Yes obviously this is mind reading and not some subtle body language that the dog picks up.
Wait.
What's the difference?
I mean, take it to an extreme: get rid of all body language, but just presume that the dog is extremely smart, and can interpret all of the variables which cause a person to come to a decision to take him outside.
To take it to the grandparent's extreme, what if two people live together so long that their habits, thought processes, decision making, everything, are all easily predictable by the other person.
How, exactly, would that be distinguishable from mind reading?
Why adhere to the principle of Occams razor?
Occam's Razor doesn't say that there always has to be another explanation. It just says that if you've got two theories, and both equally support the data, the one that requires the fewer assumptions tends to be true.
Since no one's really defined what "mind reading" is clearly (and if you do, generally it's done to the point where it no longer completely matches what people imagine it as) you don't actually have two explanations.
In any case, I think we are reaching the point of dimishing returns, a year old 2GHz processer already rips music as fast as the drive can deliver it, already transcodes video as fast as the drives can burn it etc... GPUs control gaming...
Why wouldn't you just double things up, then? Drop another monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and two users should be able to use one of these computers just as fast as one can on a modern computer.
I know a lot of households that would benefit from buying only one new computer rather than two.
Besides, there are plenty of CPU bound uses for these processors. People who mainly do gaming might not see it, but - my God, those rendering and integer/floating point performances just make me want to go suggest replacing all of our computing servers right now.
I was mainly trying to point out that the "benchmarks" aren't nescessarily useful in describing the performance of these beasts in operation.
Sure they are. Just not in your operations. In mine, oh my God, that thing's insane. But this has been a problem for computers for years. The real-life speed difference in terms of Web browsing between a modern PC and a five year old PC is minimal.
It's not a limitation of these processors. It's a limitation of your usage of them. I'd venture to say that probably 80-90% of all computers out there are far more powerful than they need to be, with the people who use PCs for gaming being the exception in the past. Welcome to the rest of the world.
There are, in fact, other uses for computers than games, believe it or not.
Tech Report's reviews are typically the best I've seen, and these are no exception, adding rendering, video encoding, audio encoding, voice recognition, and in the past, scientific benchmarks as well.
The Core 2 Duo beats the crap out of the A64 architecture just about everywhere - and LAME encoding, voice recognition, rendering, image processing, etc. By large margins - 25% or more.
The pure integer performance of the Core 2 Duo is ridiculous. The last iterations of the Netburst were still faster performers than the A64s, due to their higher clock speeds, but in Sandra's Mandelbrot iterations test, the Core 2 Duo was almost triple the performance of the fastest Netburst. Triple! And the floating-point performance is much better than the Pentium 4s, basically on par with the Athlons.
Now I know why I stopped reading HardOCP. So what if I can't see any benefit in games right now? The entire rest of the system will be faster. By far. And I'd bet you'd see performance gains in games if the system was doing other things at the same time, for instance.
It was introduced to control another introduced species: rats. Why they thought the already-proven solution of cats was too primitive for them, who knows - but the grand stupidity of the attempt is that rats are nocturnal. Mongooses are diurnal. The two species never met.
So now there are rats and mongooses in Hawaii.
That example just proves to me that humanity really, really needs to learn ecological engineering, because we're apparently too stupid to do this by instinct.
Seriously though, this is hardly going to make waves for some time.
Depends what you're interested in. Take a look at integrated battery-backed SRAM: some form of this is used for realtime clocks in PCs, for instance. Large quantity battery-backed SRAM is expensive: 4 MBit (which this is) is huge (a 32-pin DIP package) and is $50 in quantity.
This is half the price. The large-size integrated battery-backed SRAM market just became completely pointless. I wouldn't be surprised if manufacturers of those parts (like Maxim, ST Microelectronics) announces that those parts are discontinued within a year.
Well, the array size is governed by the memory cell size, but the actual storage geometry is governed by the controller.
What? How would you write 8 bits to a device that has no way to write only 8-bits of a 16-bit word? This particular device has byte-select for flexibility, but still, in order to have byte-addressable read/write access, you'd need to add an additional pair of 8-bit buffers for each chip and a bit more logic to support 8-bit read/writes.
But plenty of devices aren't capable of writing to individual bytes. You could rearrange the geometry with a controller (write = read word and rewrite new bits) if you wanted to be insane, but I think you'd have to be a little crazy to do that.
Power on time for the chips is significant WRT access time. 2-3mS as I recall. I don't have the datasheet handy at the moment though.
I didn't see it originally, as it's hidden in a note in the data sheet - but it's 1 microsecond. Which is significant but not insane. You could probably build a power-switched large array of these guys with acceptable performance for certain applications.
Anyway, it's obvious that they're not targeting this thing for large-scale storage (the "10 year minimum data retention" in the data sheet should tip off what other chip they're targetting), but that's just due to the design of the chip (and the current cost), not the technology.
Why all of the sudden did everyone start talking in Mbits for size of memory?
Everyone always has. Go look at chip descriptions in Digikey, or anywhere else for that matter. They only get converted to megabyte, etc. at the end-user level. Mbits are useful if you don't care about the arrangement of the memory, because usually they specify 256Kx16, for instance, which is what this is.
Switching the power to the chips required to store a chunk of data would require knowing the length and width of the memory required, and then knowing what blocks are free, and then powering on the required chips (with a huge current spike and associated noise), and then making the write.
My bad, I missed this comment. I think you're misunderstanding how easy this would be: you already need a chip select demux for multiple chips. Add a relay and probably a one-shot to delay the system a bit, and you've got a power switcher. The current spike and noise can be handled with decently large capacitors on the power supply.
You don't need to know length, width, etc. of memory. Blocks free? What blocks? It's just SRAM style memory: bunch-o-address lines, and a chip select and write enable. If you want to write to (16-bit) word 0x80001234, the mega-gigantic demux just switches out 0x800012 into the proper chip select and relay, and the addresses just pass on to the newly-activated chip.
Finding a 20-to-1,048,576 demux might take some work, though, but you'd need it anyway.
Keeping the chips alive but idle is the easiest way to design the system.
Yes, but if you're proposing a massively gigantic chip array, I think you've already abandoned the "easiest way to design the system" approach, and you'll probably optimize away the need for a kilowatt of idle power. The fact that it maintains power when off means that you can abandon the idle power if you're willing to trade a little bit of speed.
Note that they don't note the power-on time, though. That'd be nice to know for an instant-on chip.
And remember, my numbers were only for a 500GB x 1 byte array.
a 500GB FRAM disk would require 1,024,000 of these chips, requiring nearly 2,500 sqft of PCB space, and more power than a pile of overclocked P4s (~9mA * 3.3V * 1,024,000 chips = 30.4128kW at IDLE)
The size issue you're right on (based on the current chip, even though the cell size is smaller than SRAM, which means that it is higher density) - but the power usage? C'mon. You just build an address decoder and switch power to the chip that you're selecting. MRAM's power usage is basically the same as SRAM.
But based upon the size (4 MBit) and the price ($25), they're targeting battery-backed SRAM currently. I'm sure they'll target all external SRAM chips next, and then flash as the production scales.
On the other hand - sorry, I don't quite see how these will be in competition with hard-drives
Right now, they aren't. At that price point, they're competing with battery-backed SRAM (very nicely for the integrated stuff, and it depends on the product for the battery + battery monitor chip + SRAM solution).
Short primer on different memory technologies: SRAM is very fast, very low power, easy to interface, but it needs a battery for data integrity. DRAM is very cheap, but higher power, much harder to interface, and needs not only a battery but a controller for data integrity. EEPROM is everything SRAM is, but nonvolatile but is expensive, and writing requires awkward voltages, can't be done bytewise, and is slow anyway. Flash is similar to EEPROM, but beats it because it's cheaper, doesn't require weird voltages, but writing is still awkward.
The only downside to MRAM currently is its cost - fast and easy reads, fast and easy writes, nothing required to maintain it, and low power to boot. If this becomes available at distributors within a factor of 2 of that $25 price point, there's literally no point to integrated battery-backed SRAM chips anymore. If the price drops by a factor of 2 or so, there's no point to battery-backed SRAM at all.
As the price drops, though, MRAM has the potention to challenge all of those technologies above, as well as hard drives, much like flash is starting to do now.
That is a reasonable price. Right now, MRAM replaces battery-backed SRAM: like the ZEROPOWER series from ST Microelectronics, and a 4-Mbit version (M48Z512A) costs $45 in quantity, and the MRAM chip won't take up huge real estate with a gigantic DIP package.
At $25 in quantity for a 4-Mbit chip, it's about a factor of 5 higher than conventional SRAM. I'd guess that a factor of 5 in cost reduction isn't crazy to expect.
Too bad this chip didn't come out say, five to ten years ago - otherwise you likely would've been seeing it in video game cartridges for a while now.
We've been hearing vaporware mram chip stories for almost a decade now... When is it going to be on the market for people to purchase and use?
Now, apparently. That's what this story is about. Here's a link to the actual chip's spec sheet. Here's a link to the chip's page on Freescale, where you can order it for $25/chip in 1000 unit quantities.
It's not in any consumer products yet, no, but it is available to purchase, which means it isn't vaporware.
These people will know nothing about the console except what they'll see on the side of the box after they buy it.
Yeah - the price tag. And then they'll say "the total comes to how much?", look over, see how much the PS2 price has dropped since when they first bought it, and say "screw it, I'll wait a year until it's half the price."
OK, what is your problem here. Is it that the author is stating a fact regarding PSP vs DS popularity that is true but only giving US statistics?
What... in the devil... are you talking about? The author - as in, the article, as in the guy speaking at the conference - was talking about North American installed base. He projects a small gap between the PSP and the DS opening in the North American sales figures by 2008. In the current year, there is essentially no gap, according to his figures.
Is it that you disagree with the DS crushing the PSP in overall popularity worldwide?
Why would I be talking about the DS vs the PSP in installed base worldwide in an article about North American sales figures???
Cause guess what, the statement the Methusala poster made was regarding PSP vs DS worldwide (I assume)
Why would he be talking about the PSP vs the DS worldwide in a thread related to an article on North American sales projections?
The freaking original poster was saying "how can you predict this stuff? you couldn't predict the DS beating the PSP!" and the other poster responded that he could've predicted it. I disagree. All of his reasons apply equally well to the US market as to the Japanese market, except in the Japanese market, the DS is killing the PSP. In the US market, they're currently tied. So there's got to be another reason why the DS is killing the PSP in Japan. That reason is the DS Lite, the Brain Age games, and marketing to non-gamers.
Those things are just starting to happen in the US, which is why the author - the presenter - the guy the article is about - is likely wrong. The DS likely won't stay tied with the PSP.
In other words, gamers reward consoles which offer them the most choice in their game selection, not necessairly the highest overall quality. Not really surprising if you think about it, but it's interesting to see some numbers backing it up.
Or, to further comment, it could be because the guy did a crappy analysis.
Take a look at his DS/PSP comparison : he states the PSP is like 70%, and the DS is far lower. From gamerankings.com's own data, that seems to be because of a large number of games with very few reviews for the DS. If you restrict the set to only games reviewed by 50 or more reviews (i.e. statistically sound data), the DS is ahead of the PSP (80% to 77%).
Which is probably another reason why trending won't show the right behavior for the DS/PSP battle. If users really aren't buying many games for the PSP, then the profits of PSP publishers will start going down, and down, and then Sony will make less money on the licensing of the games, and eventually have to pull the system.
Right now I think there are a lot of people who bought a PSP for "other" reasons, but Sony isn't making money on those "other" reasons. At some point, it's entirely likely the whole setup for Sony will just collapse like a house of cards.
Bloody freaking hell, this thread was talking about whether or not the DS is dominating over the PSP. Worldwide, it is, thanks to Japan. In the US, according to this article, it isn't.
GBA kicks the crap out of both of them so far. Combined. But it's not part of the discussion.
No, this is the quote that started the whole thing.
who would have predicted, for instance, the overwhelming popularity of the nintendo DS over the PSP?
The other poster then gave reasons why he'd expect overwhelming popularity of the DS over the PSP. Except in the US, it isn't overwhelmingly more popular. Yet.
In the US, ok - but not worldwide - and that is the scope of the article.
As has been mentioned, if you adjust for inflation, (or even if you don't) it's not more expensive than the neo-geo was.
Exactly. And the Neo-Geo's price wasn't mainstream, because the console itself wasn't mainstream - at least, in the end, it wasn't. Sony's hoping to sell a mainstream product at a premium price, and that hasn't been done before.
Are you kidding? They've both started. Maybe not directly to consumers
That's what I meant. By "market research" I meant "go ask consumers" (and by consumers, I mean all consumers, not just gamers, considering Nintendo's not targeting gamers) and if there hasn't been significant marketing to those consumers, then doing that sort of research is a bit pointless. I mean, if you did it, and then said "hey, most of Nintendo's target market doesn't know about the Wii yet!" - um, yeah, but they will come launch day.
I wouldn't call what Nintendo and Sony have done so far 'marketing'. More like 'market teasing'.
I'm not so sure that's all that meaningful a metric of success, though. Doesn't the massive dominance of the DS in Japan count for something? What about the number of game titles purchased per system?
I agree. In fact, that was my original point before people started to get bogged down in where my numbers came from (which is hilarious, considering they came from the article).
I think the reason the DS is doing so well in Japan is because they started getting another demographic - girls, adults, etc. - with Nintendogs and the Brain Age series, and then the design of the DS Lite just really drove that home.
What I'm saying is that this guy is predicting that the DS and PSP will stay neck and neck. For a while, in Japan, it looked like that was true there, too. Then Nintendogs/Brain Age/DS Lite hit the market, and the PSP got flattened in the span of a month or so. So I think it's entirely possible that it'll happen in the US too. We'll have to wait and see how the DS Lite launch finishes out.
He's only predicting a small lead for the DS by 2008. I can't see that at all.
I have a problem taking someone seriously when they denounce a whole article but are willing to use statistics from it as argumental fulcrums. Then say, well if the statistics are wrong, that's another reason he's wrong. It would also be the reason you would be wrong too.
What? That doesn't make any sense: I disagree with the logic in the article. I have no interest as to whether or not the numbers are correct.
If the numbers are wrong, then ignore my argument (and his too). I don't care. If someone says "there are 700,000 people in the US who are more than 7 foot tall, and 400,000 people who are less than 4 foot tall, clearly, there are more midgets than giants in the US" there's nothing wrong with me pointing out the fact that 400,000 is less than 700,000. The numbers could be wrong - that's just another reason. But the logic is still wrong too.
In other words, gamers reward consoles which offer them the most choice in their game selection, not necessairly the highest overall quality. Not really surprising if you think about it, but it's interesting to see some numbers backing it up.
Or, it could be that the average rankings drop the more games you have released. Given that of the console systems, the one with the highest average ranking (Xbox 360) has the fewest games.
Even excluding the "if you have tons of games, you must have tons of crap" effect, I think it also has to do with the fact that the more games you have, the more your scale gets set by the best game. With fewer games, you have less to compare to.
Where did you get this idea. They said they wanted to make it accesable for all, a statement they make every release. They have yet to change their tactic of garnering faith with the younger demographic.
Yes, they have. Take a look at the games they have for the DS in Japan. The demographic buying a DS is completely different than those that bought a GBA.
They're not targeting kids. They're targeting everyone else. Girls, adults, grandparents, etc. That's what they are currently doing in Japan with the DS. You think they're going to stop with Wii?
Uhh, no - he's spot on. Even if the PSP and DS have similar install bases, I'd like to see your references
Then read the article. They're quoting an install base for the PSP/DS of 8.7 and 8.8 million respectively. If you disagree with those numbers, that's another reason the guy's wrong.:)
while ignoring the GB Advance SP is a flawed analysis.
Except for the fact that we were only ever talking about the DS? The great-grandparent said "who would've predicted the DS's dominance over the PSP?", the grandparent said "I would". According to the article, the PSP and the DS are neck and neck.
According to the numbers in that article, the install base is roughly the same in the US, or will be by the end of the year - to quote:
For handhelds, in 2006 the group breaks the numbers down to 34.4 million installed units for the Game Boy Advance, 8.7 million for PSP, and 8.8 million for DS.
If you disagree with those numbers, hey, that's another reason why he's wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes obviously this is mind reading and not some subtle body language that the dog picks up.
Wait.
What's the difference?
I mean, take it to an extreme: get rid of all body language, but just presume that the dog is extremely smart, and can interpret all of the variables which cause a person to come to a decision to take him outside.
To take it to the grandparent's extreme, what if two people live together so long that their habits, thought processes, decision making, everything, are all easily predictable by the other person.
How, exactly, would that be distinguishable from mind reading?
Why adhere to the principle of Occams razor?
Occam's Razor doesn't say that there always has to be another explanation. It just says that if you've got two theories, and both equally support the data, the one that requires the fewer assumptions tends to be true.
Since no one's really defined what "mind reading" is clearly (and if you do, generally it's done to the point where it no longer completely matches what people imagine it as) you don't actually have two explanations.
In any case, I think we are reaching the point of dimishing returns, a year old 2GHz processer already rips music as fast as the drive can deliver it, already transcodes video as fast as the drives can burn it etc... GPUs control gaming...
Why wouldn't you just double things up, then? Drop another monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and two users should be able to use one of these computers just as fast as one can on a modern computer.
I know a lot of households that would benefit from buying only one new computer rather than two.
Besides, there are plenty of CPU bound uses for these processors. People who mainly do gaming might not see it, but - my God, those rendering and integer/floating point performances just make me want to go suggest replacing all of our computing servers right now.
I was mainly trying to point out that the "benchmarks" aren't nescessarily useful in describing the performance of these beasts in operation.
Sure they are. Just not in your operations. In mine, oh my God, that thing's insane. But this has been a problem for computers for years. The real-life speed difference in terms of Web browsing between a modern PC and a five year old PC is minimal.
It's not a limitation of these processors. It's a limitation of your usage of them. I'd venture to say that probably 80-90% of all computers out there are far more powerful than they need to be, with the people who use PCs for gaming being the exception in the past. Welcome to the rest of the world.
There are, in fact, other uses for computers than games, believe it or not.
Tech Report's reviews are typically the best I've seen, and these are no exception, adding rendering, video encoding, audio encoding, voice recognition, and in the past, scientific benchmarks as well.
The Core 2 Duo beats the crap out of the A64 architecture just about everywhere - and LAME encoding, voice recognition, rendering, image processing, etc. By large margins - 25% or more.
The pure integer performance of the Core 2 Duo is ridiculous. The last iterations of the Netburst were still faster performers than the A64s, due to their higher clock speeds, but in Sandra's Mandelbrot iterations test, the Core 2 Duo was almost triple the performance of the fastest Netburst. Triple! And the floating-point performance is much better than the Pentium 4s, basically on par with the Athlons.
Now I know why I stopped reading HardOCP. So what if I can't see any benefit in games right now? The entire rest of the system will be faster. By far. And I'd bet you'd see performance gains in games if the system was doing other things at the same time, for instance.
Actually, I always thought the stupidest one was the introduction of the mongoose into Hawaii.
It was introduced to control another introduced species: rats. Why they thought the already-proven solution of cats was too primitive for them, who knows - but the grand stupidity of the attempt is that rats are nocturnal. Mongooses are diurnal. The two species never met.
So now there are rats and mongooses in Hawaii.
That example just proves to me that humanity really, really needs to learn ecological engineering, because we're apparently too stupid to do this by instinct.
Seriously though, this is hardly going to make waves for some time.
Depends what you're interested in. Take a look at integrated battery-backed SRAM: some form of this is used for realtime clocks in PCs, for instance. Large quantity battery-backed SRAM is expensive: 4 MBit (which this is) is huge (a 32-pin DIP package) and is $50 in quantity.
This is half the price. The large-size integrated battery-backed SRAM market just became completely pointless. I wouldn't be surprised if manufacturers of those parts (like Maxim, ST Microelectronics) announces that those parts are discontinued within a year.
Well, the array size is governed by the memory cell size, but the actual storage geometry is governed by the controller.
What? How would you write 8 bits to a device that has no way to write only 8-bits of a 16-bit word? This particular device has byte-select for flexibility, but still, in order to have byte-addressable read/write access, you'd need to add an additional pair of 8-bit buffers for each chip and a bit more logic to support 8-bit read/writes.
But plenty of devices aren't capable of writing to individual bytes. You could rearrange the geometry with a controller (write = read word and rewrite new bits) if you wanted to be insane, but I think you'd have to be a little crazy to do that.
Power on time for the chips is significant WRT access time. 2-3mS as I recall. I don't have the datasheet handy at the moment though.
I didn't see it originally, as it's hidden in a note in the data sheet - but it's 1 microsecond. Which is significant but not insane. You could probably build a power-switched large array of these guys with acceptable performance for certain applications.
Anyway, it's obvious that they're not targeting this thing for large-scale storage (the "10 year minimum data retention" in the data sheet should tip off what other chip they're targetting), but that's just due to the design of the chip (and the current cost), not the technology.
Why all of the sudden did everyone start talking in Mbits for size of memory?
Everyone always has. Go look at chip descriptions in Digikey, or anywhere else for that matter. They only get converted to megabyte, etc. at the end-user level. Mbits are useful if you don't care about the arrangement of the memory, because usually they specify 256Kx16, for instance, which is what this is.
please, for grandma, its a 500 meg chip.
It's a 512K chip. Half a meg.
Switching the power to the chips required to store a chunk of data would require knowing the length and width of the memory required, and then knowing what blocks are free, and then powering on the required chips (with a huge current spike and associated noise), and then making the write.
My bad, I missed this comment. I think you're misunderstanding how easy this would be: you already need a chip select demux for multiple chips. Add a relay and probably a one-shot to delay the system a bit, and you've got a power switcher. The current spike and noise can be handled with decently large capacitors on the power supply.
You don't need to know length, width, etc. of memory. Blocks free? What blocks? It's just SRAM style memory: bunch-o-address lines, and a chip select and write enable. If you want to write to (16-bit) word 0x80001234, the mega-gigantic demux just switches out 0x800012 into the proper chip select and relay, and the addresses just pass on to the newly-activated chip.
Finding a 20-to-1,048,576 demux might take some work, though, but you'd need it anyway.
Keeping the chips alive but idle is the easiest way to design the system.
Yes, but if you're proposing a massively gigantic chip array, I think you've already abandoned the "easiest way to design the system" approach, and you'll probably optimize away the need for a kilowatt of idle power. The fact that it maintains power when off means that you can abandon the idle power if you're willing to trade a little bit of speed.
Note that they don't note the power-on time, though. That'd be nice to know for an instant-on chip.
And remember, my numbers were only for a 500GB x 1 byte array.
Two byte. It's a 256Kx16 chip.
a 500GB FRAM disk would require 1,024,000 of these chips, requiring nearly 2,500 sqft of PCB space, and more power than a pile of overclocked P4s (~9mA * 3.3V * 1,024,000 chips = 30.4128kW at IDLE)
The size issue you're right on (based on the current chip, even though the cell size is smaller than SRAM, which means that it is higher density) - but the power usage? C'mon. You just build an address decoder and switch power to the chip that you're selecting. MRAM's power usage is basically the same as SRAM.
But based upon the size (4 MBit) and the price ($25), they're targeting battery-backed SRAM currently. I'm sure they'll target all external SRAM chips next, and then flash as the production scales.
On the other hand - sorry, I don't quite see how these will be in competition with hard-drives
Right now, they aren't. At that price point, they're competing with battery-backed SRAM (very nicely for the integrated stuff, and it depends on the product for the battery + battery monitor chip + SRAM solution).
Short primer on different memory technologies: SRAM is very fast, very low power, easy to interface, but it needs a battery for data integrity. DRAM is very cheap, but higher power, much harder to interface, and needs not only a battery but a controller for data integrity. EEPROM is everything SRAM is, but nonvolatile but is expensive, and writing requires awkward voltages, can't be done bytewise, and is slow anyway. Flash is similar to EEPROM, but beats it because it's cheaper, doesn't require weird voltages, but writing is still awkward.
The only downside to MRAM currently is its cost - fast and easy reads, fast and easy writes, nothing required to maintain it, and low power to boot. If this becomes available at distributors within a factor of 2 of that $25 price point, there's literally no point to integrated battery-backed SRAM chips anymore. If the price drops by a factor of 2 or so, there's no point to battery-backed SRAM at all.
As the price drops, though, MRAM has the potention to challenge all of those technologies above, as well as hard drives, much like flash is starting to do now.
That is a reasonable price. Right now, MRAM replaces battery-backed SRAM: like the ZEROPOWER series from ST Microelectronics, and a 4-Mbit version (M48Z512A) costs $45 in quantity, and the MRAM chip won't take up huge real estate with a gigantic DIP package.
At $25 in quantity for a 4-Mbit chip, it's about a factor of 5 higher than conventional SRAM. I'd guess that a factor of 5 in cost reduction isn't crazy to expect.
Too bad this chip didn't come out say, five to ten years ago - otherwise you likely would've been seeing it in video game cartridges for a while now.
We've been hearing vaporware mram chip stories for almost a decade now... When is it going to be on the market for people to purchase and use?
Now, apparently. That's what this story is about. Here's a link to the actual chip's spec sheet. Here's a link to the chip's page on Freescale, where you can order it for $25/chip in 1000 unit quantities.
It's not in any consumer products yet, no, but it is available to purchase, which means it isn't vaporware.
These people will know nothing about the console except what they'll see on the side of the box after they buy it.
Yeah - the price tag. And then they'll say "the total comes to how much?", look over, see how much the PS2 price has dropped since when they first bought it, and say "screw it, I'll wait a year until it's half the price."
OK, what is your problem here. Is it that the author is stating a fact regarding PSP vs DS popularity that is true but only giving US statistics?
What... in the devil... are you talking about? The author - as in, the article, as in the guy speaking at the conference - was talking about North American installed base. He projects a small gap between the PSP and the DS opening in the North American sales figures by 2008. In the current year, there is essentially no gap, according to his figures.
Is it that you disagree with the DS crushing the PSP in overall popularity worldwide?
Why would I be talking about the DS vs the PSP in installed base worldwide in an article about North American sales figures???
Cause guess what, the statement the Methusala poster made was regarding PSP vs DS worldwide (I assume)
Why would he be talking about the PSP vs the DS worldwide in a thread related to an article on North American sales projections?
The freaking original poster was saying "how can you predict this stuff? you couldn't predict the DS beating the PSP!" and the other poster responded that he could've predicted it. I disagree. All of his reasons apply equally well to the US market as to the Japanese market, except in the Japanese market, the DS is killing the PSP. In the US market, they're currently tied. So there's got to be another reason why the DS is killing the PSP in Japan. That reason is the DS Lite, the Brain Age games, and marketing to non-gamers.
Those things are just starting to happen in the US, which is why the author - the presenter - the guy the article is about - is likely wrong. The DS likely won't stay tied with the PSP.
In other words, gamers reward consoles which offer them the most choice in their game selection, not necessairly the highest overall quality. Not really surprising if you think about it, but it's interesting to see some numbers backing it up.
Or, to further comment, it could be because the guy did a crappy analysis.
Take a look at his DS/PSP comparison : he states the PSP is like 70%, and the DS is far lower. From gamerankings.com's own data, that seems to be because of a large number of games with very few reviews for the DS. If you restrict the set to only games reviewed by 50 or more reviews (i.e. statistically sound data), the DS is ahead of the PSP (80% to 77%).
Just poor analysis.
Which is probably another reason why trending won't show the right behavior for the DS/PSP battle. If users really aren't buying many games for the PSP, then the profits of PSP publishers will start going down, and down, and then Sony will make less money on the licensing of the games, and eventually have to pull the system.
Right now I think there are a lot of people who bought a PSP for "other" reasons, but Sony isn't making money on those "other" reasons. At some point, it's entirely likely the whole setup for Sony will just collapse like a house of cards.
The DS, however, is a healthy, growing handheld.
Bloody freaking hell, this thread was talking about whether or not the DS is dominating over the PSP. Worldwide, it is, thanks to Japan. In the US, according to this article, it isn't.
GBA kicks the crap out of both of them so far. Combined. But it's not part of the discussion.
Okay?
No, this is the quote that started the whole thing.
The other poster then gave reasons why he'd expect overwhelming popularity of the DS over the PSP. Except in the US, it isn't overwhelmingly more popular. Yet.
In the US, ok - but not worldwide - and that is the scope of the article.
No, it's not! The article is US sales only!
What's revolutionary about the PS3 is its price.
As has been mentioned, if you adjust for inflation, (or even if you don't) it's not more expensive than the neo-geo was.
Exactly. And the Neo-Geo's price wasn't mainstream, because the console itself wasn't mainstream - at least, in the end, it wasn't. Sony's hoping to sell a mainstream product at a premium price, and that hasn't been done before.
Are you kidding? They've both started. Maybe not directly to consumers
That's what I meant. By "market research" I meant "go ask consumers" (and by consumers, I mean all consumers, not just gamers, considering Nintendo's not targeting gamers) and if there hasn't been significant marketing to those consumers, then doing that sort of research is a bit pointless. I mean, if you did it, and then said "hey, most of Nintendo's target market doesn't know about the Wii yet!" - um, yeah, but they will come launch day.
I wouldn't call what Nintendo and Sony have done so far 'marketing'. More like 'market teasing'.
I'm not so sure that's all that meaningful a metric of success, though. Doesn't the massive dominance of the DS in Japan count for something? What about the number of game titles purchased per system?
I agree. In fact, that was my original point before people started to get bogged down in where my numbers came from (which is hilarious, considering they came from the article).
I think the reason the DS is doing so well in Japan is because they started getting another demographic - girls, adults, etc. - with Nintendogs and the Brain Age series, and then the design of the DS Lite just really drove that home.
What I'm saying is that this guy is predicting that the DS and PSP will stay neck and neck. For a while, in Japan, it looked like that was true there, too. Then Nintendogs/Brain Age/DS Lite hit the market, and the PSP got flattened in the span of a month or so. So I think it's entirely possible that it'll happen in the US too. We'll have to wait and see how the DS Lite launch finishes out.
He's only predicting a small lead for the DS by 2008. I can't see that at all.
I have a problem taking someone seriously when they denounce a whole article but are willing to use statistics from it as argumental fulcrums. Then say, well if the statistics are wrong, that's another reason he's wrong. It would also be the reason you would be wrong too.
What ? That doesn't make any sense: I disagree with the logic in the article. I have no interest as to whether or not the numbers are correct.
If the numbers are wrong, then ignore my argument (and his too). I don't care. If someone says "there are 700,000 people in the US who are more than 7 foot tall, and 400,000 people who are less than 4 foot tall, clearly, there are more midgets than giants in the US" there's nothing wrong with me pointing out the fact that 400,000 is less than 700,000. The numbers could be wrong - that's just another reason. But the logic is still wrong too.
In other words, gamers reward consoles which offer them the most choice in their game selection, not necessairly the highest overall quality. Not really surprising if you think about it, but it's interesting to see some numbers backing it up.
Or, it could be that the average rankings drop the more games you have released. Given that of the console systems, the one with the highest average ranking (Xbox 360) has the fewest games.
Even excluding the "if you have tons of games, you must have tons of crap" effect, I think it also has to do with the fact that the more games you have, the more your scale gets set by the best game. With fewer games, you have less to compare to.
Where did you get this idea. They said they wanted to make it accesable for all, a statement they make every release. They have yet to change their tactic of garnering faith with the younger demographic.
:)
Yes, they have. Take a look at the games they have for the DS in Japan. The demographic buying a DS is completely different than those that bought a GBA.
They're not targeting kids. They're targeting everyone else. Girls, adults, grandparents, etc. That's what they are currently doing in Japan with the DS. You think they're going to stop with Wii?
Uhh, no - he's spot on. Even if the PSP and DS have similar install bases, I'd like to see your references
Then read the article. They're quoting an install base for the PSP/DS of 8.7 and 8.8 million respectively. If you disagree with those numbers, that's another reason the guy's wrong.
while ignoring the GB Advance SP is a flawed analysis.
Except for the fact that we were only ever talking about the DS? The great-grandparent said "who would've predicted the DS's dominance over the PSP?", the grandparent said "I would". According to the article, the PSP and the DS are neck and neck.
If you disagree with those numbers, hey, that's another reason why he's wrong.