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IBM's Plans For the Cell Processor
angry tapir writes "Development around the original Cell processor hasn't stalled, and IBM will continue to develop chips and supply hardware for future gaming consoles, a company executive said. IBM is working with gaming machine vendors including Nintendo and Sony, said Jai Menon, CTO of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, during an interview Thursday. 'We want to stay in the business, we intend to stay in the business,' he said. IBM confirmed in a statement that it continues to manufacture the Cell processor for use by Sony in its PlayStation 3. IBM also will continue to invest in Cell as part of its hybrid and multicore chip strategy, Menon said."
We're going to continue working.
What business would want to give up guaranteed sales? I mean, a gaming platform is like walking into a bank, depositing one cent and then getting a cent every second until the bank closes.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Bring on a 12 core PS4 with raytracing games.
So what? This deserves a post?
Why not tell us that Intel is going to continue to make chips too?
I wish I could buy a consumer-priced system with one of these CPUs. A very interesting system to develop for. After all, we all are going to use some kind of system with the separate memory model, more like this, when we will come to the end of scalability of the currently dominating multicore CPU with common memory space.
I hope that PS4 (or other console using it) will be linux-friendly as PS3 was until Sony blew it. Alas, however slim this chance is, there seem to be no better chance.
game over more cores with less heat.
Great, but where is the software expert side going to come from?
It seems to take years for any 3rd party to work out how to optimise "anything" HD for the systems.
With a push for more cores how about a push for more developer support vs "cloud-based" and p2p servers.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
also
Can anyone explain this to me, is there anything significant to Cell processors? Or is it a new (or old [I tend to miss these things]) buzz word or technology? Is it an IBM branding ? Is it a new type of processor that works by decoding DNA ?
I read the article, and all I read was a bunch of words with very little meaning.
Power is the architecture for IBM's CPUs. Hence PowerPC, POWER5, etc. It's more of a family of chips than a particular ISA or core design.
A "Road Map" is a published plan for product releases, usually with only general features and dates described in quarters. It's mostly marketing, and only slightly better than vaporware.
The future is the time that follows the present.
The basic problem with the Cell processor is that it has 256KB (not MB, KB) per processor, plus a bulk transfer mechanism to main memory. Given that model, it has to be programmed like a DSP - very little state, processing works on data streams. For games, this sucks. No CPU has enough memory for a full frame, or for the geometry, or a level map. Trying to hammer programs into that model is painful. (Except for audio. It's great for audio.) In many PS3 games, the main MIPS machine is doing most of the work, with the Cell CPUs handling audio, networking, and I/O. And, of course, Sony had to put an NVidia graphics processor in the thing late in the development cycle, once people finally realized that the Cell CPUs couldn't handle the rendering.
But if each Cell CPU had, say, 16MB, the Cell machines could be treated more like a cluster. Programming for clusters is well understood, and not too tough.
It's probably too late, though. Multi-core shared memory cache-consistent machines are now too good. It's not necessary to use an architecture as painful as the Cell. It's probably destined for the graveyard of weird architectures, along with data flow machines, hypercubes, SIMD machines, systolic processors, semi-shared-memory multiprocessors, and similar hardware that's straightforward to build but tough to program.
I would not want to be betting against IBM for this marketspace. Their cell chip, which is an asymmetric multi-core CPU architecture, seemed bizarre when announced, but has proven to be quite good for these workloads. If IBM is looking to leverage their regular POWER chipset for the console market, they will probably build some screamers with them. Cell and POWER both have Unix and Linux adaptations running on them, so having the capability seems trivial. Whether vendors will want you using their hardware that way is another matter entirely. After all, the chief reason that console games cost so much is that for every copy sold, the developer pays the console hardware manufacturer a licensing fee. Unlike the PC arena, where the architecture is published and you develop for it for effectively no additional cost.
A while back I was looking for one or two Cell CPU based machines as development boxes for inhouse geophysical software - basicly to see if it's worth going onto that platform. The three week process between contacting what appeared to be the only vendor of Cell based workstations and getting a price for an entry level machine was frustrating. It involved daily calls to a slimy bastard that appeared to just want to waste time trying to become my friend until he had carefully finished weighing my companies wallet.
In the end the time window had come and gone (the developers got bored or gave up on the idea of using the Cell) before I could get even a hint at the price but I kept going for the sake of future projects. The price for one workstation with one processor was fairly similar to that of six of our cluster nodes. You would need some sort of black-ops budget where any Accountants coming close are shot on sight before paying that sort of price. An entry point machine no much different to a playstation with more memory cost a truly insane and unjustifiable price.
Is that surprising? Why would they stop? All three consoles currently use a POWER-related chip, it's not like they're going to just throw all those big stacks of money away for no reason. Was someone speculating that they were going to pull out or something? Why is this news?
You've really missed hearing about Cell?
It's a new processor architecture, IBM and Sony (and possibly others) had a hand in it. Effectively two "Power" cores and a bunch of vector processing units. It's supposed to be very very good for vector operations. For a while (a few years back now) the world's most powerful supercomputer was a machine composed of nodes containing two cell processors and an Opteron each.
It's different to other parallelisation strategies as the vector units (SPU/SPEs) allow you to parallelise stuff at an operation level, unlike just stuffing more cores into the box which is the intel/PC strategy. For games and graphics this it thought to be good, hence its inclusion in the playstation 3. It's also supposed to be good for scientific computing.
I guess you could think of it as somewhere between a CPU and a GPU, or a hybrid of the two approaches.
The Cell architecture was used in the Playstation; it is designed to have many simple cores working in parallel. It is good at embarassingly parallel tasks like streaming video and rendering, but that is really all it is good at -- the individual cells currently have working sets much to small for HPC.
So, shortly:
Cell is a processor with two PPC cores, interfaced with a bunch of auxiliary CPU cores optimized for SIMD, each with its local memory.
Right?
On further reading - not two PPC cores, one core with two threads using a similar (but possibly superior) technology to hyperthreading.
But yeah, essentially your short description there is correct.
Also I've looked at the top 500 list - The cell, though not the variant in the playstation, is in Roadrunner. Roadrunner is the third fastest computer on the planet.
... is that it lies in between ordinary x86-type multicore processors and CUDA/GPGPU, and there's not much room in between.
The Cell is an affordable solution. The SPEs could be given MORE capabilities ...
Comparable processors (perhaps more advanced processors) from Tilera and Cavium (32, 64 and up to 100 cores) are very expensive ... IBM should create a Road Map for this processor ... it has floating point capability, something the other processors do not have.
x
I know Slashdot is the enemy of good writing practices, so this post will be modded downto hell, but I feel I must point out that lately, the capitalization of titles of Slashdot submissions got completely out of hand. The rule is simple: if you want to capitalize your headlines, you capitalize every word except
- prepositions ("of", "to", "in", "for", "with" and "on")
- articles ("the, "a" and "an")
- and some other obvious exceptions.
On Slashdot, the editors are so ignorant that they usually capitalize each and every word. But this title, "IBM's Plans For the Cell Processor ", shows that capitalizing every word is not even a policy!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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A bit like that in effect, although the architecture is quite different from a GPU. GPUs are aggressively SIMD, literally doing the same operation on several data items at the same time. If you have to branch, then the GPU does one pass of the branched bit for each branch (called a 'Split Warp' in CUDA-speak). Operations with fine grained branching at levels lower than an individual warp will reduce the efficiency of the GPU.
The cell had 8 baby CPU elements with 256k of local memory (called Synergistic Processing or SP elements). Peak floating point speed was somewhat slower than contemporary GPU chips like the GeForce 8 family, but cells don't have the 'split warp' problem. This gives them some strengths over GPUs for certain types of computations but the 256k local memory limit constrains the amount of data that the SP has access to at any given time. The cell is probably closer to a traditional DSP than a GPU.
GPUs have fairly clearly won the war for mindshare in the PC-based vector bashing market and are much, much cheaper than any commercial Cell based product except the PS3. If the article is to be believed, IBM are rolling the technology into their mainstream Power 8 products, which will give them very good floating point performance directly on-chip.
High-end Power boxes can take several TB of memory and IBM sell quite a few to clients who want a shared memory number crunching system (which can't be done with clusters of commodity x86 boxes). A big shared-memory box with GPU level floating point throughput might be quite a win for IBM in some markets.
...they copied this crappy Python leading-whitespace syntax. That's why they failed, I guess.
(runs to hide) Hey, folks. Just kidding. Hey!
...platform where you don't have to worry about some idiot company dictating what software you run on the hardware you purchased, don't you think?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
...processor is that the company selling it's flagship product decided to lock out people wanting to experiment with it.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
...the Cell might have had when they locked down the PS3.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I wonder what it's gonna have to absorb to evolve into the Perfect Cell. :)
What would be a pretty cool chip would be an 8-core chip with 4 x86_64 cores, two graphics cores, and two Cell cores. (perhaps IBM + AMD working together)
After that, build a custom Linux with MeeGo as the front end / launcher.... It would be cool if game console makers embraced Open Source for everything up to launching the games. ...and if they don't want their SDK open source, that's fine, just make the Operating System so it can launch the games, then get out of the way. Run it on two cores (for better functionality with Multimedia capabilities, ebook reading, etc.) and use the rest of the cores (2 x86_64, 2 Graphics and 2 Cells) for gaming.
As for the other hardware, Composite, Component, HDML, VGA, WiFi, Ethernet, and a headphone jack.(maybe bluetooth for wireless controllers and the ability to use bluetooth headsets)..blu-ray, card reader, and USB.
This is all off the top of my head, and would be a pretty cool gaming console, which would truly capture the home entertainment medium and make most people looking for gadgets, consoles, or HTPCs drool appropriately.
Make America grate again!
Of course game developers tend to be a bit more sceptical. The Cell requires a very specific way of programming (don't align your data flow to the processor's capabilities and performance nose-dives), which doesn't go over well with people who have limited time to make their game/engine work on several different platforms, most of which work roughly the same.
I attended the Games Convention Developers Conference 2008. A number of panelists mentioned that what they presented was harder to get working on the Cell due to its unique requirements. It really does require a different approach to every other system on the market.
Add to that the fact that the PS3 doesn't appear to deliver obviously superior performance to the more conventional X360 and the question arises whether the Cell is worth the hassle in the gaming sector. Scientific programming can afford to write system-specific code and jump through hoops to attain maximum performance (after all, 10% faster execution speed may mean their calculations finish a month or more sooner). Game developers, on the other hand, are on a very tight development schedule and might make a better game with a sightly less powerful but conventional platform to develop for.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Sigh.
Never fails. Out come the x86 hacks babbling about how they'ed rather be working on their archaic piece of shit chip architecture.
What a fucking joke you are.
"Sony had to put an NVidia graphics processor in the thing late in the development cycle, once people finally realized that the Cell CPUs couldn't handle the rendering."
My god. You are repeating that Beyond3d forum lie in late 2010???
"For games, this sucks"
"Trying to hammer programs into that model is painful. (Except for audio. It's great for audio."
"In many PS3 games, the main MIPS machine is doing most of the work, with the Cell CPUs handling audio, networking, and I/O."
"It's not necessary to use an architecture as painful as the Cell."
"tough to program."
It's like you tried to parrot every Beyond3d x86 fanboy talking point you could remember.
You would think that in late 2010 that the x86 fans would be smart enough to just keep their mouths shut to avoid looking like angry, delusional fans butt-hurt over how amazing PS3 games have turned out compared to the significantly weaker Xbox 360.
Uncharted
Uncharted 2
Killzone 2
Gran Turismo 5
just to name a few of this gen's graphical kings.
With all of Microsoft's billions, all the idiotic fanboy babble about 'easy to program' Xbox 360, all the idiotic fanboy babble about 'hard teh program PS3(Cell)' and yet the Xbox 360 years on still doesn't even have a game that is up to the 3.5 year old Uncharted on the PS3.
There isn't a single graphical area the PS3 hasn't destroyed the Xbox 360 this gen:
Resolution
Materials
Lighting
Poly counts
Screen complexity/number of objects
Particle effects
Animation
Deformation
Games like Gran Turismo 5 are running at 2.25 times the resolution of Microsoft's first party Forza games while running an engine that looks a generation ahead.
So yeah, I'm sure if you are some x86/DirectX,Windows,Desktop PC company you 'hates teh Cell' because you don't have a fucking clue how to handle anything outside that sad and narrow little world. Sucks to be them.
The clown has been spewing the same copy and paste garbage on this(and mostly likely everywhere else he frequents on the Net).
Back in the early PS2 we would talk about what a next generation PS2 would look like. Those whiteboard diagrams looked almost identical to what Sony and IBM came up with.
The parallels between the PS2/EE/GS and PS3/Cell/RSX are almost identical:
Execution starts on the EE/PPU
Heavy/parallel computation task is spawned off to the VUs/SPUs
Light control code runs in parallel on the EE/PPU
As graphical elements become read to be rasterized they are spawned off to the GS/RSX
In a well running PS2/PS3 engine all three major areas are running full speed in parallel. Split memory architecture lets each area of the machine run at full speed without interfering with the rest of the system.
Kutagari and IBM did a masterful job. It was an obvious choice to build off the model of the most sucessful console architecture in history and the one all console developers had intimate knowledge of, the 145 million selling PS2.
That's gotta sting Xbox 360 developers - to have fanboys calling the chip that beat the shit out of you this gen called nothing but a 'toy version'.
The Xbox 360 is also powered by a 'toy version' of PowerPC which is a 'toy version' of POWER.
Also, I think Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are all evil, and I do my best not to give any of them money any more. That means buying everything used and not paying for Live Gold. If that makes me a fanboy, then your comment makes you my bitch. But we knew that already because you're an anonymous pussy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just FYI.
IMO this was one of the main failures of the architecture. Xbox360 developers just have to worry about parallelizing their code, Cell developers on top of that have to worry about writing code that can make use of the SPE's, let alone efficient use of them.
The Cell was designed back when Sony needed hardware that could decode their high definition blu-ray streams. I think this is why the SPEs are useful for decoding operations and little else in the gaming world.
I think the true power of the PS3/Cell will be it's longevity.
Look at the PS2. Now look at the 1st gen games for it versus some of the latest ones. The differences are huge, and they are due purely to better programming techniques (same hardware.) I've no doubt that the PS3/Cell will have a similar lifespan.
Also, I know it discussed in almost every tech generation of consoles, but this time it might be true: Is the hardware finally good enough? This may be directly influenced by the popularity of Flash-based and iPhone games. Is the game market still being driven by the faster-polygon-pushing race? Maybe not..
You really have to wonder about all the now obvious lies spread about the relative performance of the PS3 and Xbox 360 how Microsoft could have gotten the 360's graphics hardware so terribly wrong and unable to compete with the PS3.
The PS2 easily put the Dreamcast to shame graphically, but it is nothing like what the PS3 has done to the 360 this gen. Last gen the PS2,GameCube, and Xbox were all putting out roughly the same number of polys in high end games(10-20 million or so), were running the same resolution with a few exceptions on each platform, had similar poly counts, etc. Each console did have areas where it excelled at - GameCube's quick seeking drive and its fast RAM, the PS2 insanely fast eDRAM and massive floating point power, and the Xbox was good at multipass rendering.
You really have to wonder what the hell Microsoft was thinking. First they gimp the 360 with the 6GB disk format making it the only console in history to have less space than a previous gen. Then they gimp the 360 with eDRAM that was too small to fit a standard 4xAA 720p frame buffer making the machine a nightmare to work with for developers. At least they dumped the horribly outclassed x86 chip for an IBM rush job where they slapped a third core on one of their existing designs. Still nothing the could compete in any way with the PS3's Cell chip.
Even a company with no console hardware design competence had to know they were dooming the console to be outclassed by the PS3.
And look at what the 360's graphical legacy turned out to be: the hilariously fake Epic Gears of War marketing shots, faked side by side multiplatform comparisons by fanboys messing with the video settings on the PS3 version or playing games with image compression so the PS3 versions look more jaggy and have less detail, and now the Xbox has resorted to pretending the fake marketing promo shots from highend PC games will look just like that on the 360. The 360 is the first console in history where there isn't a single exclusive game that is of any note graphically, let alone that in remotely close to PS3 graphics levels.
Most likely Microsoft has realized even with blowing billions they can't compete with Sony's dominance in console graphics hardware and have instead turned their attention to trying to pull a Wii type move by slapping those Eye Toy style motion controls on the old 360 hardware.
Now all that's needed is someone to copy-paste the parent post into relevant wikipedia article,
then his words will be pure gold. As evidenced by his +5 vs your +3, you stand no chance anyhow.
killzone doesn't look better than modern warfare 2. and that game is on both platforms.
you are the one who sounds like a damn fanboy.
I remember reading somewhere that one of the goals in PS2 programming was keeping that DMAC running full tilt streaming data. Ah, found it, Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2000/04/ps2vspc.ars/4
Interestingly, Cell was tolerant of losing SPUs in manufacture. A lot of "bad" chips would've been used as lower-end Cells for cheaper devices, while being essentially the same platform as far as developers were concerned. I don't think much came of that though. One laptop with a 4-SPU Cell, talk of a 2-SPU Cell as a video processor in a high-end HDTV. A shame, really, as they had a lot of half-dead Cells rolling off the line when they were trying to crank them out for the PS3 launch. Wonder what happened to them.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I found this article interesting. They write about Valves approach to multi-core CPU's and game engines.
The programmers at Valve considered three different models to solve their problem. The first was called "coarse threading" and was the easiest to implement. Many companies are already using coarse threading to improve their games for multiple core systems. The idea is to put whole subsystems on separate cores; for example, graphics rendering on one, AI on another, sound on a third, and so on. The problem with this approach is that some subsystems are less demanding on CPU time than others. Giving sound, for example, a whole core to itself would often leave up to 80 percent of that core sitting unused.
The second approach was fine-grained threading, which separates tasks into many discrete elements and then distributes them among as many cores as are available. For example, a loop that updates the position of 1,000 objects based on their velocity can be divided among, say, four cores, with each core handling 250 objects apiece. The drawback with this approach is that not all tasks divide neatly into discrete components that can operate independently. Also, if some entries in the list take longer to update than others, it becomes harder to scale the tasks evenly across multiple cores. Finally, the issue of memory bandwidth quickly becomes a limitation with this method. For certain specialized tasks, such as compiling, fine-grained threading works really well. Valve has already implemented a system whereby every computer in their offices automatically acts as a compiler node. When the programmers were getting ready to demonstrate their results on the conference room computer with the big screen, they had to quickly deactivate this feature first!
The approach that Valve finally chose was a combination of the coarse and fine-grained, with some extra enhancements thrown in. Some systems were split on multiple cores using coarse threading. Other tasks, such as VVIS (the calculations of what objects are visible to the player from their point of view) were split up using fine-grained threading. Lastly, whenever part of a core is idle, work that can be precalculated without lagging or adversely affecting the game experience (such as AI calculations or pathfinding) was queued up to be delivered to the game engine later.
Valve's approach was the most difficult of all possible methods for utilizing multiple cores, but if they could pull it off, it would deliver the maximum possible benefits on systems like Intel's new quad-core Kentsfield chips.
To deliver this hybrid threading platform, Valve made use of expert programmers like Tom Leonard, who was writing multithreaded code as early as 1991 when he worked on C++ development tools for companies like Zortech and Symantec. Tom walked us through the thought process behind Valve's new threading model.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2006/11/valve-multicore.ars
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
The guy, just like so many other Xbox and PC gamer fans, is just regurgitating every little bit of crap he ever heard hoping to convince people that what they see with their own eyes isn't true. The PS3's Cell+RSX combo this gen has destroyed the Xbox 360 graphically.
It would be no big deal if fanboys like the OP were spewing this type of inane techno-babble back in 2005/6 when the PS3 was not yet released or just released. But in 2010. That's just sad and pathetic.
Xbox and PC gamer fans filled their head with garbage from sites like the beyond3d formums because it told them what they desperately wanted to believe, that it was all lies from Sony and 'teh Cell hype'. Fine, no big deal. But as graphical masterpiece after graphical masterpiece came out on the PS3 that destroyed any Xbox 360 game came out they circled the wagons instead of doing the rational thing of clinging to the crap they filled their head with from the beyond3d forums.
I remember the socalled 'experts' aka desktop PC programmers going on and on and on about how the Killzone 2 footage was simply 'impossible' for the PS3 to ever run. They spouted post after post foaming at the mouth about how it was all 'Sony lies'.
And then:
http://generationdreamteam.free.fr/afrika/killzone2/KillZone2compa.jpg
The real time PS3 Killzone 2 demo came out. It was like there was going to be mass Xbox and PC gamer fan suicides over that. All the lies and bullshit they kept telling themselves about the PS3, Cell, 'hard teh program', 'teh Xbox 360 GPU is better than teh PS3's' was made a mockery.
And this happened with PS3 exclusive after exclusive.
Each time the Xbox and PC fans would rush back to the beyond3d forums to get their talking points about why that latest PS3 didn't really look as good as everyone is seeing with their own eyes, and 'teh 360 could easily handle those graphics but dev just don't want to'.
And now it is 2010 and those same Xbox and PC gamer fans are still sitting around in forums spewing the same bullshit and lies. So sad and pathetic. I remember the Dreamcast fans being bad, but they mostly gave up trying to convince the world that the Dreamcast could keep up with the PS2 after a year or so.
Yes, your response was informative and I know you're trying to help.
But seriously, if this person has no idea what a Cell processor is, I'm pretty sure the concept of CPU optimization will be lost on them. You could say it was a new type of chip made by elves to regrow tissue and they would probably believe it. Just how out of touch would someone have to be to miss the Cell, and not bother to Google it before posting?
I bet you didn't like that I used the word "Fail" in the modern vernacular sense. But in case you thought I was being non-factual, here is information on the real cell processor which IBM sells for truly incredible amounts of money. I've looked up the pricing, and it is scary.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't particularly care about the XBox. The last non-portable console I actually was interested in was the PS2.
This comes from the point of view of a casual gamer who is not concerned with having the latest and greatest but has a brother who is. I've seen the X360 perform on a large HDTV set and I've seen the PS3 perform on the same set. Both look good. The Cell may outperform the X360 by a large margin if given enough time but that remains to be seen. Right now I'd put them as reasonably close (= to someone who isn't an expert on console graphics the PS3 is not obviously superior, which is exactly what I wrote).
Don't get me wrong, the Cell is powerful. Nobody would use the X360 for a scientific cluster but the PS3 was popular for that until Sony killed Other OS. However, that power is not easy to work with. They had a very impressive realtime raytracing demo on the GCDC with the SPEs doing the raytracing work and the PPE coordinating and compositing everything. Very nice.
But at the same time there were a lot of workshops (and at the GC proper, a lot of developers) who pointed out that getting an engine to work on the PS3 is much more work than on more traditional systems because it's a completely different programming model. Treat the SPEs as small CPUs and watch your framerate go to the low single digits. Ignore them and you're wasting most of the system's power. The SPEs have a tiny amount of RAM and you're expected to code in such a way that you deliver data to them in a single DMA operation. If your data set is too big for the SPE or your packet size does not align with what the Cell can do in a single DMA operation you plug up the bus and all SPEs starve.
It may very well be that the PS3 is a late bloomer and that we will see more and more optimized graphics for the Cell. Then again, Microsoft might be able to afford to just release a new XBox sooner than Sony can relace the PS3 as (if I remember correctly) the PS3 was really expensive to develop.
The big question is whether the PS3's approach of having a really powerful but hard to use processor is viable in the marketplace. If Microsoft can just toss out consoles at lower development cost and Nintendo outsells both of them by delivering cheap systems to casual gamers, Sony might be facing trouble.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
This coming from some Mexican beaner piece of shit.
Go eat a fucking taco or something, wetback.
I've wondered this for a while: IBM, Toshiba, and Sony developed the cell. Pray tell, they sell a cell, how do they divide the income?
shitstation's got nogaems.
Actually, since console graphics are meaningless next to sales numbers (this is business, after all) the winner is Nintendo, with Microsoft and Sony being also-rans. Using a souped-up Gamecube (which sold as often as the PS3 and the X360 combined) and a portable system with four megabytes of RAM (which sold as often as the PS3, X360 and PSP combined) Nintendo has outpaced them.
;)
It doesn't matter whether Microsoft's promo videos are pre-rendered and Sony's are not; Nintendo's look like they're from ten years ago and people buy Nintendo. In today's market, graphics don't mean as much as they used to and that's why Microsoft and Sony are busy trying to compete about the sizes of their new-and-improved manhoods while Nintendo is laughing all the way to the bank, selling people yesterday's tech for today's money.
So that's another reason why Sony might rethink their strategy: Neither in the console market nor in the portable market can their more powerful devices compete with Nintendo's old but innvotative ones. Sony can only hope for the second place this generation.
While Sony paid a lot of money for the Cell, Nintendo developed an input system using not particularly new tech like motion sensors and IR imagery. And then Sony imitated it (= paid for much of the same development), giving Nintendo even more of a development cost advantage. Likewise, the NDS combines fairly conservative tech with a touchscreen. The PSP family has more powerful (= expensive) innards and a UMD drive, which again represents development cost.
Combine that with the fact that Nintendo's systems outsold Sony's by a wide margin (and Nintendo made a profit on them while Sony treated theirs as loss leaders) and you see that the company that relied on clever human interaction design made a lot of money and can afford whatever the next generation brings while the one that relied on clever hardware design... Well, they're Sony so they're not exactly poor but they could be doing better.
PS: I know I shouldn't be feeding obvious trolls but hey, I can always use some extra karma.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)