New details on Sony's PlayStation3 -
- Thread starter Mushiki
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Mark of the Wolves
mullet bullet
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What does all that mean? I don't understand any of it.
It's sad because I know what they're talking about. What's annoying is that they have the same acronyms that we use at work, which is confusing since ours mean totally different things.
Overall it’s a nice processor architecture, and a nice way to handle multiple execution units, but that PPE better be able to keep up with the flow and I’m guessing that it’s going to take some work to keep things synchronized. Though that stuff does look pretty nice on it’s own, the programmers will just have to make sure that they get the job priority in order and avoid gridlock. The scheduling is going to be killer, but if someone gets it working well then they seem to be able to get great throughput from these things.
Game development is going to get very multi-threaded very soon even on PC’s because of multi-core CPU’s. That and the fact that the old methods of getting faster processors isn’t going to work for that much longer means things will only get faster if we can do more of them in parallel.
On a side note, anyone notice how IBM is making the chips for both the PS3 and XBox2? There are similarities between the Cell CPU and IBM’s next gen PPC cores, which may be why you always hear EA and other devs talk about PS3 & XBox2 and are leaving the Revolution out of their discussions, probably because the two units will be similar to program for.
Conspiracy theory: Wonder if that was done on purpose to further push devs away from Nintendo.
Overall it’s a nice processor architecture, and a nice way to handle multiple execution units, but that PPE better be able to keep up with the flow and I’m guessing that it’s going to take some work to keep things synchronized. Though that stuff does look pretty nice on it’s own, the programmers will just have to make sure that they get the job priority in order and avoid gridlock. The scheduling is going to be killer, but if someone gets it working well then they seem to be able to get great throughput from these things.
Game development is going to get very multi-threaded very soon even on PC’s because of multi-core CPU’s. That and the fact that the old methods of getting faster processors isn’t going to work for that much longer means things will only get faster if we can do more of them in parallel.
On a side note, anyone notice how IBM is making the chips for both the PS3 and XBox2? There are similarities between the Cell CPU and IBM’s next gen PPC cores, which may be why you always hear EA and other devs talk about PS3 & XBox2 and are leaving the Revolution out of their discussions, probably because the two units will be similar to program for.
Conspiracy theory: Wonder if that was done on purpose to further push devs away from Nintendo.
Buro Destruct
Formerly known as, Buro Destruct, , Southtown Stre
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So, what I gather is, the Xbox Next presentation was much easier to understand, so I liked it better.
PPE GIGAFLOPS TRANSVERTS THE SPE PROCESSES IN THE BUFFER ZONE. Whatever, show me some fucking games already.
PPE GIGAFLOPS TRANSVERTS THE SPE PROCESSES IN THE BUFFER ZONE. Whatever, show me some fucking games already.
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JHendrix said:
As far as I know, both PlayStation3 and Xbox2 devkits are already available or almost available, while there are not even specs on the next Nintendo system.
In other words, maybe EA is working with what they know about and doesn't want to speculate that much.
Mushiki said:
Their dev kits aren't anything like what the systems are going to be like.
The XBox2 dev kits were G5's with 9800 Pro's in them, running a special kernel written by MS.
All we know for sure is that both systems will be PPC based, though the PS3 looks like it'll be more a divergence from the PPC standard than the XBox2 will be. I don't think that Sony got production Cell systems out to dev's yet, as far as I knew the fabs weren't ready yet.
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JHendrix said:
Obviously, but having beta devkits is much better than a blank spec-sheet.
JHendrix said:
Yes, Microsoft will go for the off-the-shelf-but-slightly-modified hardware once more. While Sony is taking a different approach. Not as custom as in the past (EE/GS), but still not standard PC hardware.
Other than that, we can also speculate on which GPU derivates both systems will most likely have.
Mushiki said:
Well yar, but I'm sure Nintendo has put out some early dev kits or maybe not and they're going to be late again despite what they've said previously.
As far as MS going the traditional role, I thought that it was not clear they were going with standard 940FX (aka G5) IBM chips but might be going with another one of their PPC cores. I doubt it'd be cell though, but nothing's been officially announce yet, at least that I've seen. If you've got a link then please feel free to share.
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JHendrix said:
IGNcube: Microsoft and Sony have development kits out there for their next-gen systems. Are Revolution dev kits coming?
Reggie: Yes, they're on their way. We're hard at work providing pre-development tools to key licensees. And again, Mr. Iwata will be talking at length tomorrow at his keynote about our vision for Revolution. Are dev kits going to be on the way? Absolutely. Are dev kits going to be out on the marketplace with enough time to impact great development of software for Revolution? Absolutely. We are right on track for development of Revolution and that's a key message out there. We're not going to be late to the marketplace. We're going to be on time with our competition, which we've pegged as Sony. And certainly getting development kits out there in a reasonable fashion is a big part of making that happen.
JHendrix said:As far as MS going the traditional role, I thought that it was not clear they were going with standard 940FX (aka G5) IBM chips but might be going with another one of their PPC cores. I doubt it'd be cell though, but nothing's been officially announce yet, at least that I've seen. If you've got a link then please feel free to share.
No link, just speculation, haha.
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Baseley09 said:
well put. this all means nothing.
ferrarimanf355
Bullets QB
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Ditto. Where are the pretty looking tech demos already?Loopz said:
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After all the broken promises with the PS2 "launch specs", how could even sony fanboys be excited about the PS3 before it's out?
Grow a dick and suck it Mushiki, thx.
Grow a dick and suck it Mushiki, thx.
