Playstation 3 Gathering Components 443
briancnorton writes "Cnet has a story about how Sony has licensed some Rambus connection technology for the playstation 3. One technology is for chip-to-chip communications and the other for chip-to-RAM at over 100 Gbps. These are all parts of the 'Cell' processor system that is supposed to do over '1 trillion mathematical calculations per second.'"
Some Specs (Score:5, Informative)
Can be found here [theinquirer.net].
Re:1 Trillion calcs/sec for 640x480 (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, and that console will be called XBox or GameCube. Both support HDTV 720p and 1080i. Rogue Leader, IIRC, was the first game to be wholly rendered in HDTV resolution, but it of course plays just fine on my ancient TV.
NTSC TV, btw is a pseudo-512x384 resolution - analog, dont ya know. A hi-res image actually looks better than a resolution matching image because it constantly rescans and kind of achieves a 'built-in' antialiasing effect.
Re:Rambus? (Score:5, Informative)
Streaming applications: bandwidth is the most important
Apps with lots of random memory access: latency is far more important.
Re:1 Trillion calcs/sec for 640x480 (Score:3, Informative)
Xbox, in theory, supports 720p and 1080i, but most games don't support it. Unless it's rendering simple geometry, 720p and certainly 1080i is just way beyond what the Xbox can handle.
Re:1 trillion ips (Score:4, Informative)
1)Limited amounts of color can be loaded at one time...every notice how bland the color is in most PS2 games? Many look like Quake 1, studded in brown, green, and grey.
2)Not too many textures can be loaded at once. Most PS2 games have chunky, flat textures.
Also, the PS2 can't do antialiasing without a huge performance hit, so lots of games "cheat" by blurring. And boy, does that ever get annoying when playing redeyed into the wee hours...
The PS2 in general is more powerful than the Dreamcast, I won't debate that. It seems to have be designed to act as a node for a huge parallel computer (why this was done for a game console is anyone's guess).
But in terms of texture quality, color depth, etc, the Dreamcast wins out. Take a look at Phantasy Star Online; the graphics there beat any PS2 game out there. PS2 graphics are chunky, dull, and blurry, with few exceptions.
Backward compatability with PS2 is unlikely (Score:4, Informative)
With the radical changes inherent in a cell design (as nebulously defined as the term is right now), I can't see how they could pull off the same trick twice. In theory, if they managed to do a full software emulation of PS2, they'd get free PS1 support.
Re:Rambus (Score:2, Informative)
Of course my knoledge of these subjects is strictly from an hobbist point of view, any engineers or others with more knowledge are free to in form me of any errors.
Re:What I want to know... (ease of programming) (Score:5, Informative)
It seems to be a common misconception that the PS2 has multiple CPUs. It doesn't. What it does have is a single CPU that is split up into several independantly operating units. The dual-CPU idea developed from the fact that the Emotion Engine has two vector processing units that operate almost exactly the same. These two units make up the bulk of the mathematical processing in the PS2, and must be coded separately.
All of the code I've written for them has been in assembly and the process is GRUELING. Each unit actually performs two operations at once, a lower and upper instruction. Since the ultimate goal is optimization you end up writting all your assembly and then rearranging everything so that the combination of upper and lower instructions don't step on top of each other and everything runs without any wasted clock cycles. I have heard of a few tools that have been developed to compile C into optimized VPU code, but I haven't used any and I doubt they work very well. A good camera manipulation program will only take maybe a hundred lines of assembly if it's optimized correctly, but I bet these programs spit out many many more.
(Wow, I really steered off the original topic didn't I?)
Re:Wait A Second.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sony owes "N" (Score:2, Informative)