their money for the PS2. Sega decided (unwisely) to try to have their actions speak louder than their words and poured *$80 Million Dollars* into a supergame which was going to be so incredibly good that no one who saw it would even see the NEED for a PS2.
That game, of course, was Shenmue. And it was probably better looking and playing than the first wave of PS2 games. None the less, it didn't save the console. And, in fact, its huge expense likely contributed greatly to Sega's rapid crumble afterwards. (and AM2's followup effort, Propeller Arena, looked better than PS2 flight sims for a couple years following... except that it was dumped by Sega and was never even officially released)
So, combined, what we have here is a very clear message - DON'T TRY TO PRESERVE A DYING CONSOLE. There is no easily-seen reason to do so any more. It sucks, but it's true. You (the developer) can make just as much money delaying the game's release for a year or two, and you risk sinking your entire company if you try too hard to hold onto the past.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Depends on what you mean by AI. For instance a path-finding algorithm should absolutely fly on the Cell. One way to do this is to divide the area into a grid, mark the start, and at each point label the best path from already visited points. A single Cell should be able to do this orders-of-magnitude faster than even a dedicated PPC chip (I'm guessing at least 100x faster).
Generally any dynamic-programming ie ground-up algorithm should work very, very fast on the Cell. It's just a matter of, once somebody writes a path-finding code for a cell then everybody starts using it and then games get much faster AI.
FYI 4ghz Cell is at 256 glops peak vs ppc at 8 peak (both single precision), but cache misses never happen on the cell and often waste cycles on PPC (3 for L1, 9 for L2, ~40 for L3).
Yes they will, and you know they will, or you wouldn't have had to put such powerful hardware to make it cost $600.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
To so openly admit to the failing of their architecture takes balls. Of course, no computer or console can ever use 100% of it's potential, but anyone who has worked with multi-core systems can tell you that more cores mean more overhead, more opportunities for less that optimal code, and thus more wasted cycles. I use a quad-core system for editing video and rendering 3D graphics using heavily optimized multi-threaded code and rarely have I ever seen total CPU usage exceed 75% because of the realities of software engineering. On a single core system the same code would have no problem maxing out the processor. X number of transistors on a single core will always out perform the same number of transistors on multiple cores. It's not exactly the law of diminishing returns but it might as well be. Because of this phenomenon, and the limitations of merely mortal software engineers, the allegedly weaker XBox360 will in most instances perform as well as, if not better than, the PS3.
+0 Meh
Nobody will ever use 100% of the power because the processor is too hard to program. It's like shipping a product useless attachments, then boasting that nobody will ever use them all.
Who cares, sure the PS3 (and xbox 360) have great graphics and insanely powerful processing capabilities.
I think consoles are now close to being a commodity product like computers are for most people. For average users, any new computer you buy today will do pretty much everything you need.
Similarly all the current consoles have acceptable performance, they differ in price and controller design.
Wii is powerful enough, cheaper and fun.
Sir
I have read with great interest news stating that games only use half power on a PS3.
As a mater of fact, I am not bound to pay complete price for a defect product that has limited performance.
Therefore I ask for a 50% rebate on the price of my PS3.
When games will use more than 50% I promise I will pay the rest of the product, the same you promise future games will use more of your product.
Best regards.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
prop mem stick software
....I'm sure there is more that has slipped my memory
vastly overpriced viao computers
the old tinitron monitor with the wire running horizontal about 1/3 of the way from the bottom
the time last year I went to the sony website to download driver for a sony digital camera and it took a half hour to find the link - and this was for a current model, still sold on the web site, boy, it was easy to buy stuff, but impossible to find the driver this really *irked me
the overpriced sony playstation i got my kids tht never worked right and broke after two years of moderate use\
the external usb dvd writer we got cause none of our old machines had dvd writers and the
astonishingly bad sony software that shipped with it, i got better shareware to run sonys own dvd writer then the stuff shipped with it...
So he's essentially confirming that their SDKs suck!?!
Love or hate Microsoft, you cannot deny that they produce some of the best development tools and SDKs. Cater to users, and you end up with a nice Mac, user-friendly, but with 5% market share. Cater to developers, and you dominate the PC desktop. Apply formula to console gaming, rinse, repeat for next-gen...
And then there's the matter of the 6 fully-programmable Vector DSPs (8-1 for production, -1 for sony's own uses) running on an on-die bus attached to the CPU on one, and then 2 other PPC procs on the other. If you don't know how much of a difference that makes, read a computer architecture book.
IMHO, I'd rather do the Cell any day of the week. Putting physics, collision, etc into the DSPs really screams 'absurd performance.' Get the algorithm implementations good once, and reuse them for the next 10 years of the PS3's lifetime. (plus, we're going to see similar algorithm implementations for the cell come out of academia, where it's used for other simulation uses). A lot of a game engine's contents can use DSPs pretty effectively. Save the PPC core for scripting.
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Of course they're not going to be able to fully master the power of the PS3!
Everyone's too busy expending energy by slamming Wii remotes into TVs.
"I have the POWER!"
Seriously. This means, in a nutshell, that it will be abandoned by developers before it reached the end of its use cycle. I, for one, would not make a comment like this about a product of mine. I'd rather say that after 100% use is reached, people will find better algorithms that make better use of my technology, because it is so superior that studios keep developing for it long after it should have had its demise.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The potential of all systems is "unlimited", until one turns them on. While off, simply divide the work it's actually doing (0) vs. the work it can do (0)...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Chuck Norris can use 100% of the power of the PS3!
You can't tell me that someone out there didn't buy a PS3 just for the cell processor to add to their cracking rack or SETI farm
I am already using all of PS3 power this winter - and me feets are getting cold anyway. I need something that takes at least 1000 watts to run, maybe I will plug in another PS3 ...
If you're that over-provisioned, you're just throwing away money, especially when you sell game consoles at a loss. If extra system resources are available, some game would use it if they could. That is, if some other aspect of the system design isn't bottlenecking performance.
Perhaps you would like to purchase the PS3 game I have just written. It's called "Factorial of one million". It's not as much fun as Doom 3 but it will use the CPU quite heavily.
it's also an incredibly dumb thing to say.
Sony has been insisting that the thing that makes their product better is the power. But if nobody will ever use all that power, then why is the extra "better"?
A 360 is, from what I understand, only slightly less powerful (if it actually is) but also, again from what I hear, much more easy to develop for, has better on-line capabilities, and a much larger installed base (meaning more liklihood of exclusives or getting cross-platform stuff). So, tell me, Sony, why shouldn't I buy one of those if your power will never be used and your other stuff is equal or worse?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I had a conversation without someone who worked at IBM and is very knowledgeable of the cell's architecture. While he said that the cell was in fact a powerful processor, it was hampered because it was a "speed demon" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed-demons, and opposed to a "brainiac" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainiac_CPU.
While I don't claim to be an expert on the matter, from what I understand this means the theoretical maximum of the CPU is higher, but it doesn't perform as well as a brainiac in the real world. Another way to state it is that if the cell had been designed as a brainiac it would have been more powerful, but had a lower clock speed.
Seems like this is a dumb statement from sony. Why pay all that cash for capabilities that will never be used? Sony should be saying it will take years for companies to max out the system and therefore the PS3 will consitently always have the best graphics for years, instead they tell people they are wasting money. Dumb sony.
So not only does it cost 3x as much as the next guy, but I'm not even going to ever use what I'm paying for? Way to go, Sony.
-or-
[some DRM joke]
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I am a programmer at EA and in fact what spiritman77 is saying is actually correct, except he means NVidia instead of ATI and he means cell processors instead of Blueray. But otherwise everything he says is correct. I wouldn't say the PS3 sucks, though.
This is pretty much just a semantics battle. Where sony is trying to make the cell sound more important than it really is. It's impossible to optimize hardware to 100%, you can consider it practically fully optimized, but never truely optimized. Also people tend to think that if the ps3 is only using 50% of it's potential now once they get to 90% games will look/run 2x better which is completely false. I think MS tried something simular because Dead Rising was the only game using multiple cores they were claiming developers were only use 33% of the 360's potential (not sure if it was official MS or just some wanna be techie). Overall it's just best never to listen to anything that ever comes out of Sony's mouth it's likely to be wrong 90% of the time (yes that's an official statistic from the hypothetical statistics department of my brain).
You'd end up with the CPU running idle as you push into swap. :-)
The XBox360 has 3 cores, yet it is widely known that the vast majority of games presently only utilize one of those cores.
I wish the console makers and all the fanboys would all just shut up their mouths. Wouldn't that be nice? Just make machines and people just play games on them and let the best machine win. It seems like the console gaming world is 95% hype, trash-talking, FUD, and blind fanaticism that all has nothing to do with whether or not the gaming is actually good.
Just shut up your mouths you ridiculous peoples!
In today's world the developers design for the least common denominator. In this case the XBOX 360. So you might see one or two graphics tricks, maybe extra shadowing or high dyamic lighting, but all in all they are all going to be the same game. We will see when the XBOX 360 Forza 2 comes out how it compares to the SONY only Gran Turismo HD. My bet is they will be so similar no one will want to spend twice the price for the SONY console.
This is correct, however, it is not automatically a good thing just because they say it meaning it as a good thing. I suspect it's more like the SEGA Saturn was. It has a lot of theoretical power, much of which will never be truly utilized because of too many limitations and complications in writing stuff to properly utilize that power. It doesn't help that they've done stuff like limit the video memory bus and so on. Frankly, this statement should be filed under "reasons to worry" rather than "reasons to be proud."
I remember John Carmack stating that he thought the XBox 360 might have been better off with one dynamically-scheduled CPU than 3 static pipelines.
In a sense, with static pipelines, "the programmer thinks about the machine", and with dynamic pipelines, "the machine thinks about the programmer".
The assumption in gaming has always been that game programmers are more than happy to put in the effort to think about the machine, if the payback is the console ships with higher peak performance. But maybe we're going to see that game programmers are a lot closer to desktop application programmers than we've thought.
So they rate limit the system so it never gets to 100 percent? Or you can claim all the other OS crud is eating up a small percentage.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
"Sony Says Nobody Will Ever Use All the Power of a PS3"
So why did they make it that powerful? They could of made a practical gaming system and charged less for it.
Regardless, we're definitely down to 6 SPEs at this point, which puts it in a similar class to the 360 with 6 hardware threads. I know the two chips are architecturally dissimilar, but in all honesty I have no idea how this would affect the complexity of programming or the yields of the machine.
I do think the shared 512MB of RAM is a better model than the 2x256MB on the PS3. The eDRAM on the GPU provides quick memory access to prevent bottlenecking and the rest can be dynamically shared.
Godless heathen.
console launches are expensive and messy affairs. Sony had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 128-bit era by Sega and their Dreamcast before they pushed out the ps2, and by Microsoft's XBox360 this Generation. After all, software's where the money is.
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Since I still, from time to time, see brand new jaw dropping parts for the c64, I consider the statement true. Noone will ever bother to squeeze the last bit out of the ps3. C= COMMODORE C=
Sony: You will never tap the full potential of the PS3!
Developer: Is that a challenge? *cracks knuckles*
Sony: Cha-ching! We got a new game!
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Never is an awfully long time.
The Wii, like the Gamecube, is a modified G3 so its better for game logic, branchy code, etc.
(Thank you)
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"Sony Says Nobody Will Ever Use All the Power of a PS3"
So... why pay all this money for it???
Yeah, I use the same technique on my young kids.
"I bet you can't clean your rooms..."
"Oh YEAH?!?"
Who knows, maybe software devs will fall for it. I mean, EA got them to work 90 hour weeks at 40 hour pay rates!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Because it will crash and burn long before that day comes. Sony is doing everything they can to ensure that.
It is so powerful it can't even do backwards compatibility right without aliasing everywhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoCD9TwLrVs
If it has so much power they can emulate a PS2 properly. I am doubtful it can deal with that overhead though.
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The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
In Soviet Russia, console uses 100% of YOU!
In a previous interview, Phil stated that he didn't think developers would ever use all the features/capabilities of the PS3.
Video (.wmv) about halfway in.
Indeed. :-)
Program Intellivision!
Soon they'll release their EDS (Emotional Doll System) mobile accessory units, and it'll need every bit of the PS3's capabilities.
/. readers. ;-]
[This shouldn't be an obscure literary reference to at least some
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
So if Sony executive Phil Harrison says you're paying arround $100-300 more for a system that will never be used to its full potential, why on earth would this make you want to buy it?
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Nobody will ever use all the power of a PS3? Great! Guess that means we have no reason to shell out $1200 for a PS4 in 5 years!
Since we high wizards need you little slackers to start pulling some weight, I will throw you all a rope. If you all begin to inform yourselves we will all get better games, and then all technology will benefit from the developments. So, if you don't do this homework, you forfeit any right to complain about anything that sucks in your life because you declined to avail yourself of the best opportunities to effect a remedy yourself.
Please let me spoon feed you the standing end of the tasty noodle of computer science which the FSM has graciously extended: Amdahl's Law. Since the Cell processor's design depends upon parallel processing in order to achieve its ideal performance, it is subject to the basic limitations of parallel processing. The weakness of the PS3 lies in the inability of people like you (and indeed people much better than you, myself included) to envision games as an embarrassingly parallel problem. Rendering vertexes in a shader algorithm should be such a problem. The new thing in games, according to the video card vendors is physics acceleration. There are plenty of people who can encode Newtonian physics as embarrassingly parallel problems, but they get much better hardware than a PS3 with which to play.
So, the weakness of Sony is their inability to get the Cell processor rolled out into the scientific community ala: "Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!" IBM can, but I don't think they want a free flow of ideas to commodify their precious expertise. They get serious premium dollars for programming that stuff. That's where the Linux community is supposed to come in. So GET CRACKING you lazy schmuck! I don't care if your brain hurts! You'll take it and like it!
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
We still haven't even used the full capability of a 300mhz processor and 32mb video card. The bottleneck is not hardware, it's software. Inefficient code, outdated methodologies, and improper application of libraries is a much greater bottleneck than the hardware in any system.
More cycles and more memory doesn't mean that developers are capable of using better graphics and logic, it means they can be lazier in their optimization. Games which take up 5gb of hard drive space do so because they can, not because they must. Developers know the user has 100+ gigabytes available on their hard drive, so no further optimization is necessary. They know that the video card has 256mb or more memory, so they don't optimize the game anymore than they need to. We only need 3ghz processors because developers can throw away as many cycles as they want. On a needs basis, the actual logic and graphics of the most powerful game available probably would require a 300mhz processor and 32mb of video memory. All the rest is a buffer for waste.
This isn't a sleight against coders, I'm a professional developer too. I've seen a lot of applications that could be optimized further but other tasks are much higher up the priority tree because even though the program could be more efficient, it doesn't need to be.
LISP
Seriously, if an AI programmer can't write AI on a vector computer, then they are just a regular programmer posing as an AI programmer.
Not that I am saying all AI algorithms are easily vectorizable.
It must be true. No one will EVER use all the power of the PS3 because it's built in the 4th dimension. It is just soooooo powerful and super computer like. The fact that all the games just look like a PC or XBox 360 is because No one can fully harness the power of the PS3 but its still worth having because you get that amazing feeling each time you look at your box and say to yourself three times No one will ever use all the power of PS3. WOW!
Since my current machine is 3.8 GHz with 4GB of RAM and I was maxxing it out within 1 week (trying to do Shor's algorithm on it), I think he is making an idiot mistake. Of course, no one would EVER try to do the RSA Challenge on it ;)
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
I'll never use 100% of the PS3's CPU power. I'm boycotting SONY and will never use ANY of the CPU's power.
He's right.
Let's just put the word 'Sony' aside, for ONE second.
Okay. I saw one of these things in a Fry's Electronics store. After seeing the $1200 price tag, I'm sure I will never use all the power of a PS3. Or even a little bit of it.
If you don't know how to write code to utilize all of the CPUs, then, well, you can't utilize all of the CPUs. The number of people who know how to write good parallelized code are few and far between. MIT is even teaching a course on how to program the PS3: http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/.
I guess I could use 100% of the Cell processor in PS3 with Quake 4: Raytraced and would wish I got an even more powerful CPU.
Presented for your amusement: the observation that each and every thing *has* minor details, which is what said pedant would be pedantic about - not the things themselves. To be pedantic about everything is, again, by definition being concerned explicitly only by the minor details themselves. We won't go into the murky and very non-objective waters of whose standards apply for defining what a minor detail is, neh?
- does a love of pedantics make one a pedantophile? -