@MikeB

Quote:

“It’s exciting to imagine what will happen when you put a supercomputer-class PlayStation 3 with a great OS into the hands of developers,” said Ray DePaul, RapidMind President and CEO

DePaul says -- I love the PS3. This supercomputer stuff needs to stop. The PR wanking is getting a bit sickening. As for power/price the PS3 is a good deal, for now. This good price does come at the expense of Sony who loses a few hundred per console. There are computer systems out now that beat the PS3 in performance but not price.

If Sony is looking for 10 years of console life that's all well and good. But, with the rate of computer change in the industry I'd estimate 2, at worst 3, years until we have computers that outperform at about the same price range. Using the PS3 for a Linux computer is nice geeky thing to do. I doubt it's going to take off in any significant way. Also, I doubt studioes are going to stick with it they'll buy new computers in a couple years which render the use of the PS3 obsolete. Unless we see Sony and IBM come out with a desktop Cell machine which handles faster graphics cards and can handle faster Cells I'm highly doubtful the PS3 is going to be a long term computing solution.

Porn industry going HD-DVD

There is 1 company found to be considering Blu-Ray the rest of the porn industry is almost exclusively supporting HD-DVD

@MikeB

Quote:

PS3 490.7 K + 15% = 564 K + 226 K = 790K is roughly in line with earlier North American estimates, Japan (Hong Kong and Taiwan figures unknown) was 456,750 = 1 million and 246K units

OUCHY! This means Sony missed their projection of 2M by end of 2006. This doesn't set them up good for the 6M by March figure they push. They not only have the 4M more to sell but have to make up for undershipment in 06 in order to reach it.

I'll go out on a limb -- Sony will not have 6M consoles in consumer hands by March 1. Heck I'll even give them to the end of the day.

@MikeB

Quote:

Even in a worst case scenario if the vast majority of content providers currently backing Blu-Ray would suddenly decide in HD-DVD's favour, Sony and MGM will likely keep Blu-Ray alive with their huge movie libraries for many years to come.

It could be a long, hard fight for sure.

That Sony actively wants to get rid of the porn industry could be the death toll regarding mass adoption, though. Whether Bluray or HD-DVD wins, I'm sure Bluray will be in a better position than UMD movies simply because they make more sense than UMD. I mean.. you can actually watch them on your tv as long as you have your PS3.

@BrianK

Quote:

DePaul says -- I love the PS3. This supercomputer stuff needs to stop.

I'd like to see this kind of comment from you once for a MS marketing bubble comment. Please don't take this to personal, but it is usually this one way street "bashing" what I dislike and I use your comment only as an example (it might describe the feeling I get on a number of biased comments all the time).

What I don't understand why people have such an interesst in seeing Sony to fail. Are they really that much of a thread to competing - and already successful - companies ? Or is it simply greed because they are successful with the PS2 (and not do bad with the PSP?). Whatever, just a thought.

Back to RapidMind. Well, obviously they have specialized in CELL solutions (BTW. they don't specifically mention just PS3, but also dual CELL based blade servers) or better in "abstract" multiprocessing. I think if that's their business strategy, to sell specific (development) solutions for CELL based machine, they obviously will market their product as "superior", like everybody else does (incl. MS with their XNA - which also is just a (good) integrated development solution - but its not the only one).

OTHO, RapidMind does not necessarily promote the CELL itself, but their product which gives you kind of an abstraction across the board (ant - without knowing hard facts - this could include the 360/Multicores/GPUs). If their approach really works, this is a milestone for anybody who wants to port from one platform to another (seems the abstraction is encapsulated in a high level macro wrapper).

Quote:

computer systems out now that

Far from $600, though (however, that latest Gateway special for a Core Duo wasn't bad with $499 (ex. Monitor) - but no good gfx, and no, I'd say slower then aa PS3).

Wake me up, when 4 or 8 core solutions reach $600. (Makes me wonder how long this whole thing will last).

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@BrianK

The problem with the article you referenced is that the two key components they said they are using for them choosing HD-DVD are no longer true as was pointed out by lots at CES. At this time there are 10X more Blu-Ray players then HD-DVD players, and that number is just going to get bigger. And Blu-Ray production costs as of CES just went way down so the cost factor is negligible. HD-DVD is dead as of CES, in less then a year it will be the Betamax of the HD world except unlike Betamax its not better quality.
-Tig

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@BrianK

Quote:

I'll go out on a limb -- Sony will not have 6M consoles in consumer hands by March 1. Heck I'll even give them to the end of the day.

I think the 6M is crap. They should be happy to reach 3M. But who cares? Except rich people who will loose some money on Sony shares.

More games would be nice, eventually they'll come. Read John Carmacks comment about preferring the 360 over the PS3 as a development platform. What he also says - and that's surprising - is that it seems to be enough to do milestone updates from the 360 version to the PS3. I'd read that in a way, that the PS3 will get a lot of 360 titles - except the first party titles which are bound to MS contracts. I'd expected a higher porting effort.

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@BrianK

Quote:

OUCHY! This means Sony missed their projection of 2M by end of 2006.

Most likely they shipped at least 1.5 Million, like I stated earlier. Complete figures aren't known.

"SCE Asia managing director Tetsuhiko Yasuda did not manage to clarify how many PS3 consoles would be made available for Hong Kong or Taiwan, but he explains that the current plan to ship one million units within an unspecified timeframe."

It seems only a percentage of those who pre-ordered received units. Unlikely not that many, as North America seems to have gotten a priority. However their shipment, despite likely not reaching target figures (like Microsoft with the XBox 360's launch), is still a lot more than most of the press expected.

Quote:

I'll go out on a limb -- Sony will not have 6M consoles in consumer hands by March 1. Heck I'll even give them to the end of the day.

I thought those were March shipment targets. If so, they have unitl the 31th of March to meet this goal, which should include the European launch.

@MikeB

Quote:

I thought those were March shipment targets. If so, they have unitl the 31th of March to meet this goal, which should include the European launch.

If the launch is early Mach, well, maybe. I doubt that Eurpe will sell more the 1M for the lauch. Given the 1.5 (max) currently, 2M units until then + 1M for the lauch makes around 4M to 4.5M. I think that's much more realistic. 6 is very agressive I doubt they'll reach that.

It just plain stupid from Sony again. Ever heard of "under promise and over deliver"? With their strategy they can only fail...(again, who cares, Sony won't get bust because of it and even a 10M market is a market).

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@Jorge

Quote:

What I don't understand why people have such an interesst in seeing Sony to fail.

There's a lot of bad behaviour on Sony's part. Sure, Microsoft and Nintendo have also acted inappropriate at various times, but Sony are just p*ssing on their customers, where the others tend to do it on competitors.

Examples?

* Rootkits on their audio cds.
* Cash bleeding of Bleem! in spite of never actually winning a case against them (forced closure)
* Cash bleeding of Lik-sang and thus forced closure - the preferred store of import gamers and one of the best places in the world to find gear that was otherwise very hard to obtain
* Constant lies about their machines' capabilities (from PS2 onwards)
* Vandalism
* More lies

I could find even more, but I think I've made my point.

Quote:

Or is it simply greed

For it to be greed one would have to benefit from it.

Quote:

I'd say slower then aa PS3

Slower if PPE and all SPEs are running at full speed. As a general purpose computer (Linux) you're not getting that, though. In fact you're getting somewhere around the speed of a 1,5 GHz G5 - give or take a little (and with laptop drive performance).

Last edited by Trezzer on 12-Jan-2007 at 06:09 PM.

@Jorge

Quote:

I'd expected a higher porting effort.

It's not necessarily a small effort. These days you don't code things from scratch after all. You use your own engine or middleware and mostly just have to make sure that it runs well and move content across, balance things out and so on.

@Trezzer

Quote:

Examples?

Well, sure. I do not agree to their business practice either. But I can't really complain about their service. Well, My PSP broke down twice since I have it. The first time my son wrecked my UMD drive cover - got it replaced within days, service people were very friendly and called me back 2 times because I could find the right channel to get thru - the second time they didn't. But, OK, that was not really a clear situation, and I could fix the problem myself and it cost me $20.

But, that very same is pretty much true with MS. They have tons of common accepted business terms where they simply shoot out the competition. Beginning with support contract which makes it impossible to support anything else then MS. Aggressive marketing against Linux Server solutions, or hostile takeovers of competing companies, forcing proprietary standards (and not sharing information), etc. (I am pretty sure, there are a ton of sites out there with examples).

While I understand why people are angry about Sony, MS would at least deserve the same. Or they don't. But then this would apply to both, again. (Maybe Apple, too. With their restrict policy...but then, where would it end).

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@Trezzer

Yes, but I was thinking, a symetric cpu could handle load balances much more dynamically then say a pretty static async core. OTHO, the other has more cores and could allocate them more dedicated. Obviously, there is a good way to trade one for the other as long as you keep parallel design in the main design goals.

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@Tigger

Porn stays on HD-DVD - due to Sony

@Trezzer

Quote:

For it to be greed one would have to benefit from it.

oops, wrong word. "envy" was more what I wanted to say. Maybe its still greedy - from the other side - , both are kind a close (depends from which perspective you see it:)

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@Trezzer

oops, then no HD closeups for me :) (well, yeah, porn on a 60" 1080p Plasma, while the kids are playing. That's what we need. indeed).

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@Jorge

Hehehe. I'm not sure what the impact of the porn industry will be on this. They've gone hi-def online even before the media hit the streets. The porn industry has always been a couple of steps ahead of the rest of the bigwigs when it comes to tech adoption.

I have no idea of what kind of numbers they churn out on physical media these days and whether it's a growing or declining business model. It could be kinda interesting to see the raw numbers. Anyone got a clue on where to dig those up?

@Trezzer

Blu Ray burners will certainly be available for the whole Home-Video market (probably not including DRM protection). Well, they can burn them them selfs and ship 'em directly :) I doubt Sony can do anything about it - eventually.

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@Trezzer

Quote:

Anyone got a clue on where to dig those up?

Heyyy... you just dig up your own prn!

Last edited by jtsiren on 12-Jan-2007 at 06:50 PM.

@jtsiren

I did say raw - not nude
I bet you're just keeping all the good links to yourself.