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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...
There's not going to be that many games coming out?
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?
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 think he meant "Nobody will use all the power to improve the storyline..."
of course it's also presented as -different- bad news, if you think about it. It means they could have made it less powerful, cheaper, and easier to program for and there wouldn't be a difference because nobody will ever use the extra power
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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
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Or there is another reason, far less flamebait than my GP post: since the PS3 and the 360 are somehow similar, game developpers will be tempted to build their games on the common ground between those tho systems, therefore, even with a superior PS3, the game will be exactly as it is on the 360.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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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.
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You'd end up with the CPU running idle as you push into swap. :-)