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Nov 13, 02
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PS3? Weoh...
 PlayStation 3 takes to the grid By David Becker 3rd Quarter, 2002, 5:00 PM PT SAN JOSE, Calif.--If distributed computing can unravel the building blocks of life, it can probably help make a better version of "Crash Bandicoot." That appears to be Sony's thinking as the electronics giant moves ahead with development of the next version of its PlayStation video game console. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), an annual trade show for the creative and technological sides of the game industry, Shin'ichi Okamoto, chief technical officer for Sony Computer Entertainment, said research efforts for the PlayStation 3 are focusing on distributed computing, a method for spreading computational tasks across myriad networked computers. Distributed computing is making headway as a way for researchers to conduct demanding computing experiments, such as an ongoing project by Stanford University to unlock protein structures. Okamoto said the method also appears to hold the most promise for dramatically boosting the performance of the next PlayStation. Game developers have said they would like the next console to have a thousand times the processing power of the PlayStation 2. There's no way to do that with hardware advances alone, h said. "Moore's Law is too slow for us," Okamoto said, referring to the long-held truism that semiconductor power doubles roughly every 18 months. "We can't wait 20 years" to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in PlayStation performance, he said. Okamoto said Sony is working with IBM to apply Big Blue's research in "grid computing," a variation of distributed computing, to the next PlayStation. While he didn't share details, the plan presumably would involve networked game machines sharing software, processing power and data. Okamoto added that the recently released kit that allows PlayStation 2 users to run Linux software on the console is the foundation for much of the research. Looking further ahead, Okamoto saw even bigger changes for Sony's game business. "Maybe the PlayStation 6 or 7 will be based on biotechnology," he said. While Sony focused on the future, Microsoft looked at the recent past. Pete Isensee, lead developer for Microsoft's Xbox Advanced Technology Group, used his GDC talk to deliver a mostly positive critique of the Xbox's journey to the market, lauding a product launch that happened on time and without major bugs, a departure from Microsoft history. "Microsoft has this stigma about not getting it right until version three," he said. "We didn't have a choice with Xbox. If we didn't get it right with version one, Sony and Nintendo would eat us alive." Xbox glitches Isensee touched on mainly centered on international issues. The game console's bulky controller repelled Japanese consumers, for instance, forcing Xbox to design a slimmed-down version that comes standard with the Japanese Xbox and as an add-on purchase for U.S. and European users with small mitts. "There is a perception we didn't know what we were doing when it came to the controller," Isensee said. "What we failed to do is a usability test for a global market. You need to do that, because things that work in the U.S. don't always work in Japan or Europe." That includes the Xbox start-up screen, which had to be redesigned for the Xbox's European launch because nobody realized that the German "einstellungen" wouldn't fit in the same text space as "settings." Fresh Update: Playstation 3 chip nears completion John G. Spooner Cell, a radical new processor designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba and dubbed a 'supercomputer on a chip', could enter production in 2004 Collaborating engineers from IBM, Sony and Toshiba have wrapped up the design for the inner workings of a mysterious new chip called "Cell." The new multimedia processor, touted as a "supercomputer on a chip," is well on the way to completion, IBM says. The chip could end up inside the PlayStation 3, and elements of its design will be seen in future server chips from IBM. Advertisement Click here for another great offer! Cell has nearly "taped out" -- an industry term meaning that the chip's pen and paper design and layout have been completed. Soon these will be handed over to engineers in manufacturing, who will craft samples. Meanwhile, engineers have been testing various sub-elements of the processor, both separately and together, before the manufacturing unit connects them inside actual Cell chips. At this rate, commercial production of Cell could come as soon as the end of 2004. While details remain vague, Cell will differ from existing microprocessors in that it will have multiple personalities. The chip will not only perform the heavy computational tasks required for graphics, but it also will contain circuitry to handle high-bandwidth communication and to run multiple devices, sources say. Ultimately, Cell will provide a "much more interactive way of delivering content, including advertising, sports and entertainment such as video," to a wide range of Internet-ready devices, said Jim Kahle, director of broadband processor technology and a research Fellow at IBM. This esoteric approach is possible because a single chip will contain multiple processing cores (hence Cell), a design concept rapidly gaining steam, sources said. Communications features expected to be in the chips will also allow devices to form powerful, peer-to-peer like networks, some analysts believe. "It's sort of like having a group of handymen who are able to raise the roof (on a building) or do plumbing if it's needed," said Richard Doherty, analyst with Envisioneering. More than games So far the chip triumvirate of IBM, Sony and Toshiba, which pledged $400m to the project and sent engineers to a joint development center located in Austin, Texas, has been short on details of how Cell could benefit each company. The processor has always been associated with Sony's PlayStation 3 and peer-to-peer computing, but will do more than allow players to battle opposing characters in multiplayer Internet games, Kahle said. But Cell will go "beyond gaming to just entertainment in general," Kahle said. From his own analysis, Doherty believes Cell will create a new extensible computing platform. A set-top box containing a Cell chip could, for example, combine to share processing power with a Cell-powered high-definition television to render the graphics of an animated movie. "It's like a beehive -- cell components can also be ganged together," he said. This ability to change rapidly between states will make devices more flexible, but also give the living room a big boost in computing power when devices interact, making for much livelier games, movies and other entertainment-related experiences. While Cell will provide a lot of PlayStation 3 opportunity for Sony, what will IBM and Toshiba get out of it? For IBM, Cell represents a technology showcase. The new chip will not only illustrate IBM's design prowess, but it will also display the company's manufacturing expertise. IBM will use its bag of chipmaking tricks, including silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processes and low capacitance dielectrics, to mint Cell. Analysts say it's not as clear what Toshiba will get from Cell. The company could also use Cell to create new consumer devices such as high-definition televisions. Or, it could use Cell in its components business; Toshiba sells a wide range of components for set-top boxes and other consumer electronics products. What's behind Cell? While the processor's design is still under wraps, the companies say Cell's capabilities will allow it to deliver one trillion calculations per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz. Cell will likely use between four and 16 general-purpose processor cores per chip. A game console might use a chip with 16 cores, while a less complicated device like a set-top box would have a processor with fewer, said Peter Glaskowsky, editor in chief of influential industry newsletter Microprocessor Report. Some of these cores might perform computational functions, while others could control audio or graphics. But not everyone thinks this approach is groundbreaking, given that some processors already use inter-chip multiprocessing. "I just don't see that Cell is revolutionary, except in its marketing impact," Glaskowsky said Indeed, a host of other chipmakers produce chips -- known as system-on-a-chip processors -- that use multiple processor cores to power systems ranging from networking equipment and automobile electronics devices to cellular phones. IBM entered the dual-processor core market with the Power4, the first server processor to use a multiple-core design. Power4 pairs two 64-bit PowerPC cores on the same processor, linked by a high-speed communications pathway. But efforts to create similar, more generic multiple-core processors -- including MAJC (pronounced "magic"), a very similar effort by Sun Microsystems -- have missed their intended mark. The first MAJC chip was originally slated for multimedia processing, a job similar to Cell's. But instead of selling the chip to set-top box and game machine manufacturers, Sun repositioned the dual 500MHz MAJC 5200 chip as a high-end graphics processor for workstations. Software -- the road ahead While Cell's hardware design might be difficult, it's creating software for the chip that will be the trickiest part of establishing it in the market. "It's going to take an enormous amount of software development," Doherty said. "We believe the chip architecture is going to be on time and ahead of the software wizardry that is going to really make it get up and dance." Furthermore, creating an operating system and set of applications that can take advantage of the Cell's multiprocessing and peer-to-peer computing capabilities will be the key to determining if Cell will be successful, he said. Knowing this, the three chip partners have so far set a goal of crafting Cell as a system, creating operating system and application software alongside Cell hardware. Cell's designers are engineering the chip to work with a wide range of operating systems, including Linux. But the chip triumvirate is also developing a purpose-built Cell operating system and applications, which Cell's developers will use to test the chip's various features, such as its multimedia processing capabilities. They are also likely to form the basis of a Cell software development kit and also the Cell OS and applications for end-devices, such as game systems, sources said. Still work to do While much of the work on Cell is complete, there's still a lot left to do. Together, the hardware and software teams will continue testing the chip's inner workings. The last stage of development work, which still lies ahead, includes completing circuit layout and then eventually testing actual sample chips. IBM is expected to begin manufacturing Cell as soon as 2004 or possibly early 2005. But as with many other details about the chip, Kahle will confirm only that the Cell project is on track to meet it's a 2005 introduction, which was set forth at its initial announcement. The rest of the chip's schedule is a secret, at least for now, he said. See Chips Central for the latest headlines on processors and semiconductors. To find out more about the computers and hardware that these chips are being used in, see ZDNet UK's Hardware News Section. Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Go to the Chips Central Forum. Let the Chips Central editor know what you think by email. And sign up for the weekly Chips Central newsletter. Last edited by ƒORM; Nov 13, 02 at 04:10 PM. 
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Nov 24, 02
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AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHH!
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Dec 19, 02
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whoa THAT PS3 IS MAKIN ME TWITCH!!! YEA i hope the got like final fantasy everything on there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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