Playstation 3 Gathering Components

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.'"

yeah okay...

[doofusclam]

... so cue the comments about how great a Beo-bloody-wulf cluster this would make and how it'll be able to solve world peace despite the fact this is a carefully orchestrated scare tactic to keep ps2 owners from buying XBoxes (sp?)

Thing is it sounds impressive, but will that still be the case when it ships? If it was available now then of course things would be more interesting.

And Rambus: maybe this is their real market, PCs are too much of a commodity to employ their expensive memory. The only 'expensive' discrete component in a PC nowadays is Windows, and even that seems on the way out.

seany

Re:Wait A Second..

[Junks Jerzey]

So will the principled slashdotters put their money with their mouths are and not buy a PS3?

Or a PS2, as there's been Rambus tech in there from day 1.

Patents and stuff

[floppy ears]

With product sales and licensing fees in jeopardy, Rambus launched into its second life, as a litigant. Starting in 2000, the company began to seek patent royalties and pursue lawsuits against Micron, Infineon and other memory companies. The company said that patents it filed in 1990 entitled it to royalty payments on all of the SDRAM and DDR DRAM ever sold.

Lovely. Let's all go out and throw support to this wonderful company!

Seriously, though, I'm in the market for a new computer right now. I'm looking for a high end machine, but I refuse to buy one with RDRAM. It's just too expensive and not effective enough. Thankfully, you can now buy high-end DDR based Pentiums at Dell.

Rambus sucks.

Re:overkill?

[Anonymous Coward]

what about the steady increase of HDTVs that are showing up on the market?? we are then talking about 1080x768 (ish) and at 60fps... still nothing radical in today's CPU and graphics power, but would you be suprised to see a VGA port on the back of the box??

Won't be seeing it for a while. . .

[stevarooski]

Its great that these rumors of the PS3 are leaking out to get people excited, but we certainly won't be seeing the unit for a good while yet.

Console development is damn expensive (and getting worse each time around), and there is a *lot* of life left in the PS2. Hell, they're still selling PSOnes at a good clip!

I would expect Sony to milk the PS2 for all its worth before updating the hardware (and forcing updates from those developing for it, always a hassle). The only thing that would make them move more quickly is to one-up an opponent. And even then, they may wait; its the games that make money, and there are some pretty damn good games for the PS2.

Re:Rambus

[TheTomcat]

I think it makes sense to use a "proprietary" technology like RAMBUS for consoles..

The main drawback to RAMBUS on a PC architecture, IMHO, is the tight grip on manufacturing, and the possible inability to get parts at a reasonable cost (not that it was really reasonable in the first place).

When's the last time you upgraded the RAM in your console?

S

Re:1 trillion ips

[Junks Jerzey]

Remember the cinematic effects rendering and the 'groundbreaking emotion engine' in the PS2 up till its launch? And then it barely leapfrogged the Dreamcast in terms of performance.

It was actually *much* better than the Dreamcast, but it required a different mindset in order to work with the hardware. The graphics hardware in the Dreamcast was very similar to that of the PC, whereas that of the PS2 was much stranger to the uninitiated.

Here's hoping that Sony funnels a reasonable percentage of the PS3's power toward making thing headache-free for developers, instead of even more complex.

Re:overkill?

[Alpha_Nerd]

If we are only limited by resolution, then why doesn't halo look photo-realistic, but TV does??

Resolution doesn't mean much, I can put CS in 1600x1200 and it won't look as nice as Doom 3 in 1024x768 =/

Re:1 trillion ips

[oliverthered]

No lets hope that developers pop there minds out of the linear programming concept for a while.

A good bit of prolog and Lisp should help in the training, then drop what they've learnt back into more predictable languages like C.

Re:overkill?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Yeh, it isn't 640x480. It's less than that, once you take into account overscan and such.. 5** x 3*** or so, I think. His point was valid, and it was clear to people who cared to listen.

Maybe he deserved to be shot down, but not by an even bigger idiot. As a matter of fact, the reply was so much more extremely stupid, I felt moved to invent a "new word"... fucktard. English is a living language, you cretin, that means that there is no such thing as a non-word, especially when meaning is implied and a context exists that allows other people (stretching the definition I know, including you in "people") to understand that meaning. You sir, are what is meant when people use the word "fucktard". I only wish I could honestly claim I invented that beautiful, lovely word... how else would I tell my friends about quasi-persons like yourself?

These will NEVER be publically mod-able.

[Viewsonic]

Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft make all their money on software sales. The second people can run UNLICENSED software on the system (Ie. Linux, which in turn can run Linux games, or emulators) will make it so there is little to no need to buy legit software for that console. You may think "Sure, but the percentage of people who will do this is small. So it wont hurt." - WRONG, losing ANY legit game sales hurts the developers. If you look at the XBox with it's mod chips, people can put 200GB drives in their systems, stick a Linux installation on the drive, stuff it with a NES, SNES, Genesis, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, MAME, and god knows what else emulators on it, thats all people NEED for $200 bux! A lot of people are buying the XBox simply for that purpose, which Microsoft (And others) LOSE MONEY ON. You can blame this on bad console design, but Microsoft and Sony CAN NOT offer systems like this as cheap as we are seeing now if you want this. They will have to redo their entire marketing and we would see consoles for nearly $500 just so Sony / etc gets some sort of PROFIT by allowing people to opt out of buying their licensed software (Like the PS2 Dev kit).

Then they'll refocus where they should

[Crash Culligan]

Soon graphics on consoles (even PC's) will be to the point that the artist makes a much bigger diference in image quality than the hardware on the console. So what then?

Then the focus will move -- as it rightly should -- from the performance, resolution, and just plain Goshwow Factor(TM) of the hardware to the important things in the games: design, balance, artistry in textures and layout, and (dare I say it?) playability.

I could even envision a time (once again, depending where you're reading this) where the biggest name on the box isn't the manufacturer, but the designer's or artist's. Hideo Kojima, Sid Meier, Will Wright... they're all names that might be recognized already. There are other talents out there too that probably deserve recognition.

As it stands in the marketplace today, it's not enough about good gameplay and too much about pushing the product.

As Console Wars go, this is a not unreasonable move on Sony's part to drive further nails into the Xbox's rather large and well-ventilated coffin. It's talk of the successor to the PlayStation 2, which is likely to blow the doors off off the current Xbox. It's FUD, pure and simple. It shows Sony [playstation.com] has a lock on the market, if they can do that to Microsoft [xbox.com].

Sadly, even if people decide that the Console Wars aren't worth fighting, it still won't change much of gaming's status quo. Clever little puzzlers like Devil Dice [playstation.com] disappear off radar because they don't get "enough attention" while Electronic Arts [ea.com] manages to dump yet another sports-themed game on the public year [playstation.com] in [playstation.com] and [playstation.com] year [playstation.com] out [playstation.com] because the public can't get enough of it.

(You want a cause for skyrocketing player salaries? Look no further than the unwashed masses, clamoring for tickets in the stadium, coverage on television, this year's hot merchandise, and every last tidbit of gossip and news they can get. The insanity ends when people finally decide the celebrities aren't worth the price of admission.)

Re:OT, but...Neurocomputers

[Anonymous Coward]

Vector subtraction implemented neurally: A neurocomputational model of some sequential cognitive and conscious processes [mit.edu]

Artificial synapses copy brain dynamics [trnmag.com]

Computing and Learning with Dynamic Synapses (1999) [nec.com]

Computing at the Tissue / Organ Level [liv.ac.uk]

From neurobiology to silicon [washington.edu]

Principle of Neuroinformatics and Neuroinformation Coding [cuhk.edu.hk]


In short. The synapse is a computer in it's own right.

Re:Wait A Second..

[drinkypoo]

There's no reason they couldn't have included both PSX/One memory slots and one memory stick slot. It would have made more sense, especially since the device has i.Link and USB, Sony probably could have sold a $30+ software package to allow transferring data between sony digital cameras and DV camcorders, and memory stick, as well as TV display of images on memory stick and so on, or playing MP3 or ATRAC from memory stick. You could probably get $50 from people who were going to do ALL of those things.

Instead, the USB is used only for the force feedback wheel, keyboard, mouse, and maybe ethernet IIRC? The 1394 is even worse, it's used only for the little-used networking function in the PS2 (At least GT3:A-Spec uses it.) Sony missed the boat entirely. Obviously microsoft gets it, XP Media Center edition don't ya know. The next xbox will be running that, I'm sure, at least it will multiboot to it if nothing else. Why doesn't Sony get it?

Re:These will NEVER be publically mod-able.

[Carrot007]

Sony do let people run linux on pS2 OFFICIALLY you know, you do know that don't you?

see:
http://www.ps2linux.com/ (jap)
or:
http://playstation2-linux.com/ (us /eur)

for more info.

bah some people.