@BrianK

Quote:

I don't believe the PS3 was the fastest selling Sony console ever in the states. I believe the PS2 beat it this Christmas.

I'm sure he meant in the launch window, which probably isn't off considering that the PS2 launch was catastrophic and the market wasn't as big when the first PlayStation came out.

@BrianK

Quote:

Supposedly Sony has missed the shipments this year, only 1M, and of those only 69% are in consumer hands.

Yes most likely, not really news to me, their target was to ship and sell 2 million to retail in 2006. The US and Japan launch received less consoles than expected. Amazingly Sony was still able to ship and sell about 1.5 million units to retail, even outshipping and outselling Microsoft XBox 360 launchyear in Microsoft's home market, shipping a million units to North America (vs 900K by Microsoft) and selling tens of thousands more units in the United States . Currently globally over 1.5 million units have been sold to customers according to my sources.

Many US media and some PC game company managers seem to want to kill the PS3, IMO in some respects somewhat similar to what we saw happening with the Amiga computer, but I think the PS3 will do well in Europe and with the US media's half glass empthy approach, shouting disaster/bust left and right, will IMO likely shoot themselves in the foot for the long run, especially when PS3/Cell developers are able to rock with this machine. I think it's just a question of time, in the meanwhile the PS2 and Nintendo Wii are doing amazingly well all around the globe.

IMO some PS3/Cell developers are the equivalents of Amiga developers back in the good old days, when someone says something is impossible, they are even more motivated to prove the naysayers wrong.

@stone

Quote:

Quote: The Cell in it's design is more general purpose focused then the Xenon utter nonsense. calling cell general purpose is the same as calling the united states a true democracy - both are rediculous claims.

Some more application of the Cell..IBM Blade server, IBM System Cluster, and IBM Supercomputer codenamed 'RoadRunner'. STI showed a 6Ghz Cell for next generation communications and multimedia uses. Toshiba said they will beat Sony to the market with Cell in home devices.

Here's Sony's words on the Cell - 'Scalability offered by Cell can be utilized for broader applications, from small digital CE systems within the home to other entertainment applications for rendering movies, and to the big science applications as supercomputers.'

Here's IBM's words on the Cell - 'The Cell architecture grew from a challenge posed by Sony and Toshiba to provide power-efficient and cost-effective high-performance processing for a wide range of applications.... the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) - is an innovative solution whose design was based on the analysis of a broad range of workloads in areas such as cryptography, graphics transform and lighting, physics, fast-Fourier transforms (FFT), matrix operations and scientific workloads'

Seems to be my statement isn't ridiculous the Cell was designed from the onset to be more general purpose then a gaming processor. This is why MikeyB is so excited he sees it everywhere and has stated he hopes the AmigaOS runs on it cuz he wants to see Amiga everywhere again. The Xenon, made for gaming, isn't looking to extend into other sorts of applications.

@BrianK
Quote:

The statement is that the Cell was more general purpose in it's design then the Xenon. It's not ridiculous at all.

in context of cpu design it sure is. the entire concept of the cell envolves around cutting down on its general purpose core. the fact that its scaleable and flexible doesnt make it a general purpose cpu per say.

Quote:

So which is more general purpose? CELL

please read up on cpus before trying to cook up new definitions for well establised terms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor

Quote:

I don't believe the PS3 was the fastest selling Sony console ever in the states. I believe the PS2 beat it this Christmas.

it doesnt really matter what you belive. while the ps2 shipped 1.4 million within its launch window, the ps3 has shipped 1.6. what is left to be seen is how good the sell-through has been. currently there are a lot of unfounded articles stating it doesnt sell, and just as many unfounded articles trying to counterprove them.

what is sure though, is that time will tell. personally i find the continued un-documented mud slinging to be rather childish and irellevant.

/stone

@MikeB

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in the meanwhile the PS2 and Nintendo Wii are doing amazingly well all around the globe.

And the 360 is picking up pace nicely. Yes, it's a good time to be a gamer.

Quote:

IMO some PS3/Cell developers are the equivalents of Amiga developers

That's hacker nature - someone says it can't be done and someone goes ahead and does it. It has nothing to do with PS3 or Cell...

Besides, let's not forget that the PS3 is the Atari ST with the cpu horse power and the 360 is the Amiga with the graphics chip to offload the cpu, eh?

@stone

Quote:

stone wrote: @BrianK Quote: The statement is that the Cell was more general purpose in it's design then the Xenon. It's not ridiculous at all. in context of cpu design it sure is. the entire concept of the cell envolves around cutting down on its general purpose core. the fact that its scaleable and flexible doesnt make it a general purpose cpu per say.

Perhaps I misworded.. My comment in response to the comment that the Cell was primarily designed for gaming. Looking at the work and statements from STI it appears their intent was to design a processor with optimizations for media handling and not the narrow focus of a game CPU. It has more general use applications then a game machine. Whereas the Xenon was designed for 1 purpose in mind that to be a game console processor. Perhaps this wording is better -- The Cell was not designed with the single purpose in mind to be a game processor, such as the Xenon, but designed with other purposes in mind such as multimedia processing.

Quote:

Quote: I don't believe the PS3 was the fastest selling Sony console ever in the states. I believe the PS2 beat it this Christmas. it doesnt really matter what you belive. while the ps2 shipped 1.4 million within its launch window, the ps3 has shipped 1.6. what is left to be seen is how good the sell-through has been.

It looks like perhaps a miswording on your part as your original sentence failed to include the term 'launch window'. Trezzer above did a nice job in helping clarify your point. With that correction in mind you are right.

Also I see you said this thread shouldn't be 50 pages long and you are tired of the mudslinging. All good points. I'm trying to be polite so don't take it harshly but there are other threads that may be less offensive to you. You are welcome to stay.

Last edited by BrianK on 16-Jan-2007 at 12:07 AM.
Last edited by BrianK on 16-Jan-2007 at 12:06 AM.

@BrianK

Quote:

Looking at the work and statements from STI it appears their intent was to design a processor with optimizations for media handling and not the narrow focus of a game CPU. It has more general use applications then a game machine. Whereas the Xenon was designed for 1 purpose in mind that to be a game console processor. Perhaps this wording is better -- The Cell was not designed with the single purpose in mind to be a game processor, such as the Xenon, but designed with other purposes in mind such as multimedia processing.

This was in answer to my point, I said Cell was *primarily* designed for games.
If it was designed primarily for media processing it would have kept the saturated integer commands from AltiVec, whereas these were removed. Other commands would also be present (motion estimation etc.) and it would have been a great deal smaller.

Same goes for Scientific processing, if that was the main design point it would have had full speed support for double precision FP. It can do DP FP but it won't have full speed support until the DP version next year.

If you look at the PS2 it has quite a few similarities: vectors, non-IEEE SP FP for speed, local stores (called scratch-pad on PS2).

The architecture was designed with other things in mind but many are similar to games or are used within games so it's not as if there's any loss.

_________________
Whyzzat?

@BrianK

Quote:

The Xenon on the other hand was designed off of Power4 too but in it's design the primary, and likely only, would be gaming and entertainment.

Actually neither were based on Power4, they do use the same instruction set though (apart from AltiVec). They were based on an experimental PPCs developed at IBM from 1997-2000 but both were modified from that.

The 970 / G5 was based on Power4.

_________________
Whyzzat?

@minator

I think where we differ is in the use of 'primary' your use is singular and state the 1 reason gaming. I quoted the info from IBM where they talk about a design design was based on the analysis of a broad range of workloads and which includes the most demanding consumer appliance: game consoles. I think more appropriately is the Cell has a small group of primaries with one of those being game performance.

As you mention parts of the chip that could be better for certain applications there are areas tht could be better for gaming? The SPEs are nicely configured for streaming tasks like collision detection but not the best situation for AI, for example, The PPE is good for AI. In gaming if you want more intelligent or variety of AI it's likely beneficial to give the developer more then a single PPE. The Xenon has the multiple full cores and AI is better handled by that arrangement.

Thanks for the info on Power4 that was indeed correct. Keeping all this stuff straight is sometimes fun. I went back and read IBM papers along with Arstechina review and other sources and refreshed myself. The cores on both are in-order execution and while based on the Power line in instructions are indeed their own. Perhaps a sibling might be a more appropriate description.

A couple items to think of. Toshiba is using the Cell for non-gaming console do you think their primary reason to go into the STI relationship was to improve Sony's PS3? Look at the releases from IBM about the 360 where they talk about it's gaming ability and fail to mention any other activities, definitely something that looks more like it has a single primary, gaming. This seems to be a bit different then the Cell which looks more to have a small set of primaries.

Last edited by BrianK on 16-Jan-2007 at 03:02 AM.

@Trezzer

Quote:

That's hacker nature - someone says it can't be done and someone goes ahead and does it. It has nothing to do with PS3 or Cell... Besides, let's not forget that the PS3 is the Atari ST with the cpu horse power and the 360 is the Amiga with the graphics chip to offload the cpu, eh?

But what has happened with the hacker spirit on the 360? Oh no, let's go DirectX, so we don't have to explore the hardware ourselves anymore.

And let's not forget, when CPU's became faster, we were offloading the gfx chips.
And I was told that the PS3 was designed so you can shift the workload as you see fit. I have a movie with Phil Harris where he is showing a landscape render (coming from LIDO data) that was done purely on the Cell. The RSX was only used to display the rendered stream. Nothing was added by the RSX. In the next part they are navigating through a fantasy world that grows to life, making use of both the Cell and the RSX. Sony really stresses that the Cell and RSX complement each other.

I have no doubt that the 360 can do similar things, but with the PS3 potentially you have so much more control over it. And I would say that is the "true" Amiga spirit. Taking control of the hardware, not bounded by a developer suite.

Last edited by jiyong on 16-Jan-2007 at 04:24 AM.

@jiyong

I really doubt you should think of it as being bound by a developer suite. DirectX is merely the API to access the functions you would hit directly in the old days. It's there for a good reason and remember we have it on Amigas too. It just doesn't make sense not to have it - especially when it comes to financials of scales with multiplatform games.

Sony are using OpenGL ES and Nvidia's Cg shader language in place of DirectX.

@jiyong

Quote:

But what has happened with the hacker spirit on the 360? Oh no, let's go DirectX, so we don't have to explore the hardware ourselves anymore.

Dirext3D provides the abstraction layer for future changes in GPU hardware design e.g. VLIW array (e.g. NV3X), SIMD/MIMD array (e.g. AMD R5x0, Xenos), Scalar arrays (e.g. NV G80).

Quote:

Sony really stresses that the Cell and RSX complement each other.

Compared to AMD's Xenos and R5x0, RSX’s G7x architecture is less programmable.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@BrianK

Quote:

Supposedly Sony has missed the shipments this year, only 1M, and of those only 69% are in consumer hands.

Apparently Sony has now been focussing on Asia again, they have now shipped 1 million units in Asia as well. So they are about two weeks late.... The sky is falling!!! The sky is falling!!!

IMO shipping 2 million units in less than 2 months isn't bad at all, considering their initial shortages, IMO a very impressive figure.

It appears the 1 million shipped to the US is by far not enough to meet demand.

Here you can see which large PS3 dealers still have units in stock, most of them are out of stock however, if you aren't interested in a bundle Circuit City seems to be the most likely candidate:

http://ps3finder.com/

However if you are interested in the 20GB version of the PS3 without Wi-Fi, CompUSA seems to have the best deal, you can create your own bundle.

For instance a PS3 + HDMI cable + an extra wireless SIXAXIS controller + 2 games (Sadly Resistance is sold out....) + PS3 G-Pak Console Organizer and Travel Case only for 499 dollar!?

Last edited by MikeB on 16-Jan-2007 at 10:41 AM.
Last edited by MikeB on 16-Jan-2007 at 10:38 AM.

@MikeB

Quote:

For instance a PS3 + HDMI cable + an extra wireless SIXAXIS controller + 2 games (Sadly Resistance is sold out....) + PS3 G-Pak Console Organizer and Travel Case only for 499 dollar!?

Not bad at all!

_________________

For people who are afraid of installing Linux on their PS3 but still want to check out the OS, there's now a Debian Live CD available:

http://ps3.qj.net/Debian-Linux-Live-CD-for-the-PS3/pg/49/aid/79458

Yellow Dog Linux can be downloaded here:

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/Yellow-Dog-Linux-10407.shtml

@MikeB

Yeah now that's a decent price.

I wonder how they can throw that much in compared to the others.

@MikeB

Quote:

My gf is playing MS Pacman-trial right now, finally a XBox 360 game she may learn to love...

I will have to correct myself, due to an email I received from Edgar M. Vigdal, she now greatly prefers his excellent remake of the Amiga classic Pacman Deluxe for the PC, Deluxe Pocmon:

http://www.warblade.as/pocmon/

If only XBox Live's arcade games were of this quality! IMO would make sense if he ported this game, at least if easily done through XNA software tools.

Last edited by MikeB on 16-Jan-2007 at 03:17 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 16-Jan-2007 at 03:16 PM.

@MikeB

To some extend I agree that the PS3 is more interesting to so of the Amiga 'coderz'. (sometimes you shoot over the boundaries, MikeB )

Linux, while not the best solution for what I want, could be a start. I have a day job, and while not in the game industry I am kind a close. I can't do much about it (bound by my contract), but I'd be very interested to explore the SPEs and the architecture.

While XNA is nice, I consider this just another game engine (or editor as it allows engine plugins - but so does e.g. Blender), but it is another step to degenerate the programming environment (it's hard enough to find people who can really program nowadays, XNA enforces even more click and point "programming" - don't even know, why that's still called programming). That said, XNA is the only way to get some homebrew going on the 360 (well, maybe not, I would have to look into the 360 homebrew scene), while on the PS3 there is - err - nothing. Wait, hey there's Linux. (maybe more in the future).

We programmers tend to become pretty spoiled now a days, especially the senior generation which claims to be part of the first generation of developers. People in my age were at the front line when gaming was born. They had to hit the HW and come up with some creative ways to get the max out of it. Over time this "species" (the original game developers) have evolved, I would say into an spoiled elephant.

Now there's middle ware. Who would go with their own thing any more. At the end you get your salary (not small, BTW). Don't waste a dime and get the max out of it. Who has time to investigate into new technology ? We would earn less then say 100K a year. Oh darn.

I don't say its not expensive and the costs exploded over time, seriously. Exploring a CELL (which I consider the most expensive piece of HW from a SW developer POV) costs a lot, and might take a couple of month/years to really get something out of it. Especially because it requires a complete mental paradigm shift.

Now you sit there and your whole evolution (dictated by the big MS or others) pushed you into a linear way. OOP, C++, well, you could adopt a little to think a bit more parallel - they told you since years that MHz are not scalable. But sometimes history happens in a different timescale than the natural human is used to. It happened faster. All of a sudden the market is full with multi cores. Well, OK, it was hard enough to handle that step, but now, Sony (oh you ####s!) come up with an async parallel machine ? How dare you are! We just started to adopt, and now this ? What the heck! (Actually, that includes Carmacks comment about developing on the 360 and backporting to the PS3. He might be right. This is way is cheaper then say sitting there for a year and use your favorite gcc to max out the SPE. We'll see who has the longer breath).

For me, personally, I don't care. I don't get payed to make my hands dirty with a PS3. I have to luxury to maybe do something on my own - and still get pay for something else. That said, I look forward to play around with that thing a little bit. Maybe starting with Linux. Well, there are tons of things out there one could do with it. An SPE dev kit is there, even though not really in a preferred way (who wants a cpu seen thru a file system in the gaming world ?) but then, it might work. MESA is out there. Guess one project could be writing a rasterizer which uses the SPE(s) (especially because there's not access granted to the RSX - could result in a very fast SW renderer). Then there's things like crystal space out there. That can be ported. Guess what. That uses ODE as a physics plugin. Porting ODE to the SPEs would be a next project. Don't know how ODE can be "parallized", but would give a nice research project (or lead to something completely new).

While I doubt these things would ever result in games, which can challenge serious game development, it can help to fundamentally understand how games work from a programming perspective. It is more then XNA. It goes below the surface. So much what is needed now a days. But its again my generation which might do it. Or maybe I am wrong. Maybe the you guys (and ladies!), out there will do it. They are usually much faster on learning new things then I am now. We'll see. I look forward how this will evolve. As long as Sony doesn't break under the PS3 load they have to carry.

Some people here seem to take certain things way to personal. Its just a machine. What the heck...

_________________
AmigaOne XE G3/933/VIA/FM801/R200 (fixed),
G3SE/600/Voodoo3/Sil680/RTL8139/SBLive! (noiseless!)
µA1-MK2/G3/933/R200/CMI8738
XE/G4 (broken 7450/800)

@MikeB

Quote:

If only XBox Live's arcade games were of this quality!

They are far, far better.

Remakes aren't the original game, Mike. People generally want the original title. I would be seriously po'ed if Double Dragon or Sensible Soccer had been tampered with when
they hit the Xbox Live Arcade.

The remakes also have their place and titles like Geometry Wars Evolved is basically just Robotron on steroids - which is great. It's just not Robotron.

And actually Xbox Live Arcade titles are far beyond the quality of Vigdal's titles (not trying to belittle them because they're great shareware games - they just don't compare at all).

Just look at titles like Assault Heroes, Small Arms, Zuma, Marble Blast, Mutant Storm Reloaded, Lumines Live, Roboblitz and the upcoming Heavy Weapon (this week).

Last edited by Trezzer on 16-Jan-2007 at 03:28 PM.