Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

[Mhurron]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

A very old definition of 'Super Computer' is a machine capable of performing a Billion Operations per Second. While that is an old definition, it does still stand. This is why Apple could market the G4 as the first desktop super computer and be completely accurate. by that definition every recent desktop, the 360 and yes even the PS3 are Super Computer class machines.

Now you're not going to see a single G4, a PS3 or your desktop show up on the Top500, but thats also because current huge computers are so far beyond the old definition of Super Computer.

[Amele]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

A very old definition of 'Super Computer' is a machine capable of performing a Billion Operations per Second. While that is an old definition, it does still stand. This is why Apple could market the G4 as the first desktop super computer and be completely accurate. by that definition every recent desktop, the 360 and yes even the PS3 are Super Computer class machines.
Now you're not going to see a single G4, a PS3 or your desktop show up on the Top500, but thats also because current huge computers are so far beyond the old definition of Super Computer.

the issue with using the old definition of supercomputer is that there's handheld devices approaching 1 Billion Integer Operations a second (flops I'm not as certain about), which is a roundabout way of saying that the old definition is so obsolete as to be meaningless - which is why I used the current benchmark for Top500 as my yardstick for qualifying as a supercomputer. a more modest benchmark would probably be 1 TFlop (which is readily achievable with (nearly) off the shelf parts) and still far enough above the current generation of desktop rigs as to not include ~85% of the modern processor market.

not that that will ever stop marketing from using the term in the most relaxed sense possible.

[Malacite]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

The stats were shown @ E3 as well during the Sony demonstration and I'll believe it. I seriously doubt that those 3 companies would have spent so much money developing a processor that didn't deliver.


Anyway, supercomputer or not that machine is still a freaking beast...

[Amele]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

The stats were shown @ E3 as well during the Sony demonstration and I'll believe it. I seriously doubt that those 3 companies would have spent so much money developing a processor that didn't deliver.
Anyway, supercomputer or not that machine is still a freaking beast...

again, IBM reports the 8 SPE CELL processor at 100 GFlops on a standard test, and was the primary hardware design interest (and the company with the best track record historically for accurate reporting) so I trust that number over a power point at a tradeshow or a game (not hardware) industry website.

and yeah, it's a strong machine: it's got the hardware leg up on all the competition right now; that doesn't mean it's gonna last 10 years. (Moore's Law says we'll have ~32 times the transistors [or transistor equivalents, in the event of a paradigm shift between now and 2016] on a cutting edge chip than we do currently.)

[Malacite]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

Maybe not 10 years, but there won't be need of a PS4 for a good while unlike the next Xbox or whatever the hell Nintendo pulls out of their ass next.

It might be hard to accept but it really is one of the strongest processors out there. The chief reason if I recall correctly for IBM to support Sony on this was because they wanted to use Cell for various other applications so they helped them make it.


http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/...nnovation.html


Right from IBM's website:

Some Cell statistics:

* Observed clock speed: > 4 GHz
* Peak performance (single precision): > 256 GFlops
* Peak performance (double precision): >26 GFlops
* Local storage size per SPU: 256KB
* Area: 221 mm²
* Technology 90nm SOI
* Total number of transistors: 234M


There ya go.

I'm not sure exactly how Toshiba fits into the equation though.

http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/

[jwalton]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

Whoopdee-freakin-doo. It's a fancy numbers game, who cares. Nvidia's older 7950 GX2 dual GPU cards are rated at 384 GFLOPS. Oh look, ATI's R580 GPU has a peak performance of 375 GFLOPS stand-alone and 750 GFLOPS in Crossfire configuration.

When the hell did GFLOPS become the standard of measurement for a CPU's capability anyway?

Same ol' marketing bullshit, different year. ZzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.......

Don't get me wrong, the Cell processor is powerful, but it is designed for a very specific purpose, so to pretend like it's just sooooooooo much better than the competition is hilarious. Notice how IBM's Roadrunner upcoming next-gen supercomputer is using 16000 Cell processors and 16000 Opteron processors? If Cell was just the be all, end-all of processors, they may as well have used 32000 Cell processors.

[Amele]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

FLOPS (floating-point operations per second) has always been a standard measurement of CPU capability.

don't buy into the old intel hype it's not 'all about the clock speed'


and 256 GFLOPS is significantly fewer than the ~TFLOPS you quoted from ign, which is part of why I was doubting it.

you're right though: the ps3 will probably last longer than either of the 360 or the wii..

but given it's current price, it'd need to last about twice as long to be worth the investment, anyway.

[Feba]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

Maybe not 10 years, but there won't be need of a PS4 for a good while unlike the next Xbox or whatever the hell Nintendo pulls out of their ass next.

You don't know much about technology, do you?

There will be a need for it. The PS3 won't last any longer than the competition, especially with it's popularity (more accurately, lack thereof.)

[jwalton]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

FLOPS (floating-point operations per second) has always been a standard measurement of CPU capability.

Correct, it is A standard of measurement, but not THE standard of measurement. Because after all, who gives a crap about I/O performance, cache coherence, or anything else. Let's just spurt out how many GFLOPS we have.

[Manatra]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

GFLOPS means absolutely nothing. This is especially true when coming from the company that is making the chip.

If you want to measure something's performance you need real world tests, real world benchmarks. Hence why Tomshardware, Anandtech, and their ilk are so popular.

For the record, the Cell processor in the PS3 gets destroyed by today's Core2 Duo's, and the PS3's videocard isn't much better off.

[Manatra]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

To clarify, using a single type of calculation as a benchmark for a CPU is foolhardy. If I wanted to, I could say that my Radeon X1950 is faster than my CPU. Why? Because the Radeon is a specialized piece of hardware designed solely to perform certain types of calculations incredibly fast, where my CPU is designed to be able to perform almost every type of calculation possible.

[Pai Pai Master]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

Whether or not the CELL processor is really that powerful is yet to be seen. History has told us that first generation games have absolutely no bearing on what games will be like further down the hardware cycle, particularly with Sony machines. Look at Tekken Tag Tournament and compare it to God of War II and that should be evidence enough.

However, I wouldn't recommend, and didn't know that people still were paying any attention to what Sony said at E3 2005. Aside from the few realtime tech demos that were shown (FFVII and Resistance were among the few), Sony's 2005 E3 press conference was the same overhyped "bullshot" that we were used to seeing. They've only recently grounded their press conferences into more believeable experiences. Who knows? 2.0 TFLOPs could be possible with the CELL, but perhaps developers simply haven't gotten that out of it with current SDKs. The rest is all technical mumbo-jumbo to me and doesn't really matter, but I just wanted to point out that you shouldn't heed what Sony said about the PS3 two years ago, as the console was still heavily in development at the time and even if most of it was true, a lot of things about the console changed by the time it was released.

[Malacite]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

Somewhere in that IGN article is was stated that the PS3 is capable of 2.0 TFLOPS at it's absolute maximum, while the XBOX 360 can only do one. Whether we'll ever see this kind of processing power used or not is in the hands of the game developers though.

The Cell project at IBM Research
Project description


The Cell Architecture

The Cell Architecture grew from a challenge posed by Sony and Toshiba to provide power-efficient and cost-effective high-performance processing for a wide range of applications, including the most demanding consumer appliance: game consoles. Cell - also known as the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) - is an innovative solution whose design was based on the analysis of a broad range of workloads in areas such as cryptography, graphics transform and lighting, physics, fast-Fourier transforms (FFT), matrix operations, and scientific workloads. As an example of innovation that ensures the clients' success, a team from IBM Research joined forces with teams from IBM Systems Technology Group, Sony and Toshiba, to lead the development of a novel architecture that represents a breakthrough in performance for consumer applications. IBM Research participated throughout the entire development of the architecture, its implementation and its software enablement, ensuring the timely and efficient application of novel ideas and technology into a product that solves real challenges.

You can

* Read the The Cell story in IBM's Innovation Matters! and meet the IBM Research team which helped create Cell,
* Learn about why the Cell heterogeneous chip multiprocessor offers the most efficient approach to achieve high computer performance,
* Find out about the groundbreaking architecture of the Cell Synergistic Processor Unit which allows Cell to deliver supercomputing performance on a single chip,
* Learn about the simplified compiler-oriented architecture approach on which the Cell Synergistic Processor Unit is based, and
* Find links to additional technical information about Cell.

And as Pai Pai pointed out, we've yet to see what PS3 can really do. Just wait for Metal Gear Solid 4 this November, or FF 13 in February 2008 (Well, according to EB's pre-order book but they've been wrong before...)

By working closely with our partners in the product groups and IBM's partners SONY and Toshiba, we defined a new system architecture around our standard Power architecture which is miles ahead of where competitors are even today. Where other systems have one or two processors on a microprocessor chip, we put nine. Where other processors work on one data item most of the time, our new accelerators always process at least four pieces of data. And the results were immediate -- our partners were thrilled with this project, and we proceeded to jointly develop this into a product in the STI Design Center.

- From one of the guys who was working on Cell in 1 of the above links I posted.

[Pai Pai Master]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

MGS4 and FFXIII still won't be actual representations of what the CELL is capable of, even if we know today that they look quite remarkable. As proven with the PSone and PS2, Sony creates consoles which pump out more impressive titles each year up until the end of its life cycle. That comes with the steeper learning curve characteristic of the PlayStation family, whereas developers praise Microsoft for providing easy to learn and use hardware that can easily yield impressive results from early on in the console cycle.

We've seen that with the 360, as most skeptics were left wondering why none of the PS3's launch games could touch the visual quality of Gears of War (although I will argue that exclusive PS3 launch-era games like Motorstorm showed us far more impressive physics and AI), launched roughly a year after the 360. PS3 games are starting to rapidly grow more and more impressive in terms of visuals, AI and physics, and by this time next year it will likely prove its standing as the more powerful console.

That's not to say power has everything to do with it however, as many developers have proven with the PS2 that it's how you use the hardware, not how powerful it ultimately is. The 360 has plenty of beautiful looking games that run with extremely impressive physics calculations, AI scripts and much more, so all this talk of teraflops really means nothing when it comes down to how developers can use the power of both these great consoles to make games that couldn't be done last generation.

Once the PS3's first year wraps up, there's little excuse for developers to not be wowing us with things we've never imagined seeing before on any next-gen platforms, and games like Mass Effect, Unreal Tournament 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots will likely be leading the way in their top-quality departments of visuals, physics and AI, which I think are the three corner-stones of next-gen innovation and progression.

As for the FFXIII date you mentioned, don't expect it stateside until the end of 2008, as Square Enix certainly doesn't expect to release it until after March 2008 in Japan. On the contrary, we do know from Konami's financial reports that MGS4 will be out before that date, and with MGS4 merchandise and figures still scheduled for a November launch, we'll likely be provided with a testament to CELL processing power this fall from Kojima Productions, as well as from other quality developers such as Naughty Dog, Insomniac Games and Epic Games.

This thread is going all over the place. XD

[Malacite]

Re: Yoichi Wada calls the PS3 and 360 pieces of crap.

XD it is. And there's another detail about the Cell I forgot to mention that trumps 360.


While 360 has 3 GPU, it can only devote so much memory to it. The PS3 and Cell are designed so that it can actually direct all of the system memory to a single task if so required. I can't think of anything that could possibly cause this, but that's certainly a powerful feature.


Speaking of innovative PS2 games... I recently bought and beat Dawn of Mana. While it was a rather big let down for a true sequel to Seiken Densetsu 3 (Dawn of Mana is SD4 in Japan) the use of the Havok engine in the game is pretty cool.

It handles real-world physics fairly well, and as weird of an action game as it is, it's pretty fun toss around objects and enemies and seeing things bounce and collide with each other.


Oh, and I think I speak for Sony fans everywhere when I say that God of War 3 is gonna make a lot of people wet themselves whenever Sony gets around to making it.