New PS3

[General Failure]

This sunday at dinner. It's dad will disown it, and it's mother will start crying. The PSP will feel uncomfortable about the whole thing, but it already knew.

[JansenFan]

This sunday at dinner. It's dad will disown it, and it's mother will start crying. The PSP will feel uncomfortable about the whole thing, but it already knew.

[NC43Hog]

Is GF talking about Queer Eye for the PS3 Guy, cause we have another thread for that?

http://www.the-hogs.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11983

[air_hog]

its all about XBOX Next.

But i bet that PS3 and XBOX Next will both cost around five hundred bucks.

as of now im fine with XBOX 1 and as long as they keep making games for it, im good.

I dont know. Sony still owns 60% of the market. MS has to be careful or they may go the way of Sega. The dreamcast came out 1st and Sony came out 2nd and killed it graphically...which is debateable. Sony's in a good position. They have the largest backing of 3rd party developers. MS has gained quite a lot but are still largely behind.

This generation proved that its not about graphics, its about the games. Xbox kills the PS2 graphically in general, although the PS2 has games that kill Xbox too. Sony won because it had the best games of almost every genre. What good are those purdy graphics is the game isn't fun to play?

Have you heard of Halo?

But I think the reason Sony has a better market is because of it's Asian market.
Xbox is made in the USA, however PS2 are made in China or whatever so everyone is Asia gets the PS2

Plus i hate the PS2 controllers, they're too small.

[Chris Luva Luva]

What about Halo?

Wow, MS has Halo, one game over a 3 year life span? The avg life span is 5 years for a console, MS is cutting that short to get a head start because they're behind.

Have you heard of...

Grand Turismo?
Metal Gear Solid?
Final Fantasy?
Silent Hill?
Grand Theft Auto?

I can keep going, all of these games are either Sony exclusive or they come out for the PS2 1st and then the Xbox gets a crappy port 8 months later. Metal Gear Solid 2 came out on Xbox a year later and was a horrible port. It goes to show how much effort they even put into the game.

I enjoy my Xbox but Sony is king for now, and theres no reason to think they're going to be over taken.

[cvillehog]

I enjoy my Xbox but Sony is king for now, and theres no reason to think they're going to be over taken.

Except that Sony, as a company, has its head up its ass.

You don't think the most powerful computer company on the planet can overtake Sony's gaming dominance? Well, who would've ever thought that a small-potatoes computer company could've overtaken Sony's personal music player dominance. I mean, Sony even has it's own major record label, and they were beat out in the online music sales and personal music players.

[Chris Luva Luva]

I enjoy my Xbox but Sony is king for now, and theres no reason to think they're going to be over taken.

Except that Sony, as a company, has its head up its ass.

You don't think the most powerful computer company on the planet can overtake Sony's gaming dominance? Well, who would've ever thought that a small-potatoes computer company could've overtaken Sony's personal music player dominance. I mean, Sony even has it's own major record label, and they were beat out in the online music sales and personal music players.

I didn't say never, but I don't see it happening in this coming generation. I'll go on record and say that it won't happen.

The fact that MS is the most powerful PC company has nothing to do with the gaming industry? The only thing that helps MS is their fat pockets. They took incredible losses on each and every Xbox they sold. The architecture of console chips and PC chips are totally different.

[ToxicSkin]

I don't mean to butt in on your conversation, but are any of you guys/gals purchasing a PSP next week?

[cvillehog]

I enjoy my Xbox but Sony is king for now, and theres no reason to think they're going to be over taken.

Except that Sony, as a company, has its head up its ass.

You don't think the most powerful computer company on the planet can overtake Sony's gaming dominance? Well, who would've ever thought that a small-potatoes computer company could've overtaken Sony's personal music player dominance. I mean, Sony even has it's own major record label, and they were beat out in the online music sales and personal music players.

I didn't say never, but I don't see it happening in this coming generation. I'll go on record and say that it won't happen.

That's my point. You likely won't see it happening until it happens.

The fact that MS is the most powerful PC company has nothing to do with the gaming industry? The only thing that helps MS is their fat pockets. They took incredible losses on each and every Xbox they sold.

What did apple have to do with the personal music market before they took it over?

The architecture of console chips and PC chips are totally different.

This is not true. The current xBox uses x86 processors from Intel -- same architecture as your PC. The next xBox is using the PowerPC processor from IBM, same as the latest Machintosh computers. PS3 will use the upcoming Cell processor, which is built on the PowerPC architecture.

[Chris Luva Luva]

I enjoy my Xbox but Sony is king for now, and theres no reason to think they're going to be over taken.

Except that Sony, as a company, has its head up its ass.

You don't think the most powerful computer company on the planet can overtake Sony's gaming dominance? Well, who would've ever thought that a small-potatoes computer company could've overtaken Sony's personal music player dominance. I mean, Sony even has it's own major record label, and they were beat out in the online music sales and personal music players.

I didn't say never, but I don't see it happening in this coming generation. I'll go on record and say that it won't happen.

That's my point. You likely won't see it happening until it happens.

The fact that MS is the most powerful PC company has nothing to do with the gaming industry? The only thing that helps MS is their fat pockets. They took incredible losses on each and every Xbox they sold.

What did apple have to do with the personal music market before they took it over?

The architecture of console chips and PC chips are totally different.

This is not true. The current xBox uses x86 processors from Intel -- same architecture as your PC. The next xBox is using the PowerPC processor from IBM, same as the latest Machintosh computers. PS3 will use the upcoming Cell processor, which is built on the PowerPC architecture.

No no no, it is not true. They are totally different, moreso on Sony's machines than any other. You can create these complex worlds but you'd have a hard to running a spread sheet on the PS2.

They are made specifically for number crunching. Show me a 300MHZ PC that can push 60million unshaded polygons per second and I'll give you a dollar. Thats the speed of the PS2's EE chip and its top performance. Its powerful in that aspect but run Word2k on there and you'll die.

[Chris Luva Luva]

All speculation on my part, but from the information given this is what I've come to.

You can see how unique the Cell proccessor is, you should read up on it a bit, its pretty cool. MS and Nintendo have off the shelf components like you mentioned but they are seriously different than wut you'll find in your pc.

[cvillehog]

All speculation on my part, but from the information given this is what I've come to.

You can see how unique the Cell proccessor is, you should read up on it a bit, its pretty cool. MS and Nintendo have off the shelf components like you mentioned but they are seriously different than wut you'll find in your pc.

1) The cell processor is not yet being used. However, it is merely a multi-core processor. These will be common place in all computers in the next year or so, just not this particular chip, since it is geared toward drawing polygons, not general computing tasks.

2) You said the chip architecture is way different in consoles. It is not. However, the system architecture is optimized for graphics, the chips themselves are based on existing architectures.

3) xbox 2/Next/360 or whatever they will call it, is thought to be constructed with three processors (based on patent documents); however, the processors themselves are PowerPC chips from IBM.

[Chris Luva Luva]

All speculation on my part, but from the information given this is what I've come to.

You can see how unique the Cell proccessor is, you should read up on it a bit, its pretty cool. MS and Nintendo have off the shelf components like you mentioned but they are seriously different than wut you'll find in your pc.


1) The cell processor is not yet being used. However, it is merely a multi-core processor. These will be common place in all computers in the next year or so, just not this particular chip, since it is geared toward drawing polygons, not general computing tasks.

2) You said the chip architecture is way different in consoles. It is not. However, the system architecture is optimized for graphics, the chips themselves are based on existing architectures.

3) xbox 2/Next/360 or whatever they will call it, is thought to be constructed with three processors (based on patent documents); however, the processors themselves are PowerPC chips from IBM.

If you believe the cell is just a multi-core CPU and thats it then you've just shown me that you don't really know what drives the cell. It surely isn't just a multicore CPU, it way more than that, a lot more scaleable. Read up on it. Its all about the SPE's.

esktop CPUs take advantage of out-of-order CPUs because of unoptimised, crappy, spagetti code. But for a specialised games consoles, wasted transistors are not necessarily needed for out-of-order logic in a CPU. Finely tuned code can be crafted for in-order CPUs, thereby saving transistors for cost or increasing them for more performance.

In this case, all three consoles have a good chance of sharing tech from IBMs in-order PPC core for CELLs PPE, Xenons cores and Revs (but without the VMX units, IMO).

Console CPUs are going in-order because console workloads in general have large regular data structures, and thus are fairly predictable in their memory accesses.

OOOe helps you when you can't properly determine instruction schedule or access patterns at compile (or assembly-programming) time. It really has nothing to do with the skill of the developer (Jaws!).

OOOe won't help you scheduling around main memory latencies, multi-threading and explicit prefetch/streaming will have to solve that.

OOOe will help you schedule around instruction latencies (5-7 cycles in CELL, probably as bad in Xenon) and on-die caches (up to 30-ish cycles). The instruction latencies won't be a problem for the majority of the workload in a console, since loop-unrolling/interleaving (explicit vertical threading) will help alleviate this.

But not all code fits this bill, and code with unpredictable access patterns will run alot slower on next gen console hardware compared to state of the art general purpose CPUs.

See the difference between SpecInt and SpecFp, SpecInt being alot more unpredictable than SpecFp. All the top dogs in SpecInt are OOOe CPUs (Opterons, Athlon 64s and P4s), whereas SpecFp is more execution unit (in particualr DP FP) limited and you see the in-order wide issue Itanium 2 is right up there with Power 5.

[cvillehog]

I think you need to read up on it some more, and lay off the Sony Kool-aide when you do your reading.

[Chris Luva Luva]

I think you need to read up on it some more, and lay off the Sony Kool-aide when you do your reading.

I see that this conversation is pointless. You automatically think Im some huge Sony fan...thats retarded it truely is. Just because I'm impressed with the technology of the PS3 and not so much with the Xenon.

Just because you don't understand the cell and its architecture and/or its vision don't try to scapegoat by calling me a Sony fan.

You didn't even mention the SPE's in your comments about the CELL which goes to show that you don't understand what really drives it.

[BringThePain!]

NERD FIGHT!!!!!!!

[cvillehog]

I think you need to read up on it some more, and lay off the Sony Kool-aide when you do your reading.

I see that this conversation is pointless. You automatically think Im some huge Sony fan...thats retarded it truely is. Just because I'm impressed with the technology of the PS3 and not so much with the Xenon.

Just because you don't understand the cell and its architecture and/or its vision don't try to scapegoat by calling me a Sony fan.

You didn't even mention the SPE's in your comments about the CELL which goes to show that you don't understand what really drives it.

You said the architecture for the cell was radiacally different. I said it's not so different.

I didn't say you were a Sony fan, I said you were buying into the hype of the Cell processor.

architecturally, it's exactly like the multi-processor SIMD vector machines that were built in the mid-eighties

http://www.jonpeddie.com/Back_Pages/What%20the%20Cell%20isn't_Feb05.shtml

At any rate, we are just splitting hairs here, and this discusion of chip architecture has NOTHING to do with whether Sony can be overtaken in the gaming market, as they were in the personal music player market.

Sony's problems don't stem from technology, they stem from corporate infighting and an inability to create necessary synergies across business units.

[Chris Luva Luva]

Regardless of how either of us feel, I doubt that whoever has the most powerful machine will really get a lot out of it.

With middleware such as renderware we'll just get more games that don't utilize the strengths of each machine. Supposedly games will be shooting into the $60-$70 price range due to development costs.

This generation is a prime example of that. The Xbox is the superior machine but games that come out on multi platforms, Madden for example, you can hardly see a difference between them aside from resolution. Even with the new Splintercell... Although its a wider margin in contrast to Madden.

[cvillehog]

Regardless of how either of us feel, I doubt that whoever has the most powerful machine will really get a lot out of it.

I agree, it's the power of the company behind it that I am concerned with here. Sony does have a new CEO, so maybe he can right the ship.

With middleware such as renderware we'll just get more games that don't utilize the strengths of each machine. Supposedly games will be shooting into the $60-$70 price range due to development costs.

Yeah, I heard prices will go up, and it hardly seems worth it for games that aren't platform-specific.

This generation is a prime example of that. The Xbox is the superior machine but games that come out on multi platforms, Madden for example, you can hardly see a difference between them aside from resolution. Even with the new Splintercell... Although its a wider margin in contrast to Madden.

Part of the problem with the Xbox, IMO, is that it is only superior by vertue of being newer. The next Xbox will only have that advantage for a short while before the PS3 comes out. However, I wouldn't discount Microsoft's ability to flex its muscle in the game industry, which it is steadily working its way into. Don't forget that PC gaming is a big part of the industry, and most PC gamers are on Windows.

I guess all I'm saying is that I wouldn't wager my retirement on the success of Sony.

[NC43Hog]

NERD FIGHT!!!!!!!

OMG - just about shot soda out of my nose!!!!

[tcwest10]

Jesus.
I got lost right after "...combat all loaded up."