Gamespot has an [url="http://www.gamespot.com/all/news/news_6073040.html"]article on the Cell chip[/url], which may (or may not) be the heart of the Playstation 3.. The part of the article that got my attention is below..
quote:While the processor's design is still under wraps, the companies say Cell's capabilities will allow it to deliver 1 trillion calculations per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz.
Now, 100 times more faster than a P4 chip running at 2.5GHz is nothing to be sneezed at. But let's imagine that it does what they say when it comes out - what do you think this means for games in the future? Give me all your speculations, hopes, or fears on what we can expect from the games running with this horsepower..
** Actually, scrap that question. I think we've discussed our 'dream games' in another thread before. [:)]
I think it will be pretty cool :)
http://www.ps3insider.com
http://www.ps3insider.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=3
Its like we learnt in Computer Architecture, even though there may be a claim that something performs really well, say to a teraflop level, there is always an overhead, and no-one can make the processor run at optimal speed for long, therefore the real practical limit is probably only 80% of what they claim at best.
Its like claims on video cards that they can render so and so number of triangles every second, but that assumes that all triangles are flat shaded and only a few pixels in size with no overdraw. So you gotta take these things with a (big) grain of salt.
Well i think that even if the PS3 doesnt live up to the hype, it's not unreasonable to think that rendering full pixar level graphics in real time is an obsurd statement. It's definitely gonna happen. Just not necessarily on the ps3. Having said that, the concept of the cell tech sounds achievable, but i guess we'll see if it works when it arrives. However, b4 that can happen, they need to overcome that same hurdle the phantom console will have. Connectivity.
On a side note, has anyone seen that trailer for the ps10 or sumthin? it was just a concept some design firm came up with. They made a full fledged trailer based on the concept and when you see it it just opens up your mind to the possibilites of future gaming. You'd b lucky to find it now though, the trailer's like 2-3 yrs old .
quote:Originally posted by Fluffy CatFood
This reminds me of the bollocks about the ps2 being banned in some countries because its powerful enough to launch nukes, heck those super computers in the 70's that were as powerful as a calculator could do it, They just want to over hype.
My understanding (and I could be wrong) was that there was an issue with America and its security laws concerning the export of 128 bit tech at the time. Its my understanding that this is why some companys moved off shore at that point in time.
Sure it was blown out of proportion and hyped through the roof, but I thought it had a basis in fact (Fact being stupid American law)
Pantmonger
quote:Originally posted by sho-nuff
Well i think that even if the PS3 doesnt live up to the hype, it's not unreasonable to think that rendering full pixar level graphics in real time is an obsurd statement. It's definitely gonna happen. Just not necessarily on the ps3.
That's all good, but the Toy Story reference was made towards the PS2, not the PS3... [:)]
quote:Originally posted by Red 5
I feel it'll be both exciting and daunting to develop for (from an artist's point of view) unless we can develop new quicker methods for producing 3D art content.
I couldn't agree more.. making content is definately going to have to evolve. If it means characters and organic objects are modelled by hand with clay, and then scanned in, I'm looking forward to it. [:)] (I think that's what Kenneth Scott did with the Doom 3 characters.. I remember seeing a small rubber/clay statuette of one of the characters seen in game).
I think PS had never been the tech power house. The PS2 is nothing but a P 400 with GeForce 2 with no ram, but also not windows in the back ground which helps.
They have won with Marketing and will go on doing that. Like saying the PS2 can do 70 million polys a second (which they did) and it can't get anywere that high in the real world. More then likly doing the same thing with the PS3.
Yes i hate PS.
quote:Yes i hate PS
Seems a bit harsh, its just a console. Some fun stuff is on it and no one makes you buy / own / play on / read about it.
I like the PS, probable because of the games I have enjoyed on it. But I also have other consles (but not an x-box, nothing personal just last on the list.
Im keen. I'd like it if it was also still backward compatable.
Pantmonger
With regards to America and 128 bit stuff, I know that they've got something against exporting any encryption greater than 56bit to certain countries, because it's a lot harder to crack. And with regards to the missiles, the Patriot missile defence system uses 24 bit floating point values, so basically any 386 with a math co-processor could be used to launch missiles.
quote:The PS2 is nothing but a P 400 with GeForce 2 with no ram
The PS2 itself is a bit more than just a 400 with a GF2, it's a 300 MHz machine with 2 dedicated vector floating point units which mean its like a 300 with 2 Pentium 3 (SSE component) chips attached to it, in addition to having an onboard video card. You're just simplifying it all because you hate it.
quote:Originally posted by Doord
They have won with Marketing and will go on doing that. Like saying the PS2 can do 70 million polys a second (which they did) and it can't get anywere that high in the real world.
The PS2 probably can theoretically do that, just not the way everyone imagines.
This is the uber-marketing machine at work my friend.
They said 70 million polys a second fair enough but they never said in what form did they?
You know why? Because they knew the average gamer would go into drool ovewrload and from that little tease imagine worlds full of super high poly beings in realtime when they actually just meant unsmoothed, unantialised, untextured triangles that don't move.
If you fell for it then its your own fault I guess.
quote:Originally posted by Doord
Yes i hate PS.
Shit they had better stop making games for it then lol.
Hell I still only own a PS1 because I'm a poor sap so I can't wait for the PS3. I think my first few pay checks might go straight into consoles.[:)]
Thank god I still have my PC.
i think they should design the ps3 into a robo-dog like aibo. Or at least design it in such a way as to promote gaming as more of a social activity, instead of where it currently stands. As a past time for the bedroom.
O.K there is the exception of arcades, but there is only so much time crisis, daytona, street fighter, tekken and DDR that a guy can handle.
Most people I know keep their consoles in the lounge, hell even some PC's end up there.
I also think console gaming is generally a pretty social thing anyway.
Aibo would be cool, but it would be better if it was some anime looking robo-friend who you could hang out with and every now and then it could transform into some sort of mecha battle suit to help you fight off invading angels, lol. [:P]
quote:
Yes i hate PS.
LOL
Ever one has a console they like the least. My just happens to be the PS, even that I have a PS 1 and PS 2, and played then a fair bit. and more then likly get a PS 3, i just wish that I'm didn't have to and have X-Box have all the power. That will not happen because every one hate MicroSoft. Hey maybe that is way I hate PS 2 because they have the console market by the neck, the same reason a lot of poeple hate microsoft. Hmm funny.
robo-dog:
Cool, the PS 2 was a game console and DVD player (and now a TV record, and net thing) way not also make it your pet.
Sony Are You Reading This: Ten Thing Your PlayStation Can Be For You. lol
I dread the console war being over. Just look how fast PS2 and Xbox prices dropped in the first 2-3 months after the xbox released here!
From what i gather, PS3 and XBox 2 (or whatever they call it) will be realeased around the same time, so Sony won't have the advantage of releasing a year earlier next time which should reduce their market hold.
CYer, Blitz
PS2 did not just gain the market hold due to an earlier release, they gained it because of fan loyalty as well as rights to produce certain, already popular games and the fact that the console was backward compatible, which allowed a much larger initial game-base even for non-PS1 owners. On top of this their marketing strategy was much better, I remember several of my non-hardcore gamer friends didn't even know what an X-Box was when Microsoft first started advertising in bus stops, billboards etc, as the posters were just the 'X' logo with 'Microsoft' written on the bottom.
The earlier release helped for sure, but I personally belive that the PS2 would have come out on top even if all three major consoles were released simutaniously, perhaps not as far on top, but on top nonetheless. Perhaps it will be different next time, particualy if the X-Box 2 and/or GameCube 2 are backward compatible as well.
Yes, I'm reviving up an old thread here, but it's on topic [;)]
This sorta news has kinda been lost within all the leaked Xbox pics news, but Toshiba gave the first public demo of what the Cell can do. quote:In the demo, 48 MPEG-2 streams stored on a HDD were read, decoded and projected to a 1080i resolution display divided into 8 x 6 cells, each of which showed a different video fitted to the cell size. The company expects to use this technology to display moving thumbnails in a video list.
Not terribly useful for us ordinary folk, but is [url="http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/8119/Toshiba-Gives-First-Public-Demo-of-t…"]impressive nonetheless[/url]. [:)]
The thing about the Cell is that it doesn't re-order instructions on the fly. That means a massive reduction in chip complexity, and it's why they've got it running at >= 4gHz, but it's instruction re-ordering that makes CPUs fly (the re-ordering is to exploit the innate parrallelism of the CPU).
Still a peak 256 gigaflops from 1 chip (that terraflop figure is from 4 chips) is pretty damn impressive. It will take one HELL of a compiler to build efficient software for it though (or a big team of advanced god level assembly language programmers, and being RISC the Cell isn't meant for hand coding asm).
I think I'll wait and see myself.
BTW previously I said my athlon 2500 does 2.5 gigaflops. That's based on my own benchmarks using SSE vector instrinsics and Intel C++. I've seen some people claiming high-end P4's can do 10 gigflops, and from my testing that is not that case: my 3200 does around 3.
The playstation 2 was much more like an old Silicon Graphics workstation than anything else, which is one reason why Sony managed to port Linux to it so easily (Linux was already running on the old SGIs)
quote:Originally posted by Doord
quote:
Yes i hate PS.
LOL
Ever one has a console they like the least. My just happens to be the PS, even that I have a PS 1 and PS 2, and played then a fair bit.
And this is why the overhyped and under-delivering PS3 will still be a smash hit... because you will buy one. Your mother will buy one. And every dog kennel will not be complete without one. All the tech boys wet themselves over the specs. All the hardcore gamers freak out over the sub-titles of sequels and everyone else gets one because it occupies the most floor space at Kmart. I boycotted sony after they released the Playstation and see no incentive to change this stance. Your souls are weak and you are all far too quick to go to the dark side. Patooie!
there is something of a difference between liking the least and a boycott. Likewise in the case of the playstation (2 ofcourse in this generation) i find it the least desireable of the consoles but that dosent mean i see no reason to have one. So when it became affordable my household purchased one, it was however the last console we purchased (ie cube and box came beforehand).
I think for now I'll be satisfied with the construction of my Gaming and TV Box. MythTV now supports running MAME so I'll have a DVD, PVR, and Console Box in hte living room :-)
I'll upload screenies once its made and running.
Lorien: On the programming side of the PS3 I would imagine a whole new market of libraries will spring up, one's that run on the cell's vector pipelines and do specific things. So you'd have a Cell physics, video decoder, audio decoder, compressor/decompressor, etc libraries that people have coded and optimised. The application makers would then just plonk these libraries together and they'd have a complete and relatively optimised system in no time.
quote:Originally posted by lorien
The thing about the Cell is that it doesn't re-order instructions on the fly. That means a massive reduction in chip complexity, and it's why they've got it running at >= 4gHz, but it's instruction re-ordering that makes CPUs fly (the re-ordering is to exploit the innate parrallelism of the CPU).
That's a bit of a nit-pick. Instruction reordering really only helps to maximise the efficiency of a single processing pipeline, and is something that can be done by a smart compiler. In fact a lot of the extra logic contained in modern processors is there simply to get around inefficiencies in the pipeline. Cell strips away all the crap and focusses on making the pipeline itself as fast as possible. That means less logic, which means a smaller core, which both makes for a higher operating clock speed. And now that the core is smaller you can squeeze more onto one die.
So what we've got with Cell is a bunch of high performance processor cores, each of which is seperately configurable and can operate completely independently of the others, all under the supervision of a seperate PowerPC core. You're worried about instruction reordering? Just use the PowerPC core as a kind scheduler farming out macro instructions to however many cores are under its control. Alternatively, start thinking about entire processes that could be assigned to a particular core: one for physics calculations, one for sound processing, one for video stream decoding, one for AI...the list goes on.
Admittedly, what with multi-CPU systems around right now, none of this is particularly new. What excites me about Cell is that it has been built from the ground up with massively parallel computing in mind, and I think this is where the future lies. If the presentation I saw at AGDC is anything to go by, the idea eventually is to have each Cell chip on a completely self-contained motherboard, which can be mounted in a rack. Each Cell can communicate with the others over 10Gb ethernet built onto the motherboard. The OS (whatever that happens to be) will automatically use the combined power of however many Cells are in the box.
What I would really like (and I don't think this is too far away) is the ability to alter the internal architecture of the chip in order to optimise it for a particular task. Gone would be the need for your GPU/PPU/SPU, just one general purpose chip that could become whatever you needed it to be. Want more power? Just get another chip. Then everyone could have a supercomputer in their lounge room...but then they wouldn't be "super" anymore because it'd be average spec, but it'd be pretty damn cool all the same.[:p]
Not to pick back at your nits there, but the key thing about a RISC pipeline architecture is that it works very well for code that doesn't need to make too many decisions (ie: transform this list of a billion matrices), but has a high cost for code that makes a lot of decisions or branches. Assume the pipeline can take ten instructions, if the first one is a "If value = 0 go and do something else" then the other nine instructions in the pipe are wasted - thrown away. not only that, but it's ANOTHER ten cycles before the one you've just switched to completes it's work (and what if it's a branch too?)
I can imagine compiler technologies based on hyperthreading to avoid this (ie: have two completely differnt contexts running down the same pipeline), but the long and the short of it is that gameplay code will run slower, which flashy graphics will go faster. Some very big compiler smarts will be required to get stuff running to these new processors' full potential.
In computing you never get something for nothing :)
mcdrewski: I'm sure that they'll include conditional instructions such as found in the later x86 processors and the ARM instruction set. That should allow for some clever optimisations that don't require the execution stream to branch. Plus you could just run the massively branching instructions on the controlling PowerPC chip while the massively parallel processors are crunching through the graphics, sound, compression, decompression, physics etc.
We all know Sony have an excellent "hype" machine... we've seen it in action before, but if it does turn out to be close to their claims I feel it'll be both exciting and daunting to develop for (from an artist's point of view) unless we can develop new quicker methods for producing 3D art content.