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IBM PlayStation (Games) Entertainment Games

Sony, IBM Announce Cell Workstation For PS3 Dev 45

Posted by simoniker from the give-me-sequels-or-give-me-death dept.
Thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for its article discussing the little-heralded Sony announcement of a Sony and IBM co-developed, Cell-based workstation for PlayStation 3 (and other) content creation. The article explains: "The workstation, which will ship before the end of the year, will feature an architecture based on the parallel processing Cell chip [also to be used in the PlayStation 3], and will be designed to power digital content creation for movies, television and videogames." GI.Biz also quotes an un-named industry figure as suggesting: "Microsoft should be really worried by this... They've been touting Xbox 2 to their partners and talking about the kind of content they want to see created on the platform - more polygons, higher resolutions, more effects - and our response has been that the tools to create this stuff for games don't really exist yet. Now Sony has effectively created those tools."
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Sony, IBM Announce Cell Workstation For PS3 Dev More

Sony, IBM Announce Cell Workstation For PS3 Dev

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  • While this is exciting news... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by clu76 ( 620823 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @12:47PM (#9140855) Homepage
    Better technology does not always translate to better video games. I'm sure what ever Nintendo or Microsoft use for their next gen architecture will be comparable to the PS3. As for home media centers, I bet Sony will eventually wipe the floor with Microsoft.

    • Re:While this is exciting news... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kabocox ( 199019 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @01:00PM (#9141010)
      As for home media centers, I bet Sony will eventually wipe the floor with Microsoft

      I'm personnally betting that the PS4 would be Sony's grand attempt at a universal media server. PS3 is too soon. They are playing around with PVR products and have their eye on the home media center. IBM has their interests o.k. in being chip R&D and making the chips. Sony could do this by themselves, but it does make sense to partner with an MS rival. Nintendo is not rivaling MS in anything but game consoles. Nintendo is more likely to be bought than beat though. (Actually, it would have made alot of sense for MS to do that.) I think the XBox is MS's early attempt at game console/home media consoles.

      These are just my personnal thoughts on the subject.
  • They're telling everyone to get G5s! Brillant!

  • DEV KITS! :) (Score:3, Funny)

    by ChibiLZ ( 697816 ) <john@eTWAINasygoldguide.com minus author> on Thursday May 13, 2004 @12:57PM (#9140957) Homepage Journal
    Wow. I have to say I am so amazed. Get this: Sony has released DEV KITS for their new console. I've never heard of this before! This must be that new-fangled, next generation game development stuff here. Personally, I found it MUCH more interesting when M$ started sending out G5's as Dev Kits. I tried to tell them I'm writing up a great Xbox 2 game, but alas, no Dev Kit to my door.

    • Its not even /that/ exciting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by *weasel ( 174362 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @01:47PM (#9141721)
      They're announcing the dev kits that should ship 'sometime' before the end of the year.

      Personally I see it as the Sony PR FUD machien is running again: "no no, our machine will be much more powerful than theirs".

      It worked the last time they were going to show up a year late to the next hardware generation. Why not go back to the well?
      • True as this may be, I'm going to be watching the next generation of game console with great interest; my reason being that fancier graphics just may not cut it this time round.

        If Sony want developers to make full use of their graphics pushing potential, they're going to have to provide some kick arse dev tools. It's already taking teams of 40 people 12 to 36 months to produce games that use the current generation's graphical ability, so ramping that up is just going to increase dev costs.

        The next gener

    • That's one way of interpreting the article, another way is that they have announced a successor to the Little-known GScube which was a workstation with 16 of the PS2's 'Emotion Engines' in one box, aimed at the rendering community.

      Unfortunately the article is so short of details that we can't really tell.
    • You forget this is Slashdot, where half the articles posted are simply childish jabs at Microsoft
    • I'm sure there are some 'beta' XBOX2 dev kits already in developers hands... running on dual G5s...

      XBOX has development tools (DIRECT X) already... And isn't dot-net easily cross-compiled?

  • just the dev station (Score:5, Interesting)

    by johnjones ( 14274 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @12:57PM (#9140960) Homepage Journal
    this seems to me just to be the dev station like SONY gave out for the PS2
    (they call it something like PS2Tool)

    big deal or not ?

    o BIG deal at least the hardware is sort of final (can be changed but not likely) that means they taped out and just need to do mass production

    o NOT does not say anything about the device or that it includes silicon from the PS3 or just running an emulator

    o lets face it you can use all of the tools to do graphics like they do in the movies and games at the moment Maya, 3DS Max and games engines are pretty good about seperating out the display from the AI, sound, physics

    now can someone actually give details like a block diagram of the chip ?

    regards

    John Jones

  • Not needed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PktLoss ( 647983 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @12:59PM (#9140994) Homepage Journal
    Building an engine around being able to do x,y & z doesnt nesesarily mean needing to have the equipment to do it all in front of you. Build your engine to be able to do it all, use a high end machine, and downsample your textures and such untill you get a machine that can handle the high rez copies.

    Given the choice its always nicer to have the platform be available to you, but you can do a lot before you get to that point (assuming the specs are set in clay).

    • Re:Not needed (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AltaMannen ( 568693 )
      It is not really so much about designing a pipeline to push polygons and textures for a generic target as it is about how to find the optimal pipeline and vertex/texture/feature balance so that content can be created to fit perfectly to take the most advantage of the machine.

      On a PC you generally can't determine an exact balance and load for rendering so you more or less have to create art that can scale with the machine but on consoles you don't have to do that and you can work with a known target.

      The be

  • What OS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @01:08PM (#9141124) Homepage Journal
    Hmm, IBM, Sony, new chip , not wanting to give M$ a lead ... I wonder what OS this thing will be running..

    Could potentially be very very tasty.

    nick...

    • Re:What OS (Score:2, Interesting)

      by AltaMannen ( 568693 )
      My guess is Linux: Used in the ps2 tool, used for the original set of tools (which were quickly recompiled for windows), and it is cheap :) And IBM seems to like it too.
  • The race to get next gen machines to market begins now!
  • will it run Linux?

    I could see it being a good choice but I can't find any mention on what OS it'll run. I wonder if it'll work as a Linux desktop for things other than "content creation"? I did find this press release at IBM though:

    Cell-based workstations to be readied for entertainment applications [ibm.com]

  • XNA (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Iscariot_ ( 166362 )
    Sony has released a dev kit, MS has got XNA in the works. The real company that should be worried is Nintendo... not Microsoft.

  • Why is this good for Sony? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "...digital content from the Cell workstations (whose proposed role reminds us of the market position occupied by Silicon Graphics workstations in the early nineties, before their performance was overtaken by x86 PC systems and PowerPC Macintosh systems)"

    And why is modelling your business strategy after a defunct market segment (e.g. Silicon Graphics workstations) a good thing? There is a reason why SG went out of business, people! Because it eventually became cheaper to buy plain old PCs! As much as I

    • Re:Why is this good for Sony? (Score:4, Informative)

      by News for nerds ( 448130 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @02:21PM (#9142156) Homepage
      Cell is a generic grid-computing processor. It means, the same hardware block can be used in this workstation, PS3, rack-mount server, home appliance, and other devices from Sony and IBM. The difference between those various hardwares is only the quantity of Cells equiped in them, so this workstation is not specialized hardware bound to a specific market. When PS3 ships, the scale merit of Cell production will soar dramatically, which is what SGI couldn't do.
      • OK, lets look at the SGI chip architecture: MIPS. I think they did manage to hit pretty decent production levels -- lots of set top boxes, quite a few (Microsoft style) Pocket PCs, etc.

        But Intel was able to push them out of a significant part of the PPC market. So Sony/IBM might be able to win, they might lose, they might wind up with only 50% of the market.

        I'd say they have to try, and they might win or lose, but we don't have enough information now or maybe even in the next year or two to say for sure
    • There is a reason why SG went out of business

      When did this happen? No really, there's an article about SGI Altix machines in the May issue of Linux Magazine so exactly when did SGI go out of business?
  • IBM seems to be playing both sides this time around. Anyone know any juicy details?
  • I was at the Sony press conference, and it was said they didn't even expect the first PROTOTYPE of the Cell processor until the end of the year.

    The workstation will come about after that.

  • Oh-aah (Score:2, Insightful)

    by justin_saunders ( 99661 )
    "...will feature an architecture based on the parallel processing Cell chip [also to be used in the PlayStation 3], and will be designed to power digital content creation for movies, television and videogames."

    Sounds like a G5 to me. Maybe Microsoft should...hang on, they already did.

    The GI.biz article tried to make out having same OS on DevKit is a big deal. It aint. As a console programmer, I've found DevKit OS makes very little difference to host OS. Any embedded systems programmer will tell you this
  • No matter what, IBM wins, no, pwns.
  • Windows market share continues to decline, thanks to Microsoft's failure to port Longhorn to the the PowerPC. By sticking with its legacy Intel platform, instead of migrating to the industry standard RISC chips, Microsoft relegated Windows to a commodity office equipment OS whose sales thunder was rapidly stolen by open source initiatives. A SonyAppleIBMTendo spokesman commented, "serves them bloody well right".

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