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Playstation 2 Pix and Rollout
Lekkim writes "Gaming Age Online has posted the first official picture of the upcoming next-gen playstation2 (its the official name...Apparently it has DVD capabilities and it looks pretty cool. Details are here.
" Thanks to Mattrad for the European playstation links as well. It will ship in Japan on March 4, 2000 with an estimated cost of 370$US.
Yeah and it's a good thing that the news media doesn't rely on anonymous sources. Oh wait, they do.
Your stance would appear to include dismissing a cancer cure or the Secret of the Universe(TM) if it were posted by an AC. Even if they're right.
It would be a much better idea to read the post and decide based solely on the merits of the content whether or not it should be moderated. One's ability to sign their name does not indicate that they're stupid. Lord knows we've got lots of stupid users around here.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I admit this is offtopic, but it has got to be said somewhere.
The slashdot moderation system is not working - decent arguments from anonymous cowards (and even logged in people) such as myself are never being rated up. I think I know why. Are the people who are moderating allowed to set their mimimum tolerance ? Ie do they set their threshold up, and then never even see the articles they are supposed to be moderating ?
Clearly if you are taking the responsibility of being a moderator then you should not be able to shield yourself from significant portions of the debate.
This theory would explain the recent spate of highly uprated articles which have recieved detailed and rigorous response (basically reducing much of what had been said to the misinformed opinion that it was) and yet while the votes continue to push the original article up, the worthy response does not get voted up, nor any real followups to it (presumably because of the threshhold problem for readers, although this is not really a problem).
What do you think ? Make people indulging in moderation read everything...seems only fair [even if the final moderation is still bad, at least they saw it]
The real Sony URL is http://www.scei.co.jp/ps2 where you will find the real specs and screenshots.
The PSX2's CPU has *14* separate FPU units vs 3 on the Athlon. It has two vector units capable of doing dot products, cross products, etc. It has a x9 multiply-and-accumulate unit which can do super-fast matrix operations. In short, for 3d calculations, it blows the PentiumIII/Athlon, and even the Alpha away.
It's normal ram is RDRAM for a 3.6gb/sec bandwidth.
It's rasterizer has a 2,560 bit bus! (embedded dram) with a RAM bandwidth of 48 GIGABYTEs/sec which is 48 times more than AGP 2x. It can render a whopping 2.4 gigapixels/sec using 16 pixel pipelines which is about 5 times the best PC 3d accelerator.
Besides hardware transform and lighting, it's flexible enough to render 60+ million polys/sec and even 16 million+ BEZIER curved patches a sec.
That's about 20 times the bet polygon throughput on a PentiumIII with SSE, and for Bezier patches it's probably 50 times faster.
It's I/O and sound processors alone best the best PC I/O and sound controllers. (It's I/O processor alone is good enough to run Playstation 1 games)
And, it decodes and displays DVD Video.
In short, $360 is fucking cheap for this box! This box destroys E-Machine PCs 100 times over.
And they have another box called TOOL which lets you develop and run PSX2 games on Linux with the PSX2 hardware!
Just another comment. When the Playstation 1 first came out, it cost $299 with NO packin game. After buying a game and a second controller, with tax, it cost near $400.
Folks, this is technology you should be excited about. You should dream of having a Linux box with the PSX2 hardware as your CPU/graphics card/CPU and DVD player!
I sincerely doubt this is the final design of the PSX2. I don't believe a drawer will be on the final design of the thing. The only other consoles that had a drawer on it was the ill fated 3DO and the CD-I. Drawers cost money, and if Sony can shave off a few bucks for this sucker, they'd more than likely do it, especially with the Dreamcast near the "impulse buy" price-range (under $200).
It's going to be an interesting Christmas, and one heck of a spring.