@Tomas

Quote:

I have never noticed any lag problems using xbox live service. I do however agree that the customer should be clearly informed about the price before purchase.

Google is your friend, you can easily find hundred thousands of related discussions if you want to know more.

@ BrianK

Regarding Blu-Ray in the Americas:

"And this month, "The Dark Knight" became the hottest release of the year when it sold 3 million copies on its first day of release. Connecting the two events was the news that 20 percent of those copies were Blu-ray.

In general, Blu-ray is growing faster than DVD. The installed user base of Blu-ray players, at an estimated 2.5 million, is at least double what DVD was at the same point in its life cycle. And that doesn't include the roughly 8 million PlayStation 3 video-game systems that also are capable of playing the high-def discs."

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/tv/36410579.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUsr

Also interesting:

Pioneer 1TB Blu-ray Disc in the works

"Firstly, you will be glad to hear that the 400GB disc WILL be compatible with existing players, so when it does eventually hit shelves, your current machine of choice will be able to spin it."

http://www.techradar.com/news/video/1tb-blu-ray-disc-in-the-works-490214?src=rss&attr=news

@MikeB
Quote:

Google is your friend, you can easily find hundred thousands of related discussions if you want to know more.

I bet i would find thousand of posts regarding the same issue on any other console with online play. Alot of people dont know much about network or even what kind of broadband they have. Is it odd that some of these people experience problems? If a person for example leaves a p2p application running att full speed then one would most likely experience severe lag.

Nothing to do with the live service imo.

edit: fixed the wrong quote.

Last edited by Tomas on 26-Dec-2008 at 11:59 PM.

@MikeB

I think we're on the same page sending essentially the same stuff. You see it as a Blu-Ray win. I see the writing on the wall that other services such as online HD video is going to play a role in the game.

Look at it this way...
records -> 8tracks -> Cassettes -> CDs -> SACD/DVDA -> online
SACD and DVD-A's lives were cut short.

I think we'll see
Reel to reel -> VHS -> DVD -> Blu-Ray -> online.
I expect online to cut Blu-Ray's life short and share the marketplace.

400GB or 1TB discs really aren't that interesting. I think in the end it'll allow manufactures to make more profits on recycled material. Sell you that TV season for $100 and instead of 5 discs it'll be on 1. No real W00t for the consumer.

Nintendo just announced a movie download service in Japan. It'll interesting to see if it's able to take off in Japan.

@Tomas

Quote:

I have never noticed any lag problems using xbox live service. I do however agree that the customer should be clearly informed about the price before purchase.

IMO the price before purchase is well spelled out. Not saying anything and having it be free, in the case of the PS3, is much easier.

As for Xbox Live lag... There has been intermittent Live issues throughout it's lifespan. Last Christmas I believe there was a couple of days where some people just simply could not get on. Microsoft promised to not let that happen this year and it appears to have been fixed. That being said PS3 online has also had it's issues from time to time. I see online gaming, stores, TV as still in it's infancy. It's hard to know how your 15M users will scatter themselves online through the hundreds and hundreds of applications. Clearly there are going to be spikes such as Christmas when more people have the days off of school and off of work then others. Having worked at an ISP it's always interesting trying to slice a cost effective solution without having to overbuild for that 1 day of severe usage. I think back to when the internet came to a standstill back on 9/11 for example.

@wegster

Quote:

Interestingly, there are definite similarities to the Cell, although workarounds for some of current Cell shortcomings (SPE local storage size, etc): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(GPU)

The local store was originally only designed to be 64K but got upped twice. I think a lot of people thought 256K would be too small but it's turned out to be OK for most purposes.


The next version of Cell looks like it'll have a bigger LS. It'll effectively be a series of Cells on 1 chip though the PPE will be a new design. Clock speed wont change much though, raising clock takes far too much power.


I think Intle have got it wrong with Larrabee, by making the system coherent (i.e. using caches instead of LS) they've given themselves a major problem, cache latency will be horrendous. To get around this they've gone with a multithreaded design, to program it you have to control dozens or even hundreds of threads and try and stop the caches from flushing that's going to be very complex - much more complex than anything you do on Cell.

They have gone with the x86 instruction set but other than making a compiler easier at first it doesn't help them, it only makes the hardware more complex and slower. I think Cell is a much better design and this will show when they start scaling to more SPEs.

Last edited by minator on 27-Dec-2008 at 02:33 AM.

_________________
Whyzzat?

VGChartz current (read nearly year end)
Worldwide #s....
#1 Wii -- 43.8M ~50% of market
#2 360 -- 26.5M ~30% of market
#3 PS3 -- 18.8M ~20% of market

IMO with the worldwide economic recession 2009 will see marketshare growth for the lower cost consoles. Wii wins this gen...

@minator

Quote:

The next version of Cell looks like it'll have a bigger LS. It'll effectively be a series of Cells on 1 chip though the PPE will be a new design. Clock speed wont change much though, raising clock takes far too much power

When the Cell was talked about it was said to be targeting 4Ghz for speed. Unfortunately by the time of the PS3 launch this was reduced to 3.2Ghz.

IBM Blades have what's called the XCell8i. This processor has signifcant improvements to the double precision floating point processing and 4Ghz speeds. The ratio of double point precision to wattage is much better than the PS3.

@BrianK

Quote:

When the Cell was talked about it was said to be targeting 4Ghz for speed. Unfortunately by the time of the PS3 launch this was reduced to 3.2Ghz.

Sometimes you have to wonder where all this "wisdom" originates from.... The specs posted here from March 2005 clearly state 3.2 Ghz. it was however never a secret higher clocked Cell with more processors, new features and more memory will become available in due time.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/614/614783p1.html

That's long before the PS3 released, over 2 years before the platform launched here in Europe.

Sometimes you also hear XBots claim the RSX was a last minute add-on, but that's also not the case, for example:

From 2004:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/nvidia-partners-with-sony-on-playstation-3-graphics-hardware
From 2005:
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2423&p=3

IMO take things written by XBots regarding the history and development of the PS3 with a grain of salt and sometimes a bucket load.

@BrianK

Quote:

VGChartz current (read nearly year end)

IMO this gen is just about to start rolling in the months ahead of us, stay tuned.

Despite all relevant XBox games already having had sequels on the 360 and the console is selling at the lowest entry pricing of the three, the 360 fares worst if you objectively compare sales (also at VGChartz):

http://vgchartz.com/hwlaunch.php (note it is said though that some 360 sales got counted double because of hardware failures)

Last edited by MikeB on 27-Dec-2008 at 07:30 PM.

@MikeB

Quote:

Quote: MikeB continues to compare NXE and Home in many of his postings WTF? I said the exact opposite! How can you ever state that? Yes, Home covers about everything NXE does, but goes far far beyond what it does. They cannot be compared feature by feature as NXE is far too limited.

My point was - you continue to compare NXE with Home, when I don't think NXE tries to be anything like Home. They share features for sure, but NXE is not a comparable service in my opinion. NXE is more like traditional Live with Wii-like improvements and improvements in communality, HOME is a Second Life kind of thing.

Apples and oranges, in my opinion.

e.g.

MikeB:
Quote:

That's why Microsoft will now include 256 MB flash memory in their Arcade units, XNE is by far not what Playstation Home offers, not by a long shot and you can't easily keep using your old environment you got used to unlike with the XMB.

Edit: Just to clarify, I think it is perfectly acceptable to note that in Home PS3 has an exclusive asset for which Xbox 360 has no comparable asset. PS3 has Home, Xbox 360 has no Second Life like system built-in or otherwise. If Home improves it might become a competetive asset for PS3, who knows. I'm just asking for both sides of the argument to a) let Home mature to see where it goes and what it can become and b) not compare it with NXE because clearly NXE is not trying to be Home, but more of another tangent - continuation of Live.

Last edited by jtsiren on 27-Dec-2008 at 09:45 PM.

I think Cell was originally designed to run at higher frequencies but the problem was the SRAMs were not stable at the 0.9v it was supposed to run at so they had to up it to 1.1v, that caused power to raise significantly and they had to consequently drop to 3.2GHz.

If you aren't worried about power they'll clock to a much higher frequency. The SPEs in the current 45nm Cells have been clocked up to 7GHz.

You wont see this though, not even in PS4. All I've seen mentioned is 3.8GHz. It's a lot more efficient to add more cores at the same frequency than increasing clock.


BTW the PowerXCell8i (awful name BTW) is also at 3.2GHz, It doesn't have the power problem but it has 4 DDR2 channels for more RAM and they eat a lot of power.

_________________
Whyzzat?

@MikeB

Quote:

Sometimes you have to wonder where all this "wisdom" originates from.... The specs posted here from March 2005 clearly state 3.2 Ghz

Mikey if you look a bit and remember a bit you should be able to find the answer. The Cell was shown by Sony/IBM/Toshiba prior to the March announcement at ISSCC. At the time all the STI group talked about was the 4Ghz version. IBM documentation came out on performance all about the 4Ghz version of the Cell. So yeah people were disappointed to find out the PS3 would ship with a 20% less clock speed and short an SPE too.

And of course there has been and will be Cell improvements. 6Ghz speeds have been talked about. As have Cells with more SPEs. Significantly increasing the double floats is shipping. I'd suspect they'd look at Power7 or Power8 for the PPE derivative. Certainly when the PS4 comes an improved Cell will be on short list of processors to use.

Did you see earlier this year at ISSCC IBM showed the 45nm Cell? It supposedly uses around 20Watts or ~40% less than the 90nm process. Not quite a linear scaling but good enough for the PS3 purposes.


Quote:

Sometimes you also hear XBots claim the RSX was a last minute add-on, but that's also not the case

I doubt anyone truly believes this. However, some smack talking from Sony early on (2002-3ish?) occurred where the Cell was talked about being powerful enough to run the whole console by itself. I think people even then laughed about the statement more so than truly believed it. Didn't the RSX take a 10% downclock from it's expected shipping too?

There were other things the PS3 was going to do such as dual-HDMI output. Now I have 2 60" HDTVs sitting side by side with the 2nd one never used because I believed Sony. And of course the three Gigabit Ethernet ports wouldn't have been used and Sony cut them before launch.

As for the next gen is getting rolling. I believe the down economies will have an impact to sales of consoles making lower cost (wii, 360 arcade) and lower cost games (wii, xbox live) more attractive.

Last edited by BrianK on 27-Dec-2008 at 10:27 PM.

@jtsiren

Quote:

My point was - you continue to compare NXE with Home

MikeB wrote:

Quote:

That's why Microsoft will now include 256 MB flash memory in their Arcade units, XNE is by far not what Playstation Home offers, not by a long shot and you can't easily keep using your old environment you got used to unlike with the XMB.

In reply to BrianK's:

Quote:

I think of a thread with a Sony apologist here that claimed HOME would only be possible on the PS3 due to the extra space in the bios.

It's very simple jtsiren, BrianK compared XNE with Home. I said something like that would be like comparing apples to oranges. There's overlap with regard to what XNE provides, but what Home provides and especially has potential to provide (things we already know are in the works) go much further.

So basically you directed your message towards the wrong person.

@BrianK

Quote:

So yeah people were disappointed to find out the PS3 would ship with a 20% less clock speed and short an SPE too.

I must have missed this outcry over specs, I couldn't find anything regarding this disappointment online.

The Cell was known to become a powerful supercomputer chip as well, Cell specs can differ amongst different uses. Be that scientific supercomputer usage, game console or upscaling HDTVs.

Of course Sony looks at the best price / performance ratio for their PS3, they included lots of fancy technology. And there are heat concerns (compare with RRoD). The PS3 must come with a somewhat acceptable price and form factor, it's not designed for inside a server park, but rather for underneath a HDTV.

Last edited by MikeB on 27-Dec-2008 at 11:01 PM.

BTW, more 'wins' for Sony.

Bioshock - great game, once again, another game better than R2 in my opinion.

However:
- released for PC August 2007
- current pricing $23 or less, and was on sale for something like $10 for holiday special via Steam.
http://www.direct2drive.com/2/4645/product/Buy-BioShock-(Pre-Order)-Download?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=D2D&gclid=CJzpvOW04pcCFQwDGgodJVsgCw&esvtk_s=bgss
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B000MK694E/ref=sr_1_olp_3?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1230436742&sr=1-3

Released for Xbox 360: also Aug 2007
- current pricing: ~$25
http://www.amazon.com/BioShock-xbox-360/dp/B000MKA60W

Released for PS3: November 2008, a YEAR later than PC and Xbox
Current pricing: $45 on up
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001B1W3GG/bookstorenow9001-20

So, the PS3 sees a year old game, at new game pricing. This is a great way to lose customer loyalty, or see more people not bother with the console version of some good games.

The few PS3 'exclusives' simply don't make up for this sort of lag, and if this continues, PS4 will likely be stillborn for many, possibly myself included, after 3 generations of Playstations and intentionally (so far :-/ ) *never* owning an XBox.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@BrianK

Quote:

Nintendo just announced a movie download service in Japan. It'll interesting to see if it's able to take off in Japan.

And of course, the NetFlix players..last I checked, the HD one wasn't yet released, but $100 for a SD STB, with Netflix regular pricing. Those trying to charge per movie, at astronomical prices, should be shaking, let alone Sony with it's $7 HD movie rentals

Let's see, a pair of rentals from Sony, or a one time $100-$200 box purchase from Netflix, (contrast this to $400+ for PS3), and for the price of a pair of movies, you can watch *many* in a month.

I hope this provides the shake-up and wakeup cable companies, Apple, and Sony need - drop the pricing, or lose the game.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

So far, besides a very few exclusives that matter to be (obviously, Home does not currently, or in the foreseeable future), the single best thing I can say about the PS3 has been it's reliability. I've now had three systems, the first a launch week 60GB that was later stolen, it's replacement (another early 60GB), and the additional 80GB unit I purchased mostly for BD.

I've left them on for weeks on end, with periods of gaming or movies, then left it on and switched to another input at times...and none of them have exhibited any odd behavior or lockups. The first 60GB unit did lock a few times during *long* rounds of oblivion, but that's the worst I can say about them regarding reliability.

Of course, PSN, and the PS3 hard drive and network seem to perform at the speed of a slug (as well as game loading from BD), which does make me curious to getting around to replacing the internal HD to see if it's a drive or hardware/OS limit...

The downsides, most of which are obvious:
- few exclusives
- games showing up much later than PC or XBox, if at all
- cost
- performance versus both a reasonable PC as well as 360
- overpriced accessories and Video On Demand, effectively making them a no-op/not for me.
- lack of RAM, making it much less interesting or useful to install Linux on
- slowest HD I've seen supposedly doing DMA (not benchmarked yet, it may be GameOS causing this)
- many ports are worse on PS3
- 'The Sony way' of forcing things on consumers, instead of listening - failure to launch with rumble/dual shock, intentionally making other PS2 peripherals not work (several $$$ steering wheels, others)
- dropping of PS2 emulation/support

Plusses:
- reliability
- rough parity with 360
- BD player on top of game console, single device
- a few game exclusives worth playing - Ratchet/Clank, perhaps KZ2 if it ever releases, MGS. I could live without either Resistance and most other of the few PS3 exclusives.
- Not giving MS my cash.

Last edited by wegster on 28-Dec-2008 at 04:52 AM.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@MikeB

Quote:

@jtsiren Quote: My point was - you continue to compare NXE with Home MikeB wrote: Quote: That's why Microsoft will now include 256 MB flash memory in their Arcade units, XNE is by far not what Playstation Home offers, not by a long shot and you can't easily keep using your old environment you got used to unlike with the XMB.

Quote:

It's very simple jtsiren, BrianK compared XNE with Home. I said something like that would be like comparing apples to oranges. There's overlap with regard to what XNE provides, but what Home provides and especially has potential to provide (things we already know are in the works) go much further. So basically you directed your message towards the wrong person.

The message I got from your postings reading this thread was one of comparing HOME with NXE. If that is not what you meant, then OK - from the quote above it still seems to me like you did compare them, so sorry for any unintended confusion!

I still don't think BrianK per se compared the two in the quote above, just mentioned that Xbox 360 was able to ship vastly larger "OS" than many originally may have been assumed due to Arcade or smaller original flash in Xbox 360. That was another point.

But my overall point, to whomever it need be directed, is that NXE is completely different approach to some of the same things HOME is trying to achieve. Microsoft, in my opinion, have been pretty consistent in their approach to advancing Live and NXE seems to be a logical and cool next step.

But a virtual world NXE is not, nor is trying to be. Time will tell how many people will actually prefer a virtual world as a communal place in their gaming experience and how many will not. I'm guessing Sony too will continue to advance NXE-like PSN features outside of Home too. It might make sense.

OTOH, Microsoft might find a need to compete with Home one day, who knows.

@MikeB

Quote:

360's Lead (in millions) Sep-05 0.00 Dec-05 1.50 (360's one year or more headstart in North America, Europe, Japan, etc) Mar-06 3.20 Jun-06 5.00 Sep-06 6.00 Dec-06 8.72 (the biggest gap in sales) Mar-07 7.29 (PS3 launch in PAL regions) Jun-07 7.28 Sep-07 7.77 Dec-07 7.17 Mar-08 6.15 Jun-08 5.89 Sep-08 5.66 (the lowest recorded gap since the PS3's launch)

It would be interesting to see an updated list on this. I don't know the source for these numbers, so I couldn't do it myself.

The VGChartz numbers put current gap at around 7.7 million for Xbox 360, up from around 5.5 million at a point in September, which would seem to match somewhat with the above. Anyway, goes towards confirming what was discussed earlier that Xbox 360 has regained the lead it had prior to PS3 launch in Europe. Not at December 2006 levels, though!

The changes in this gap (as well as the gap with Wii) would be cool graph to follow. Relative numbers say so much more about the console competition than absolute numbers or following a number of different lines on a graph...

I understand MikeB made the recent prediction that Xbox 360 sales will dwindle in 2009 (and PS3 will surge?). This will be interesting to see, if it happens. Certainly PS3 commanded some respect in sales earlier this year, Microsoft was lagging for reason (reliability, price, Blu-ray news).

Now that Xbox 360 seems to have gained momentum again (like PS2 did once reaching a certain price-point in its history and started selling by the bucket load) and PS3 didn't really get its ball rolling exponentially despite of some momentary gains (and is no longer the apparent Blu-ray player of choice), I wonder what set of circumstances would allow Sony to regain a gaining position?

Analysts concur: Sony should be worried for the PS3
http://www.qj.net/Analysts-concur-Sony-should-be-worried-for-the-PS3/pg/49/aid/127282

A slimline PS3 might be one (heck, I might buy one just to get a quieter unit - they should make the power external too to cut size), if it included a substantial price cut too, as well as exclusive software of course. Launching in new markets might help too. Although I understand Xbox 360 is not available in all markets Sony plays in, either? On the other hand, the economy probably requires pricecuts while at the same time limiting manufacturers abilities to hand out such cuts.

Interesting times, as always. I certainly didn't predict either the Xbox 360's crash in numbers a year ago (I didn't predict such early gains for PS3), nor the recent impressive rise (Christmas 2008 was supposed to go for Sony, wasn't it?) - so I don't know what will happen!

Last edited by jtsiren on 28-Dec-2008 at 08:23 AM.
Last edited by jtsiren on 28-Dec-2008 at 08:19 AM.