Another hyped PS3 exclusive gets bad reviews:
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/05/21/metareview-haze/
HAZE.

Too bad, as I respect the Time Splitters crew...

@Lou

360 this fall is supposedly the Jasper w/ 65nm GPU. This should indeed see cooling performances and likely help improve RRoD possibilties. Personally I'd like to see Blu-Ray ship on it too. The sooner the better IMO.

I believe the name Valhalla is being bantered about for the joint CPU/GPU system. This could possibly be put in a slimline case as it should be quieter and cooler. A simplified design will also allow a price reduction. The other plus? Why not use such a chip for hardware emulation of the 360 in the Xbox #3? If #3 is radically different (say dual 16 SPE Cells just to tickle MikeB) it may be useful.

@BrianK

Quote:

A strange way to say that the PS3 loses money but less much such that Sony increased to tripling profits. Of course if no PS3 existed the profits would have been nearly $4B higher over the last couple of years.

View this as a critical longterm investment, you may pay for costly university classes, books, food, etc for your children today, no doing so would save you a lot of money. However by investing into your children you open up endless oppertunities for the future.

Sony was easily able to handle the PS3 costs.

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Or the PS3 - you always leave that out too.

Of course and financially that was actually better for Sony, they didn't expect a gaming division profit for their third quarter for their 2007 fiscal year.

Both PS2 and PS3 outperformed the 360.

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PS2 life is ending

It's aging, but the old champ may well beat the much younger 360 for another year. I think the 360's life will be ending next year as well (as in terms of increasingly slowing sales).

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Impressive for the last gen loser, Microsoft, to be so close with the last gen winner, Sony.

Not that much, the 360 only sold about 20% faster the the original XBox did, this with its important games lined up much closer together. They were in a hurry, instead they could have taken their time and polished their games a bit more. I am not saying this was a mistake though, it provides them some PR ammo.

Quote:

It's okay more sequels are coming. GeOW2 isn't a big name? And isn't MGS4 coming this summer? So isn't that earlier then Halo2, as in closer to launch?

Gears 2 is an important game, but a sequel to a 360 game. Most shooter fans being interested in 360 gaming already own a 360 due to Halo and the first game.

Halo 2 was a sequel on the original XBox to a XBox game.

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Clearly the new failure rates are significantly reduced over the launch failure rates. But they are still occuring.

I would say it seems to be somewhat reduced. But nobody knows exactly what the failure rate of Falcon hardware will be after being 1 year on the market.

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There may be a slimline 360. Like the PS3 the GPU and CPU will undoubtably shrink in size.

Sony has a proven track record in this regard (PSP, PS1, PS2). Shrinking just the GPU and CPU will not be enough and I think Microsoft may fear new overheating problems if they shrink everything (cooling, internal space to breathe, etc).

Quote:

Also Sony has switched CPUs each generation -- another Cell may happen

A 'cell 2' has been confirmed for the PS4. It simplifies things a lot with regard to backwards compatibility as well. PS3 games will be heavily multi-threaded at the end of this generation, so game engines won't need to be heavily modified. The specs upgrade should be much more readily noticeable early on.

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Blu-Ray still isn't burning up the charts in fact player sales are down early this year.

Surely compared to holiday sales or Toshiba throwing in the towel. Year over year sales skyrocketed.

Quote:

The Wii clearly shows HDD was not a necessary thing to beat the PS3.

The Wii is a very different type of console. Devs aren´t complaining about the lack of a default harddrive on the Wii, however many leading devs think it´s a very big mistake on the 360.

Compare it to something like this, a good GPS system isn´t a very useful thing to have on a bike, but for a luxury car it´s important.

Last edited by MikeB on 21-May-2008 at 05:28 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 21-May-2008 at 05:25 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 21-May-2008 at 05:23 PM.

@MikeB

Quote:

Correct the SPEs are much more than just CPU cores, it includes a full processor, they are basically independently operating systems on a chip. They can operate far more asynchronous, thus allowing much better to harvest near its peak performance.

This is getting...rather thick.

The primary 'advantage' in developing for the PS3 is to break down the jobs handled by the SPEs, or additional threads/cores to delegate jobs that are _small_ enough to be appropriate for the SPEs use, which coincidentally (because the SPE local store is small at 256K). This is not an 'advantage of the SPEs,' actually a disadvantage, one that must be worked around because of slower primary memory access from the SPEs, but does coincide nicely with the (larger) CPU cache sizes.

SPEs can be chained together for stream processing, and I would say _have_ to be, to be most efficient (because of small local store, among others).

Please describe what makes you think SPEs are suitable to run multiple simultaneous OSes on them.

Far more asynchronous? Lol, than what?

The original CELL model, which still holds today in a more limited form (as we do not see 'connect to another CELL device to expand resources' as of yet), is one of distributed computing.

The PPE is the 'master node' - and the closest thing to a 'general purpose processor' branching put aside. It dispatches jobs to the 'slaves' or 'computing nodes' based on what the programmers thought was an efficient, useful breakdown of tasks, and may perform computing tasks itself.

There is benefit to be had by carefully analyzing the size, as well as the type of tasks to be delegated - some jobs are easily able to be run in parallel, others not, while many 'can benefit but requires planning.'

The ideal here is the job delegated to an SPE is that the code and data fits in the SPEs local storage (256k), as SPE -> main RAM is significantly slower.

Now, given the above, what does this sound like - oh, wait. Unsurprisingly to most, this is very similar to how you decide on what tasks to distribute on, oh, any computing cluster, or...in creation and organization of what you use threads for.

Except, of course - the local storage for each SPE is generally smaller than some CPU caches, so is actually more limited in that respect (ignoring the number of simultaneous hardware threads for the moment), so you have to split up jobs further for maximum efficiency, in order to keep each 'chunk' in the sweet spot in size (as well as processing time, if using SPEs in more round robin, or multiple task fashion). This is something you do not have to do to the same extent on more general purpose CPUs with larger caches, and why 'designing on the PS3 and porting that to (multi-core) other architectures will result in good gains' remains true, but it's not due to the 'inherent superiority of the Cell.'

Anyways, your above statement simply screams of propaganda, or misunderstanding. The PS3/Cell can perform well at some things, but the above quote is misleading.

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

@MikeB

Quote:

A 'cell 2' has been confirmed for the PS4. It simplifies things a lot with regard to backwards compatibility as well. PS3 games will be heavily multi-threaded at the end of this generation, so game engines won't need to be heavily modified. The specs upgrade should be much more readily noticeable early on.

That's interesting, and I've stated it would make the most sense for them, but feared they would 'do something different yet again.' That should at least mean experience people gain on the PS3 in development will mostly carry over to the PS4, which is certainly a good thing.

Do you have a link where this is stated?

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

@wegster

Quote:

The primary 'advantage' in developing for the PS3 is to break down the jobs handled by the SPEs

Since you explicitly begin each DMA transfer on the SPE, this basically forces devs to think in terms of using the local memory store efficiently. Inefficiencies are easily spotted. This results in cache-friendly algorithms for other systems as well.

Quote:

o delegate jobs that are _small_ enough to be appropriate for the SPEs use, which coincidentally (because the SPE local store is small at 256K)

256K is both huge and small. For executable code it's huge, the Amiga 1000 only had 256K to work with in total and had some advanced paint programs, office software and everything including big parts of the operating system, sound and graphics data all had to fit into this memory while still leaving some space for the user to work with.

For other kinds of data, you would design an algorithm to create a streaming formulation in which data can be moved through the processor in blocks. The Cell and the PS3 provides a huge amount of bandwidth for such purposes (307.2 GB/s internally, diagram of bandwidth with RSX and low latency XDR system RAM) .

The 360 Xenon processor only has 32 KiB of L1 data cache per core (thus much smaller than the local memory stores for the SPEs), the L2 cache is also shared by all 3 cores and the L2 cache can be locked for the GPU, so even less data immediately available to keep the 3 symmetric cores in the Xenon CPU running at full efficiency.

The local memory stores for the SPEs are far more interesting, as they can operate independly and even isolated to a degree in situations.

Last edited by MikeB on 21-May-2008 at 06:49 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 21-May-2008 at 06:42 PM.
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@MikeB

Quote:

A 'cell 2' has been confirmed for the PS4.

Really? Any links? Don't forget that Sony pulled out of Cell last Nov.

I say it's still undecided as of early May and here's my evidence
Sony President Hirari said about the PS4 .."There's a great deal to consider, before the Sony engineers run off and start crafting the PS4, the DualShock 4, the next EyeToy.

"We need to take a look at advances in technology in various areas, such as semiconductors, graphics chips, output devices, mainly TV and monitors, to see where we would like to benchmark our next generation product"
IF Cell-2 was selected why didn't he say we luv us some Cell next gen?

Quote:

Devs aren´t complaining about the lack of a default harddrive on the Wii, however many leading devs think it´s a very big mistake on the 360.

An estimated 20% of 360 users do not have a harddrive. This means 10M out of 12M consoles have a harddrive. Microsoft last fall stated they'll allow MMOs to require a harddrive. If, as you claim, there's myriads of developers having problems with making harddriveless options for their games they should let Microsoft know. With enough feedback surely this will change.

@MikeB

Quote:

The 360 Xenon processor only has 32 KiB of L1 data cache per core

and another 32KiB of L1 instruction cache per core.

Quote:

L2 cache can be locked for the GPU, so even less data immediately available to keep the 3 symmetric cores in the Xenon CPU running at full efficiency.

Yes and this shows design differences of the consoles. The Cell processor has the ability to assist the RSX on the PS3. Where the Xenos processor has the ability to assist the Xenon on the 360.

Neither processor is great in general purpose functions.

Last edited by BrianK on 22-May-2008 at 09:19 AM.

@BrianK

Quote:

Really? Any links? Don't forget that Sony pulled out of Cell last Nov.

No they didn't. The core R&D has already been done, now it's mainly up to IBM to continue the hardware development. Developing smaller designs, upping the clockrate, adding some functionality, adding additional SPEs, PPEs, larger caches, etc.

Sony R&D is now mainly geared towards optimising the software. (mostly games and multi-media technology, but also to a lesser extend Linux).

The roadmap is for the PS4, PS5 and PS6 to all be based on Cell technology and will be even more networked.

@MikeB

Thanks for confirming that Sony pulled out of R&D. Sony also pulled out of Cell manufacturing. IBM and Toshiba will likely make 45 and 32nm parts. The question comes will IBM see the need to do improvements (more SPEs for example) or will they simply shrink the design.

Quote:

The roadmap is for the PS4, PS5 and PS6 to all be based on Cell technology and will be even more networked

I see no links on the PS4 confirming 100% Cell certainty. I provided mine. I do see another claim here so again Link?

Kutagari, before he left, talked about ideas of up to the PS6. But do remember he his gone and it's doubtful he had (assuming 10 year life per console) the exact design for the PS6 ready for the market in 30 years. If Kutagari shot the market and the computer technology 30 years in advance then clearly he's a God.

Last edited by BrianK on 21-May-2008 at 08:13 PM.

@BrianK

Quote:

Thanks for confirming that Sony pulled out of R&D.

I didn't say that.

Quote:

The question comes will IBM see the need to do improvements (more SPEs for example) or will they simply shrink the design.

For the PS3 the Cell will mainly be cost reduced and shrunk in due time, but some info with regard to the Cell roadmap:

IBM's Jim Kahle (chief architect of the Cell):

"So that is five times faster by 2010?

JK: Four or five times faster. Yes, you basically need about 32 special processing units."

Last edited by MikeB on 21-May-2008 at 08:52 PM.

@MikeB

Quote:

didn't say that

Okay sorry. But, at least where we stand today Sony is out of R&D. It's up to Toshiba and IBM to make changes.

Quote:

IBM's Jim Kahle (chief architect of the Cell): "So that is five times faster by 2010? JK: Four or five times faster. Yes, you basically need about 32 special processing units."

8 SPE * 4 = 32 SPE. So 4x faster? Certainly if the memory bus can feed the processor quick enough. And expected via Moore's law.

I hope Sony doesn't put a 2010 processor in their PS4. If they want 10 years on the PS3 the PS4 would likely cross over around 2012-2014.

@BrianK

Quote:

8 SPE * 4 = 32 SPE. So 4x faster? Certainly if the memory bus can feed the processor quick enough. And expected via Moore's law.

Yes, that's expected with regard to peak performance. It's however likely they are going to improve double precision performance by a greater ratio.

Quote:

I hope Sony doesn't put a 2010 processor in their PS4. If they want 10 years on the PS3 the PS4 would likely cross over around 2012-2014.

They will likely look at the cost vs performance ratio. There are some things to take into account though. Likely HDTVs won't go beyond 1080p even during the PS4's lifecycle.

They can simply implement multiple older version Cell processors within the PS3's design to achieve similar results, IMO it's certainly not going to be and does not need to be the top model available at that point of time. And some SPEs will likely be disabled to improve yields and thus cut down costs considerably.

Last edited by MikeB on 22-May-2008 at 11:19 AM.

@BrianK

Quote:

BrianK wrote: @MikeB The Cell processor has the ability to assist the RSX on the PS3. Where the Xenos processor has the ability to assist the Xenon on the 360. Neither processor is great in general purpose functions.

Broadway cpu FTW!

@MikeB

Quote:

MikeB wrote: @BrianK Quote: Also note an SPE is not a core. Correct the SPEs are much more than just CPU cores, it includes a full processor, they are basically independently operating systems on a chip. They can operate far more asynchronous, thus allowing much better to harvest near its peak performance. Quote: Okay and a quad core Xeon of today is ~200GFlops with 8 threads Not even close. And the Xeon is a server/workstation targeted processor (just like the Cell of course, but the Cell's potential is far wider). Quote: the PS3 is ~205GFlops with 9 threads The PS3's Cell is ~218 GFlops peak performance. Some quotes: "A single Cell SPE outperforms a 3.0 GHz single-core Xeon processor" "IBM just published a paper about a financial app on Cell, their end result was a Dual Cell blade beating a dual Xeon (Woodcrest, quad core) by 11X on single precision, 3X on double precision.

Intel Woodcrest was using slower memory designs compared to desktop counterparts.

Quote:

That's 8 high end Core2 cores V's 16 SPEs - but the margin is way bigger than the difference in number of cores." http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=36058&page=11

A single AMD RV670 outperforms PS3's CELL more than two times in Fold@Home.

In games, an AMD K10 + AMD RV670 can easily beat the combined NV RSX and STI CELL. How about UT3 @1920x1080p >30FPS ?

AMD’s Ruby 4 demo shows R600 GPU handled physics, geometry amplification and rendering workloads. AMD's RV670/R680 also targets SP/DP FP server market under AMD's FireStream label.

Note that Intel’s PC gaming demo boxes usually comes with AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2 (R680).
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5008&Itemid=34

Last edited by Hammer on 22-May-2008 at 12:48 PM.
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Last edited by Hammer on 22-May-2008 at 12:34 PM.
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Last edited by Hammer on 22-May-2008 at 12:22 PM.

_________________
Amiga 1200 (rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32/RPi CM4/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (rev 6A, ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 4B/Emu68)
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB

http://kotaku.com/5010227/nintendo-wii-gamers-are-hardcore-gamers
Quote:

The average Wii gamer is a hardcore gamer, Nintendo of America's Cammie Dunaway told the Electronic Gaming Summit today. Seventy-nine percent of Wii gamers are male, most older than 18 with an income of $50,000 or more and more than half game for five or more hours a week, Dunaway said. While the people who buy Wii tend to be pretty typical for gaming, the other household members who play Wii aren't, she said. About 45 percent of the other household members who play Wii are female, with 38 percent 25 or older. Sixty-five of these gamers play at least two hours a week, while only 32 percent play five or more a week.

I represent that first stat, but I don't play my Wii 5 hours a week, I play World of Warcraft 32 hours a week...

Also: http://kotaku.com/5010214/nintendo-wii-has-highest-software-sales-for-first-18-months
Quote:

About 50 million games were sold for the Wii in its first 18 months, compared to about 42 million games in the first 18 months of the Playstation 2's life. The Xbox 360 came in at 30 million or so, the Xbox at roughly 28 million and finally the Playstation 3 at about 20 million.

Which means if you synch the launches, the Wii has a higher software-tie ratio than the 360...

Meanwhile on a slow week in Japan, people are starting to buy PSP games rather than pirating them. UNBELIEVABLE! Must be those recent new owners...:
Quote:

01. Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G (Capcom, PSP) - 53,000 / 2,045,000 02. Mario Kart Wii (Nintendo, Wii) - 42,000 / 1,269,000 03. Luminous Arc 2: Will (Marvelous Entertainment, DS) - 41,000 / NEW 04. Bleach: Heat the Soul 5 (Sony, PSP) - 39,000 / NEW 05. Wii Fit (Nintendo, Wii) - 35,000 / 2,074,000 06. Battalion Wars 2 (Nintendo, Wii) - 24,000 / NEW 07. DS Beautiful Letter Training (Nintendo, DS) - 15,000 / 218,000 08. Link's Crossbow Training (Nintendo, Wii) - 14,000 / 156,000 09. Taiko Drum Master DS: Seven Island Adventure (Bandai-Namco, DS) - 14,000 / 147,000 10. Wii Sports (Nintendo, Wii) - 10,000 / 2,989,000 11. Pokémon Ranger: Batonnage (Pokémon, DS) 12. The Color Blue (Success, PS2) 13. Musou Orochi: The Evil King Returns (Koei, PS2) 14. Valkyria Chronicles (Sega, PS3) 15. Mario Kart DS (Nintendo, DS) 16. We're Fossil Diggers (Nintendo, DS) 17. Wii Play (Nintendo, Wii) 18. Tottado! Yowiko's Deserted Island Life (Bandai-Namco, DS) 19. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Nintendo, Wii) 20. Deca Sporta (Hudson, Wii) 21. SimCity DS 2: From the Past to the Future (EA, DS) 22. Kanji Brain Test 2.5M (IE Institute, DS) 23. The Darkness (Spike, Xbox 360) 24. New Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, DS) 25. Home Teacher Hitman Reborn! DS: Fate of Heat (Takara-Tomy, DS) 26. Pro Baseball Spirits 5 (Konami, PS2) 27. Phoenix Wright: Gyakuten Revival (Capcom, DS) 28. Emblem of Gundam (Bandai-Namco, DS) 29. Prof. Layton and the Curious Village (Level 5, DS) 30. Crayon Shin-chan: Arashi wo Yobu Cinema Land (Banpresto, DS)

Also, CAPCOM reports that Resident Evil 4:Wii Edition and Resident Evil:Umbrella Chronicles(Wii) and DMC4 (360/PS3) helped boost it's profits. Perhaps now they will consider RE5 on Wii?
http://kotaku.com/5010231/resident-evil-wii-titles-dmc4-boost-capcom-in-fy08

I'll edit for Japan hw numbers later...

@MikeB

Quote:

MikeB wrote: @BrianK Quote: Sure any processor can handle any number of threads by your theory. But the result is severly degraded performance. The PS3 Cell supports more hardware threads than currently sold dual-core PC CPUs

My dual core laptop comes with a NV G84 CUDA enabled co-processor (on the motherboard) that supports 1Giga hardware threads.

AMD Xenos supports 64 hardware threads. AMD RV670 supports thousands of simultaneous threads.

AMD RV670 includes a "custom" RISC command processor.
http://coachk.cs.ucf.edu/courses/CDA6938/UCF_1_25_08.pdf

Last edited by Hammer on 22-May-2008 at 01:19 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 22-May-2008 at 01:11 PM.

_________________
Amiga 1200 (rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32/RPi CM4/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (rev 6A, ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 4B/Emu68)
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB

@Hammer

Quote:

A single AMD RV670 outperforms PS3's CELL more than two times in Fold

"the PS3 client is much like our GPU client. However, the PS3 client is more flexible, in that it can also run explicit solvent calculations as well"

"CPU units (which continue to be of value since GPUs work only for certain simulations)"

Quote:

In games, an AMD K10 + AMD RV670 can easily beat the combined NV RSX and STI CELL.

Sure can just like the other way around can be true, this depending on the involved game engine and how the engine was optimised, for what technology. There are more gamers with a PS3 specific setup now and forever, so for the long run games developers will specificly optimise their game engines and this process will continue long after this specific PC setup has been discontinued.

Also just this GPU, CPU, motherboard and some RAM would is now more expensive than a complete PS3 entertainment system. Add casing, keyboard + mouse, DVD-ROM drive, etc, etc and the cost of Windows, you get the picture...

It's IMO not very useful to compare PCs with consoles. The PC gaming market is much smaller and is rapidly declining, this while the console market is skyrocketing, the bulk of top PC games are going to hit the consoles, this while there are many games which will never see the light of day on a PC.

Last edited by MikeB on 22-May-2008 at 02:32 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 22-May-2008 at 02:32 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 22-May-2008 at 02:30 PM.

Bioshock confirmed for PS3

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3167898

@Lou

Quote:

Bioshock confirmed for PS3

Sadly too late for me, I was looking forward to this game. But due to denials and rumours of only BioShock 2 hitting the PS3 I watched this game's cutscenes and ending on youtube. Stupid company spokesmen.

FU Ken Levine:

"Then there is the lingering question of the rumored PS3 version of BioShock found in the PC code. Levine responds quite clearly, "I promise you, there is no secret plan about the PS3 that we're keeping from people. There's no PS3 development going on that we're hiding. There's lots of stuff that gets into game code, plans change over time and we got an exclusive deal with Microsoft ... that's not a Rosetta Stone discovery.""