[Jsnuff1]

ok someone please tell me I havent gone crazy here...this is part of an artical describing the PS3 system architecture...

"In order to design the most powerful processor possible with current technology, Sony formed a partnership with electronics giant Toshiba and supercomputer expert IBM. Together, the companies have assigned a team 300 engineers and are spending (an estimated) $500 Million to develop a new type of processor which has been nick-named the Cell. The processor is actually a collection of smaller processors. Software packets, called �cells�, are then sent to each of the smaller processors in order to give instructions on what tasks to perform. When implemented optimally, the processor will be able to calculate up to 1 trillion floating point calculations per second, which as you would imagine, is better than any standard computer processor. "

Did i read correctly? One teraflop from a gaming system??? What? Have IBM and toshiba found the holy grail of chips? Someone shed light on this...or else ill go buy myself 10 of these when they come out and ill have a supercomputer faster than vergina tech's...

[Phanguye]

Cell is bad ass... they originally said that they want every PSx version to be 1000 times faster... but i think they revised it to 100... cell will enable them to do it

[benb]

Yea, and the Emotion Engine was supposed to be able to actively simulate wind and leaves in real time.

[scaught]

doodz. thats like a million billion polygonz!!!

or.

how many bit is that?

[MindFad]

Originally posted by scaught:
doodz. thats like a million billion polygonz!!!

or.

how many bit is that?

That's like 600-bit teraflopped polygonal floating-point texture maps with refractive bump-mapping! LoLoolOlOlloloL

Duh, stupid.

About the leaf and wind simulation�that's like the new buzzword for "16-bit." Sure, any of the consoles could probably handle that, but it's down to the developers to write it. Of course, maybe one tree model and 200 polygonal leaf models, a dynamic random wind model, and no game. Or are we talking alpha-masked textures for leaves? It's down to the artists and programmers (talented programmers, I imagine). Graphics can do many things, and they can also make you think they're doing very complex things that are easily achieved.

Anyway, I'm getting a PS3, especially if it's backward compatible with PS2 games. (The new Castlevania, drollz0rz.)

[dillerX]

Originally posted by MindFad:
That's like 600-bit teraflopped polygonal floating-point texture maps with refractive bump-mapping! LoLoolOlOlloloL

Duh, stupid.

About the leaf and wind simulation�that's like the new buzzword for "16-bit." Sure, any of the consoles could probably handle that, but it's down to the developers to write it. Of course, maybe one tree model and 200 polygonal leaf models, a dynamic random wind model, and no game. Or are we talking alpha-masked textures for leaves? It's down to the artists and programmers (talented programmers, I imagine). Graphics can do many things, and they can also make you think they're doing very complex things that are easily achieved.

Anyway, I'm getting a PS3, especially if it's backward compatible with PS2 games. (The new Castlevania, drollz0rz.)

When you design your first game Fad, I wanna see NSFG squeezed into it somewhere.

[Axo1ot1]

Yo with all that power it will be the best system evar. My choice is made.

[MindFad]

I might want to design games, though I'm more keen on being a level designer. I'll stick a NSFG statue in there somewhere for you.

[Axo1ot1]

Originally posted by MindFad:
I might want to design games, though I'm more keen on being a level designer. I'll stick a NSFG statue in there somewhere for you.

Statue? How will the pixilation work? Maybe a special mask designed into the game so that it animates as you move around the statue?

[MindFad]

Originally posted by Axo1ot1:
Statue? How will the pixilation work? Maybe a special mask designed into the game so that it animates as you move around the statue?

Yeah, you could put some pixelated refraction in front of his thing or something, like they do with torches (think Zelda: Wind Waker). But hey, they didn't pixelate David. We should be able to see it in all of its stony glory.

[Axo1ot1]

Originally posted by MindFad:
But hey, they didn't pixelate David. We should be able to see it in all of its stony glory.

With the pixels it is comic, without it just seems intimidating.

[RooneyX]

And the graphics will still be crap.

Remember when they previewed the PS2 they said graphics would be lifelike, enemy AI would be realistic and human characters would have genuine facial expressions with wrinkles and all?

[faragbre967]

I don't believe it. When it comes to PlayStation, Sony is a lot like Microsoft. From a marketing stand point, why do anything special when you can just build on what you've done right and ship it before your competition? PS3 will be out almost a full year before the next Nintendo system or the Xbox 2, so they don't have to do a damn thing, except make claims like that. The masses will go buy it, only to make excuses later; like that PS3 has just as good of graphics as Xbox 2, the developers just aren't doing it right.

[MindFad]

Originally posted by Axo1ot1:
With the pixels it is comic, without it just seems intimidating.

LoL

[BlackGriffen]

Originally posted by faragbre967:
I don't believe it. When it comes to PlayStation, Sony is a lot like Microsoft. From a marketing stand point, why do anything special when you can just build on what you've done right and ship it before your competition? PS3 will be out almost a full year before the next Nintendo system or the Xbox 2, so they don't have to do a damn thing, except make claims like that. The masses will go buy it, only to make excuses later; like that PS3 has just as good of graphics as Xbox 2, the developers just aren't doing it right.

Well, you're wrong. Nintendo and Microsoft are both on record concerning the fact that they won't let their competitors get the kind of head start Sony did.

Now, for the cell processor. There's a loaded phrase in that release that you guys need to pay attention to:

"When implemented optimally,"

What this means is that 1 terraflops peak performance in a cell processor is not the same as if a single Pentium or PowerPC processor were claiming the same. In fact, there isn't really any such thing as a cell processor, because it is many processors. To give you some idea, I give you this formula:

throughput = frequency * n * N

where n is the number of instructions a processor can complete in every cycle, and N is the number of processors. Because of this, there are many different ways to get the same throughput. There's a catch, though: N and n only help real world throughput if instructions can be executed at the same time. You can think of a program as a series of questions, and the processor generates the answers. If the answer to the next question depends on the answer to the one before it, then you cannot execute the instructions at the same time. Chip makers get around this, somewhat, by running instructions "speculatively." Basically, the chip assumes an answer, and just discards the results later if it made the wrong assumption.

The phenomenon I described, called dependency, puts a limit on how much you can adapt the code to execute on multiple processors in parallel. You can try to speculatively execute more and more to get around it, but for each binary condition (true/false) the number of possible outcomes goes like two to the power of the number of conditions (iow, diminishing returns kicks in for this strategy really fast).

The other hurdle is that figuring out the parts of the program that can be executed in parallel is not trivial. I fact, it's hard. So, unless Sony/IBM/Toshiba pull off some sort of compiler miracle, the PS3 is going to be a btch to code for effectively.

So, long story short, PS3 will have a lot of potential, but that potential looks like it will be hard to get at.

BlackGriffen

[faragbre967]

Originally posted by BlackGriffen:
Well, you're wrong. Nintendo and Microsoft are both on record concerning the fact that they won't let their competitors get the kind of head start Sony did.

Now, for the cell processor. There's a loaded phrase in that release that you guys need to pay attention to:

"When implemented optimally,"

What this means is that 1 terraflops peak performance in a cell processor is not the same as if a single Pentium or PowerPC processor were claiming the same. In fact, there isn't really any such thing as a cell processor, because it is many processors. To give you some idea, I give you this formula:

throughput = frequency * n * N

where n is the number of instructions a processor can complete in every cycle, and N is the number of processors. Because of this, there are many different ways to get the same throughput. There's a catch, though: N and n only help real world throughput if instructions can be executed at the same time. You can think of a program as a series of questions, and the processor generates the answers. If the answer to the next question depends on the answer to the one before it, then you cannot execute the instructions at the same time. Chip makers get around this, somewhat, by running instructions "speculatively." Basically, the chip assumes an answer, and just discards the results later if it made the wrong assumption.

The phenomenon I described, called dependency, puts a limit on how much you can adapt the code to execute on multiple processors in parallel. You can try to speculatively execute more and more to get around it, but for each binary condition (true/false) the number of possible outcomes goes like two to the power of the number of conditions (iow, diminishing returns kicks in for this strategy really fast).

The other hurdle is that figuring out the parts of the program that can be executed in parallel is not trivial. I fact, it's hard. So, unless Sony/IBM/Toshiba pull off some sort of compiler miracle, the PS3 is going to be a btch to code for effectively.

So, long story short, PS3 will have a lot of potential, but that potential looks like it will be hard to get at.

BlackGriffen

So, in short, I was right; just not about the dates. I actually have no idea about release dates, just what I've heard here and there. But I think the point here is that PS3 isn't going to be nearly as good as Sony is claiming; and that's what's important.