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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?
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.
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
I think he meant "Nobody will use all the power to improve the storyline..."
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'
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.
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
I for one welcome our new, vastly inefficient, overpriced, Linux-running overlords.
(Sorry. I couldn't help it.)
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.
Yes and no. The PS3 does use a new architecture, but there is literally a PS2 emotion engine chip in every PS3 to "emulate" PS2 functionality. I'm not sure we can really call it emulation when it's the original chip just doing the same thing it did before.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Sony will never use the full spin power that their marketting department is capable of.
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%.
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!
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.
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 think I should point out that the Atari Jaguar had at least that many titles in their "under development" list at one point. We see how many of those got released...
Just because there's a list of upcoming games doesn't mean that they're all going to be released.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I seriously hope you work for Sony if you're spending this much effort promoting the console online.
[PS3 Hardware Summary]
Unlike the fellow above, I actually hope Sony is not paying you, because I would hope they'd get more for their money than a list of "Untitled" exclusives...
Just use Java or .NET on it.
Or perhaps the PS3 utilizes a stupid design considering that developers have repeatedly shunned the most complex console.
Even in the 16 bit days a lot of developers went with the genesis rather than the SNES even though the SNES had greater capabilities because the genesis had more CPU and it was simply easier to develop games for it.
In the 32 bit era the Saturn was basically ignored by everyone because it was a nightmare to code for, meanwhile the PS1 came out. It had roughly half the raw CPU power of the Saturn (The Saturn has two Hitachi SH-2 processors, while the PS1 has one MIPS R3000 at about the same clock rate - SH-2 and R3000 are both pretty pathetic 32-bit RISC designs, although many people will hate on me for saying that about the R3000.) The PS1 however made it EASIER to do a lot of things - you only had to focus on one CPU and they did transparency in hardware. You can't use their graphics chip for general purpose computation though. The Saturn is more powerful and you CAN do transparency but you have to do it in software using the second CPU (in order to do the rendering in a timely fashion) and that is hard. So again the more powerful platform is neglected.
Those who would use Dreamcast as a counterexample should note that it died more because of Sony marketing than because of anything else. Developers abandoned it and waited for PS2, which turned out to have specs about an order of magnitude less powerful than announced.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How can a game be "in development" if the developer is still TBD?
The correct answer is:
C) The Cell is a poor general purpose processor.
If you're at all familiar with the fundamentals of CPU design, it should be blindingly obvious that the Cell should be very good at handling streaming vector data, but relatively poor at more general purpose calculations.
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%.
Base Pi? You're not being rational.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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).
And that you can go into a store and buy one no problem right now?
:)
The biggest unreported story of this console generation is that you can, more and more, "go into a store and buy a PS3 no problem right now".
I've been offered 3 this past week alone when asking for a Wii. Yes, I do far too much xmas shopping
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Actually the upcoming Blue Dragon on the Xbox 360 comes
on 3 DVDs. Which IMO actually suggests the inadequecies of
the DVD-DL format..
The fact that a 3 DVD game has already been released should
be a suggestion of things to come.
I wonder if we'll see games spanning 5 to 8 DVDs nearer to the
end of the lifespan of the 360, or whether they'll start
offering the 8 DVDs or 2 HD-DVDs option later down the road.
Personally I think its a pain in the ass to keep 3 disks
in pristine condition and/or swap them in and out.
Then again, its not like I'm planning to buy one of these "next gen"
consoles in the near future.
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.
Good lord, attack of the fanboys! ACK! Get them off of me! They're spouting too much usless information I don't want to know!!! AAAAAUUUUUGGHHHH!!
"Sony has convinced you that you *need* blu-ray..and it's just not true."
:-)
That depends... I actually bought a PS3 almost solely for watching Blu-Ray movies. If you look around, the 20G PS3 is actually the best high definition DVD player for the money. It's even cheaper than standalone players that won't do a fraction of what the PS3 can do. I know the 360 has an add-on but the lack of HDMI output was a deal-breaker for me. For someone who doesn't need/want HDMI then the 360 + add-on is also a very attractive option.
Now I just need to sit tight and hope Sony's format wins...
You'd end up with the CPU running idle as you push into swap. :-)
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.