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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.'"
Good point, except this time the guy is actually on record as saying it. Bill Gates never said that infamous quote that is often attributed to him.
Nice work Anonymous Coward, two small problems. You've obviously never heard of the "dual layer DVD", something which has been in common use for a very long time. It has 8.5GB storage capacity. You've also obviously managed to avoid every single article, of the hundreds out there, which all point out 1 thing. The cell does not have 8 cores. It has 1 core and 7 SPEs. The Xbox 360 on the other hand has 3 cores. I take it you're looking forward to your "real time rendered, Toy-story quality graphics" on your PS3 just like you were when the PS2 came out? Get off my internet.
Consoles are never that impressive, when compared to actual computers...Computers are general purpose tools, and their architecture reflects this.
Console systems, on the other hand, are engineered for a very tight, very specific, set of tasks. This is why a console with comparatively crappy stats can walk all over a much beefier computer, and vice versa.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The PS2-PS3 generation was six years (Oct 2000 - Nov 2006). If you count the Dreamcast, the last-gen started in Sept 99 and ended in Nov 05 with the 360 - still six years. The NES came out in October of 85, the SNES in August of 91 - less than six years. The N64 came out Sep 96, the Game Cube in Nov. 01 - a little over five years, and five years again until the Wii. The console generations are as long as they've ever been. There's more games available for the PS and PS2 than any other console. And if you're wary about buying crappy accessories, those have always been around. ROB the Robot, Super Scope Six, The SNES mouse, the N64 and Dreamcast Microphones (at least they came with the game), the Dreamcast's fishing controller, DDR mats, Guitar Hero, etc. Nothing is different, except now with the Wii game developers will move gimmick development over to the system that has all those capabilities built in so less money is wasted on 1-game peripherals.
How the parent got modded so high is baffling. Ubisoft has NEVER said the AI in the 360 will be more intelligent than the PS3. Jade Raymond said that the XBox360 has "improved threading" during X06, but no where did she say what it was compared to. It was clearly FUD that Microsoft got Ubisoft to spread.
And how such a false statement of saying the PS3 will be limited to 256MB of video RAM has been modded as Interesting on Slashdot is absurd. Look at the top level diagram. The RSX can access an additional 256MB of XDR through the Cell. The RSX was designed to work with the Cell, that is why it is different than the conventional console hardware setup.
It's hype all over again, for sure. Every company does it, but it looks like you are being lead into believing the Microsoft FUD-hype instead.
4K of memory? Luxury! The Atari 2600 had only 128 bytes of memory! You're thinking of the 4K of ROM in the cartridge.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Probably because you are stupid. The specs have been out for a nearly a year now. The 360 has the exact same IBM powerpc core processor, just 3x as many of them as the PS3. The vector units are too brain dead for AI and have to be chained together to use their full potential, so basically you have a quick matrix transform, vs 3x as much cpu power, and a video card 1.5x as powerful.
I'm not a fanboy, I am a game graphics programmer. (but yes perhaps I am a little irritated over the difficulty level as well)
Regards,
----- 70% of all statistics are completely made up.
That's amazing really. I agree with your sentiment, but it's amazing how you went from using the release of a console from one manufacturer to the release of a console from a different manufacturer then compared that timeframe to the release times of consoles from the same manufacturer.
Dreamcast doesn't count here because they will never have a next generation console. Playstation 1 came out in September of 95 (in America) and the Playstation 2 came out in October of 2000 (also in America). That's only 5 years. The Playstation 3 came out in November 2006 so that's 6 years. So yeah, judging by Sony's consoles, the generations are getting longer.
But Microsoft shows another story. The Xbox was released in November of 2001 while the Xbox360 was released Novemer 2005 so there's only 4 years there.
The NES came out in October of 85 (in America), the SNES in August of 91, nearly 6 years later. The N64 was released in September 96, 5 years after the SNES. The Gamecube was released 5 years later in November of 2001, and the Wii was released 5 years after that in November of 2006.
Looks to me that of the major players right now 5 years seems to be a fairly average number with Microsoft barely reaching 4 years and both Nintendo and Sony having a 6 year period in there somewhere.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Wow, school time!
The 360 does not have a "2 core cell' it has a 3 core PowerPC.
The PS3's Has 1 core and 7 SPE's, 1 SPE is reserved for the OS, and Sony tells developeres to only use 5 of the remaining 6.
The 360 has more *useable* RAM than the PS3 and from what iv'e read also has a superior GPU.
As far as disc space, 360 games are on dual-layer DVD which is 8.5GB, not 4.7GB. And as long as games like 'Gears of War' and 'Elder Scrolls IV' are fitting on a single disc the Blu-Ray argument holds no water. And worse case scenario...2 disc game! Oh n0's!
Sony has convinced you that you *need* blu-ray..and it's just not true.
Did I mention the 360 can be between $100 and $300 cheaper than a PS3 (depending on configurations for both)? And that it has games out, like, right now? And that you can go into a store and buy one no problem right now?
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
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%.
Well, it seems like it'd be more a bottleneck for the PS3 and Xbox360 than for a lot of machines. I look at the CPU-speed/GPU-speed to RAM ratio on most desktops, and 512MB is just enough for the GPU, with another 1GB to 2GB sitting out there for the CPU. When compared to 3 x 3.2GHz PPC (Xbox360) or 3.2GHz PPC + 8 SPEs (PS3's Cell Broadband Engine), even a current AMD 4x4 system (4 Althon 64s) or a Core 2 Duo system has a run for its money in processing performance. So the ratio of compute to memory is quite a bit off compared to desktop boxes. Granted, the PS3 and Xobx360 don't have all the other miscellany running in the background that a desktop has, but is it really that big of a difference?
Granted, consoles have traditionally gotten by with much less RAM than their desktop counterparts. This was especially true in the cartridge days, where the entire game image lived in ROM, but it seems like it should be less so in the era of optical-media based devices.
About the only way I can see using up all those MIPS is to enable advanced physics and simulation in the game, and enable extra rendering passes to spiffy-up the images. Now that we have a larger deployment of HD-capable displays, spending the MIPS on rendering I guess makes sense. But where are you going to put all the additional textures and data required if you don't have enough RAM? You certainly aren't going to aggressively page it from optical media.
Unless a game specifically targets a console and doesn't bother targeting a desktop in tandem, I can't see the developer getting too excited about developing advanced engines that soak the console CPUs with physics/simulation and coding a cut-down version that keeps up on the desktop. That'd make the game behave noticeably differently on the two platforms. So, we're left with graphics enhancements which only change the quality of the visible output of the game, not the gameplay itself. So, until the desktop platforms get into the same raw-compute territory as the consoles, it's very easy to imagine many of those console MIPS will be left on the table or just spent on polishing the graphics output.
Now to those of you who say "It isn't pushed to its limits unless you're always using 100% of the CPU." Pshaw. I would say a system is pushed to its limits when no one thing is the sole bottleneck all the time, the overall playability of the game doesn't suffer for it, and increasing the depth of any given element would cause the game to lag or misbehave in such a way that playability or enjoyability does suffer. The notion that you have to use every byte of RAM, fill every sector of the disc and use every issue slot on every cycle of the CPU to say you're at 100% is a silly one. It might've made sense when games were measured in kilobytes, RAM was measured in bytes and CPU was measured in kHz or MHz, but not in the modern era.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
As far as optimizing for the memory system using prefetches and streamed processing et al., that's the future of performance coding. There's no avoiding these techniques as the gap between memory speed and processor speed looks destined to only get worse. It's a space in which the compiler really can't do much to help you; your algorithm design has to take into account how much slower memory is than compute, and either be able to set up its data transfers long in advance (as in streaming computation), or have something else to do while it waits (as in context switching).