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Intel To Design PlayStation 4 GPU
madhatter256 writes "According to the Inquirer it looks like Intel will be designing Sony's next gen console GPU. It will most likely be an off-shoot of the Larrabee GPU architecture. It is also unknown as of yet if Intel will also take part in the CPU design of the console. Due to current economic times it was a no brainer for Sony to go with Intel. " The article also mentions rumors of ATI getting the Xbox3 GPU and, if history is any judge, the Wii2 as well.
>> Wii2
Sheesh - The proper term is WiiAlso.
that should be Playstation 3.99967873 :P
are these confirmed names or assumed names?
The PC Gaming killer will be all Intel's doing.
Seriously - about the only thing intel graphics offers is raytracing. Their graphics chipsets are notoriously subpar, even the very best of them. Why would sony send it their way? ATI makes sense for the Wii2 since they've been working with the gamecube platform since its inception... but intel? Can someone clear this up? Do they have some magically awesome chipset that has never graced the consumer market?
I know Slashdot isn't known for its high standards of editorial oversight, but do you really have to waste our time parroting Inquirer bullshit?
Note that the only media source claiming that Intel is designing the PS4 GPU is The Inquirer, which is wrong more often than they're right. And Sony has explicitly denied the rumors.
Intel might end up designing the PS4 GPU, who knows. This story doesn't give us any more information than we had before either way, and the headline is certainly wrong in concluding otherwise.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Nothing like a long-winded op-ed article passing for "news" to make my friday a little gloomier. Ah well, at least the DOW is up.
Remember that Intel has been willing to open its drivers and specifications. Any improvements they make to their graphics core (which, yes, is in need of improvement) will probably make their way to motherboard and laptop chipsets, and will have nice Open Source Linux drivers made for them. So, this is a good thing.
Bruce Perens.
They must have seriously low-balled NVidia. NVidia has the better tech. Intel is traveling into unknown territory here, and Sony is risking its reputation on the lowest bidder. Playstation 3 already is a so-what console due to its bizarre architecture. I personally love it, but I know why people have shied away from it. Sony can't afford another mediocre offering...and they are taking an awfully big risk with Intel.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
So after all the smack talking that Sony did about the power of Cell being untapped....they've decided to abandon it for the their next console? But if you listen to Sony, PS3 is a "10 year platform" anyways. This means that we wouldn't see the PS4 until at least 5-6 years from now. There is no telling what kind of processors would be available during that time frame. Do we really know if Larrabee would still be available by then? I think it's still way to early for Sony to start talking about specs for the PS4. Some people are bound to stop buying PS3s because it would just mean that the PS4 is right around the corner, and Sony knows this. They really can't afford to halt sales of the PS3 at their current selling rate.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
"Due to current economic times it was a no brainer for Sony to go with Intel"
I'm no rocket scientist, but I fail to see how choosing Intel to create a brand new GPU with their fledgling GPU experiences is possibly the best course of action if a company wants to reduce risk. I guess by "no brainer" they mean a decision that uses "no brains"
For what it's worth, on the merits this is also unlikely to be a genuine leak, even if we ignore it being from the Inquirer. They claim that they got this scoop from a "nice Sony engineering lady at CES". It's unlikely that a random Sony representative at CES would even be privy to such information, or it would've leaked by now. These sorts of decisions are generally kept pretty close to the chest, and don't leak very early unless someone fucks up. (When they do leak, it can lead to SEC investigations.)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
if history is any judge
WTF? History isn't a judge. Sometimes it's a guide, but it isn't a judge. It's a bunch of stuff that already happened. How could it judge you?
"Due to current economic times it was a no brainer for Sony to go with Intel."
This makes no sense to me. Presumably they are implying that Intel is more likely to be around since they're a larger company that is doing better than AMD/ATI. I think they'll remain around, but even if they don't, where do you think Nvidia is going? Intel is currently not even competing when it comes to mid/high-range graphics. Do they see that market disappearing (hence the failure of Nvidia) at the EXACT same time Larrabee becomes more than just buzz? Dream on.
People still think we are going to have a Wii2, Playstation4, and Xbox720 in our post apocalyptic nightmare landscape? (Hey, I admire the optimism!)
Well, maybe Tenpenny will, since he always has the best of everything.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
It'll be interesting to see what the new consoles come up with (I have a hunch it'll entail more hard drive space, better graphics and processors) If the console makers actually use full keyboard and mouse support for their new consoles they could do a lot of damage to the pc gaming market. I mean A LOT. Really, I mean it.
I have nothing compelling to say
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Gotta post AC, as I'm on too many NDAs :-(
One distinct advantage Larrabee brings to the console is that it can be GPU and CPU -- they could make a 2 chip console -- Larrabee on one, and IO on the other. That would keep costs under control. They would probably use Larrabee chips where 1 to 4 cores are failing tests -- the console version would advertise 28 cores then. They'd probably also under clock it a bit to keep it cooler.
It would give them huge economies of scale, and get people to write software for it. And it will likely be competitive (at least in raw number crunching/bandwidth) to NVDA or ATI offerings at the same time. The devil is hiding in the details of their software stack. But they do have some good guys working on that. Abrash, for one.
-- A.C.
From the article:
How Sony inadvertently helped a competitor and lost position in the videogame market.
Read here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123069467545545011.html
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
"...also take part in the CPU design of the console"
Wait... Why did Sony spend all that time, money and research on making their assumed super-scaling, awesomely powerful cell processor, if they're thinking of recreating a new CPU for their next console? Am I missing something there?
Problem is that console producers must already have at least broad idea what will next gen look like. We can assume in 5 years from now not only Intel, but also AMD and nVidia will have ray tracing cards. But Sony needs something *right now* that they can build their HW and SW around. Intel is currently only one with not only idea how to make ray tracing hw/sw engine but also working prototypes of Larabee they can provide to Sony soon. They might go with 2-chip solution: Larabee for graphics + normal 4-way Intel CPU for everything else. I would really like to see game engines moving to Java because with ray tracing there is really no need to stick with C/C++ any more. All general routines (AI, scripting, camera movements) are easy to do in Java and CPU doesn't care for graphics - you send whole scene to GPU for rendering, shadows and all is done in GPU. Also, Java is much more pleasant for doing multithreaded stuff.
839*929
No, and not true.
NVidia has tried tech, but it may not be better then:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(GPU)
Intel understands Chips very well, and that includes GPUs.
There are two places they could fail.
1) They don't fully utilize Larrabee abilities in the drivers..unlikely.
2) They get eaten alive by the Graphics marketing.
another possibility is that it gets pulled due to economic downturn. I consider that highly unlike due to where they are at in development, and there momentum.
The Cell architecture isn't catching on among developers in the game industry. Odd, really. OTOH, most of them are hacks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Larrabee is just a bunch of gross x86 cores (maybe it's one of those grids). I'm sick of looking at gross stack traces where the instruction pointer can be all over the place.
Also, didn't Intel abandon the one chipset hardware RNG they had? Even Via has one now. The singularity can't come soon enough.
PS4? The PS3 is barely beginning to become competitive and live up to its name. It has 5 more years of life. At least, 5 more years before I will drop another $800 to replace it! Sony needs to shut the fucking hell up about the NEXT system, and focus on the current system, or they will lose their remaining customers!
Gee, over the past few years the news has been all about how doing a GPU for a console not only lost you money, but also pulled resources away from the profitable PC market, and the last few exchanges between ATI and nVidia holding first place in that market have been attributed to this.
Intel needs any kind of GPU win, badly, and they're big enough and rich enough they can afford to lose money on each chip and make it up on volume.
It's Sony I worry about, given how utterly appalling Intel GPUs have traditionally been.
So I gotta wonder, why do you think nVidia is worried about this?
I want Intel to get more experience designing GPUs that are competitive with nVidia and ATi. I want Intel to start offering PCIe graphics cards. Why?
Because Intel is committed to releasing open-source drivers. I want to support any company that does this, and currently if I'm in the market for a graphics card, I don't have the option at the moment.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Intel can make a graphics chipset. They have the capital to do it, and the equipment. The best nVidia CPU uses a 65nm process. Intel already has a ton of 45nm out there and has successfully tests 35nm. They just don't want to pay for the R&D to do it. Blowing a ton of dough to build a graphics chip just not that big enough of a market for them, at least until Sony came along.
Now, they will partner with Sony, get extensive experience in graphics, and can leverage their own extensive design experience, fabs, and own rather good CPU offerings. It's really a super deal for Intel, although it is a sad day for Sony, which now out-sources something that they for a long time took great pride in building.
If Intel takes this new technology they come up with, and puts it into PCs, then yeah, nVidia is doomed.
This is my sig.
It's kind of weird to take Larrabee as evidence of Intel having successfully produced a GPU, since they still haven't produced it, despite years of hype. It might turn out to be as excellent as they claim. It might turn out to be as excellent as revolutionary as their last revolutionary new architecture, Itanium.
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Just a guess. But it looks like backward compatibility just got hosed if they go to all Intel. There was such a gap in power that the PS3 was able to emulate the PS2 games on a completely different arch. I'm guessing that emulating the Cell Broadband Processor will be much harder if possible at all on Larrabee. This might be the final nail in Sony's coffin after recently having a 95% drop in profits. I have a PS3, and a 60" Sony SXRD display but damn do I hate Sony. It is interesting that they went with Larrabee for a GPU which is very similar to the CBE in the first place. Having both would be silly. They could have 2 CBE's or 2 Larrabee's.
Intel is going design their GPU... that's nice. I suppose they're aiming to find a way to waste more money and bomb harder than the PS3... if Sony can outdo themselves this time, they'll never have to make another console again!
A quick history of PS3 development. Sony, in all its genius, decides to build a "new, revolutionary!" hardware architecture that's obviously going to be very cheap, very powerful, and will put everyone else to shame.
Cue 2005 and they realize their costly new architecture isn't nearly as powerful as they thought and Microsoft is going to beat them to release. In desperation they contact Nvidia to cook up an actual GPU and throw it into the mix. This results in a poor developer SDK, a late 2006 release, and massive production costs.
Now here we are in 2009 with MS already hinting at the next Xbox and Nintendo no doubt cooking up something as well. Sony, with 95% reduction in profits and the PS3 still a financial failure says to itself "I know, lets try an unproven, supposedly revolutionary new hardware architecture!"
Odds of Sony going the way of Sega: Increased from 1 in 50 to 1 in 30. Betting taking place via stock and Las Vegas. Place your bets now folks!
Glad to see Sony continues to make bad decisions.
...even cares what the Inquirer even post?
They have been known to make up crap all the time for hits.
Hell, you could say that about most blogs to be honest, but theirs are the worst and most "out there" of them all.
I'm expecting to see the PS4 come out at least 3 years after the Xbox3. For one thing, the PS3 has technical advantages over the 360 which should give it more legs. Sony designed the PS3 with a target of a ten year lifespan.
Also, Sony is really stinging from the cost of trying to compete with a same-generation Xbox. They should be able to hit a sweet spot by spacing their machine a half a generation away. When the Xbox3 is released, Sony can drop their PS3 prices to very low levels, and capture the large, budget-minded segment of the market. After 3 years, once the Xbox3's newness has worn off, Sony can release a system which is technically unmatched, and which Microsoft won't be able to respond to for another 2-3 years.
Anyway, that's what I'd do if I ran Sony. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I thought PS3 was supposed to be a "10 year" console...
I really hope they aren't already working on the PS4, wasting money in this economic client on R&D of this nature almost seems brutally wasteful.
"Due to current economic times it was a no brainer for Sony to go with Intel. "
Um AMD out-performs Intel on Floating Point Mathematics at a QUARTER of the price.
I swear this fucking country is insane. (Almost forgot the 'o')
Cell is weird and hard to program. Larrabee is x86.
No sig today...
I didn't think Sony was still gonna be around for PS4... XD
My guess is that the PS4 will be released about the time the PS3 can be sold for around $150. I would say that would put it out around 2012. "If" the competitors release early they may follow suite, but I doubt that will happen.
I would guess it would have the following:
New Cell chip made by Intel. I can't see Sony switching to X86-64, but if they did then that would be great for running Linux on it. I still see a better/faster cell chip. Probably a chip with double the amount of SPE's.
New graphics chip made by... Intel. This will probably suck, but hopefully Intel can make a good chip/card by then. If you are a Sony fan then you can pray that this card actually has enough RAM to do cool stuff. Sony is notorious for killing graphics RAM and I hope they have learned from their mistake. Hopefully this system will have more system RAM as well. My guess is that it will have 512MB of main memory and the same for graphics memory. If we are lucky we could see 1GB of main memory, but I doubt it.
It will have a BlueRay player, probably one that runs at 4 or 8X. It will be the 200GB Discs (Yes the current PS3 can do it, but it will be fully supported in this version). The cost will be dirt cheap by then and the loading times of a BR drive at 4X or 8X would be very nice.
New controls. Sony will release a controller that can be broken apart in to two, with motion sensing AND a microphone built in. They will still be Bluetooth connected.
So in short it will be a supped up PS3 that can do very good 1080P graphics. It will be 100% backward compatible because the architecture didn't change much, and the cost should be in line. It will start with a price tag first and technology second. You won't see another $600 console for a LONG LONG time from Sony. My guess is that they will flat line the cost of the box to around $300-$400 to make, and thus it won't be a HUGE increase over what the PS3 does now.
Now "if" they go X86-64 instead of Cell, then I could see this thing shipping with a Linux OS by default.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
No, not the article.
The editor.
First off, Sony denied this already -- yesterday . So this isn't news, and it's already-rejected news.
Secondly, what kind of idiot links to the Inquirer as a source? Remember, they're the ones who posted the article claiming the PS3 was "slow and broken" because they didn't understand a memory bandwidth chart.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
PS4?
I thought that I read a Sony CEO saying some where that the PS3 was future proof and the 360 is just transitional?
Forward to today and oops.......
When your workforce is faced with a lower sales volume, you either lay them off or invest for the rebound. If your R&D workforce was invested in short-term, incremental projects (accessories, product shrinks, etc), and your projections for market opportunity appear to be poor regardless of what you might do, it may make sense to start on long-term projects. Sure , you have some trying to do cost-savings to salvage margin on what you do sell or to reduce price to consumer, but it seems Sony's ability to pull that off is limited, and as such that only warrants a small investment.
That said, Sony is not an example of a company with the financial health to think that way, and as such layoffs are an unfortunately more plausible path.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
COOL! Anything that screws g.d. nvidia!!
If it weren't for the fact that this announcement has been denied, I'd almost be willing to believe it. Sony now has a history of going for bizarre architectures in the hope that they will be revolutionary, but in the end require far more work from the developer, and eventually after several years of optimization end up with only slightly better performance than the other consoles.
I mean this is coming from the same company that claimed the PS3 will not have a GPU because the Cell processors will do everything, only to go crying to Nvidia at the last minute when that didn't work out. Now we have Intel here claiming to have an architecture (Larrabee) that does exactly what Sony wanted Cell to be to begin with. I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't learned their lesson yet.
the fact that it is x86 don't magically make it easy to code for respectively it is not the fact the the cell have a weird asm that make it hard...
the problem here is that programing a moderately parallel efficiently chip is fucking hard. I don't see how Larrabee will be any easier than the cell if you program it directly
I don't think that's called ars taking the argument seriously.
Maybe not treating it as complete bag-of-wind, but still not taking it seriously.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Anonymous shill.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Remember when Steve Jobs said that Macs were switching to Intel? Everyone thought, hey that's the stupidest thing we've ever heard, everyone knows that AMD has had the CPU performance crown for many years and Intel's lost their way by trying to push the P4 architecture. What Jobs was shown secretly that was not known to the general public was that Intel was way ahead of schedule on its next generation architecture (Core2) and process (.45nm) and there was no way AMD would be able to compete for at least a couple of generations.
Now, sure Intel is not known for their graphics prowess, but it's not like they are http://www.notebookjournal.de/praxis/exclusive--intel-centrino-2-performance-test-79/3 *that* far behind Nvidia and ATI anymore. Percentage-wise, Intel's performance improvement going from the X3x00 to the X4x00 generation was much higher than either of what ATI or Nvidia have been achieving lately -- mobile or otherwise.
Don't be too surprised if they aren't a couple years away from taking on the elite GPU competition head on.
Isn't the article. It's the discussion. There's lots of bright minds here. This is why most people don't read TFA.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Never before have I had the opportunity to get so much karma for saying so little. I'm going to savor the moment for a bit, ok?
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You're retarded.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
if you program it directly
That's why they pay the library programmers good bucks. So they'll put down their WOW raids for a little while and spew the good libraries that abstract stuff like this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Bruce is not a personal friend, I do not belong to the cult of observers of famous people, ergo, I don't bother tracking his /. user id. And I do remember a sock puppet imitating his name with a fairly low id, low enough to surprise me enough that I remember. So I don't necessarily trust that that was Bruce.
Doesn't make any difference, drinking the kool-aid a big corporation's sales staff puts out is still drinking the kool-aid, whether in public or private. intel is still doing enough evil things that we shouldn't give them any slack for trying to sell us on x86 clusters-on-a-chip.
Arm-clusters-on-a-chip might be reasonable. Even Power3 or mcore clusters-on-a-chip would be interesting.
But, x86?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Some of us think PCI, USB, and SATA are more of a testament to intel's very stubborn NIMBY than evidence of some dedication to openness.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Lets see, we got three players. The convicted monopolist Microsoft who pushes DRM onto the PC if only they could get people to use it. Constantly changes format and is constantly in a split about wether the PC can be for gaming or not. They LOVE DRM and would dearly love to push trusted computing down our troath.
Nintendo absolutly HATES drm. That is why they switched to CD's the moment that tech became superior to catridges and don't constantly change the physical interface to their handhelds. Oops.
Sony, as you said, has an open console, standard formats, open browser. But OOPS, they got BlueRay (which competes against DRM laden HD-DVD and of course DVD and of course VHS (Yes kiddies, ALL these formats have DRM, that we managed to work around them so you no longer notice doesn't count)) and that embarrising rootkit (which by the way was possible thanks to the way MS wrote their OS).
It seems clear that ALL three are pretty nasty when it comes to DRM but for some reason Sony is getting all the blame for it. Choosing the better console maker is like choosing between which guy beating you up isn't aiming for your nuts.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
First hardware will come with a sticker saying XBox 3 Capable. After they sell millions of these, new hardware will arrive that can run the new firmware with the desirable GUI. This new hardware will be marked Xbox Premium Ready. Millions of users will feel ripped off having paid for the first wave of Xbox 3 hardware, but it won't matter. Microsoft has learned from history and this is the new MO for them.
The 360 chip is based around the already existing PowerPC core, and does not have SPUs that make the Cell unique.
Well I think that pretty much rules out that Sony and Intel will ever work on anything together, ever again. I'd be really disappointed if Sony picked up Intel though because I love Intel but I also love the 360.
Intel can't do GPUs. Every time they've tried (and at the time they claim it is going to be great) and every time they've failed miserable, leaving people with clunky, slow, hot, cumbersome graphics with terrible drivers, often taking years to enable hardware features like vertex shading.
Larrabee *could* be better. At only 2TFLOPS however it seems unlikely that it will be beating anything NVIDIA or ATI offer (4870 X2 = 2.4TFLOPS today). Also power consumption is rumoured to be very high, and die size massive, leading to very expensive cards. Certainly not suitable for a console. I'm sure Sony will end up using some NVIDIA GT400 series GPU.