There are several obvious reasons that the X-box will fail (at least in the short term).
#1)Broadbrand penetration is low. There are only 13.2 million households in the US with broadband connectivity in 2001, this means that less than 10% of household connected to the internet uses broadband (source: cabledatacomnews.com). The prefered choice of internet connectivity will likely be dial-up for the next several years(the end of X-Box's product cycle).
#2) Broadband connection is usually not in the living room where the X-Box and TV set is. Like most people my broadband modem is not next to my TV set in the living room, it is next to my computer in the next room. I certainly don't plan on running a long line from my computer into my living room everytime I want to play a game.
#3) The developer has to pay MS for the online infrastructure (look at the NYT and/. post from last week). The main problem to developers other than the cost is that the developers lose control in a service based industry like online gaming. If you look at the customer service contract for a MMOPRG like Everqest you'll see that it is 80-pages long, it'll be extremely difficult to manage your service when all your equipment is controlled by a thrid-party.
The current Sony GsCube which has 16 of these running in parrellel can do 1 billion polys per second raw, and over 300million in real time. They had the movie Antz running in real-time.
http://ps2.ign.com/news/22490.html
You have to understand that this is the Emotion Engine not the Graphics Synthesiser. The EE is for raw calculations the GS is for graphics calculations. The current GS is claimed to run around 66 million polys, now imagine if your P3 or Athlon could run raw 75 million in SOFTWARE, without your graphics card.
This BS is about a dispute between two companies. It has nothing to do with using screenshots for games without permission; besides most of the games are from press material anyway. And if they were is sue over that issue, they would have sued over a decade ago when the first NES came out. This is about Imagine Meidia not paying for using Nintendo's cashcow (Pokemon) without paying them like every other Pokemon hint book publisher out there.
It's about Imagine media making those Pokemon hint books and Nintendo sueing because they used copyrighted material. If you bother to read the scans of the complaint on Dailyradar's page it clearly states that Dailyradar used photocopies of the Pokemon instruction manual, Pokemon trading card game, and Space world pamplets and used them in their hint book instead of using the press material that Nintendo gives out. When asked to cease using the copyrighted material, Imagine Meida refused. From a legal standpoint Imagine Media is clearly in the wrong. But who cares, except Nintendo and Imagine media.
What is most disturbing about this however, is that Imagine Media is using the media(their own Dailyradar) in settling a legal dispute that should be taken care of in court. They are manipulating public sympathy so that they can make money from those Pokemon books. They want every mindless Dailyradar reader out there is lash out against Nintendo. Whe else would they keep their Nintendo letters section up but close the rest of the site down.
It is a very sad thing to see Journalistic integrity to be pissed on like this. The onlu winner from this low act is Imagine Media, the losers are Nintendo and Dialy Radar readers
The difference between this machine and a server is the Graphics Synthesizer. Remember this machine doesn't have 16 cpus. It has 32. 16 sets of Emotions Engines and Graphics Synthesizers(GS). The GS will be dedicated to graphics work, and compared to the GS in the PS2 which has 4MB of on-die cache, and the new SGI's with 8MB, this machine will have a whopping 32MB of on-die cache. And much like the new SGI's this machine will be modular; hence the cube design. Also, I don't think Sony will be aiming these machines at IT managers. According to a Gamespot article ( http://www.zdnet.com/gamespot/stories/news/0,10870 ,2606952,00.html ) the GScube is suppose to work in conjuction with SGI servers.
Yep, a 1Ghz Athlon can barely manage 1 GFLOP. Same goes for the G4 500Mhz. and a P3 can't even do 1Gflop(at this time) The CPUs in the IBM's ASCI White Supercomputer also hovers somewhere above 1GFLOP(of course they have thosands of them in the machine).
Slashdot Mirror
There are several obvious reasons that the X-box will fail (at least in the short term).
/. post from last week). The main problem to developers other than the cost is that the developers lose control in a service based industry like online gaming. If you look at the customer service contract for a MMOPRG like Everqest you'll see that it is 80-pages long, it'll be extremely difficult to manage your service when all your equipment is controlled by a thrid-party.
#1)Broadbrand penetration is low. There are only 13.2 million households in the US with broadband connectivity in 2001, this means that less than 10% of household connected to the internet uses broadband (source: cabledatacomnews.com). The prefered choice of internet connectivity will likely be dial-up for the next several years(the end of X-Box's product cycle).
#2) Broadband connection is usually not in the living room where the X-Box and TV set is. Like most people my broadband modem is not next to my TV set in the living room, it is next to my computer in the next room. I certainly don't plan on running a long line from my computer into my living room everytime I want to play a game.
#3) The developer has to pay MS for the online infrastructure (look at the NYT and
Bob Young says Linux won't rule the desktop. . .
well, certainly not with that attitude
$412 in Japan starting april
Around $412 in Japan Don't know about the US
The current Sony GsCube which has 16 of these running in parrellel can do 1 billion polys per second raw, and over 300million in real time. They had the movie Antz running in real-time. http://ps2.ign.com/news/22490.html
You have to understand that this is the Emotion Engine not the Graphics Synthesiser. The EE is for raw calculations the GS is for graphics calculations. The current GS is claimed to run around 66 million polys, now imagine if your P3 or Athlon could run raw 75 million in SOFTWARE, without your graphics card.
This BS is about a dispute between two companies. It has nothing to do with using screenshots for games without permission; besides most of the games are from press material anyway. And if they were is sue over that issue, they would have sued over a decade ago when the first NES came out. This is about Imagine Meidia not paying for using Nintendo's cashcow (Pokemon) without paying them like every other Pokemon hint book publisher out there. It's about Imagine media making those Pokemon hint books and Nintendo sueing because they used copyrighted material. If you bother to read the scans of the complaint on Dailyradar's page it clearly states that Dailyradar used photocopies of the Pokemon instruction manual, Pokemon trading card game, and Space world pamplets and used them in their hint book instead of using the press material that Nintendo gives out. When asked to cease using the copyrighted material, Imagine Meida refused. From a legal standpoint Imagine Media is clearly in the wrong. But who cares, except Nintendo and Imagine media. What is most disturbing about this however, is that Imagine Media is using the media(their own Dailyradar) in settling a legal dispute that should be taken care of in court. They are manipulating public sympathy so that they can make money from those Pokemon books. They want every mindless Dailyradar reader out there is lash out against Nintendo. Whe else would they keep their Nintendo letters section up but close the rest of the site down. It is a very sad thing to see Journalistic integrity to be pissed on like this. The onlu winner from this low act is Imagine Media, the losers are Nintendo and Dialy Radar readers
RISC IV
The difference between this machine and a server is the Graphics Synthesizer. Remember this machine doesn't have 16 cpus. It has 32. 16 sets of Emotions Engines and Graphics Synthesizers(GS). The GS will be dedicated to graphics work, and compared to the GS in the PS2 which has 4MB of on-die cache, and the new SGI's with 8MB, this machine will have a whopping 32MB of on-die cache. And much like the new SGI's this machine will be modular; hence the cube design. Also, I don't think Sony will be aiming these machines at IT managers. According to a Gamespot article ( http://www.zdnet.com/gamespot/stories/news/0,10870 ,2606952,00.html ) the GScube is suppose to work in conjuction with SGI servers.
Yep, a 1Ghz Athlon can barely manage 1 GFLOP. Same goes for the G4 500Mhz. and a P3 can't even do 1Gflop(at this time) The CPUs in the IBM's ASCI White Supercomputer also hovers somewhere above 1GFLOP(of course they have thosands of them in the machine).
well... The Playstation2 Dev kit uses Linux as its OS so I'm assuming that this machine will use Linux also.