PS3 details today.

Rick Stirling

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4242447.stm


PlayStation 3 chip to be unveiled

The successor to the PlayStation 2 will be launched in 2006
Details of the chip designed to power Sony's PlayStation 3 console will be released in San Francisco on Monday.



The chip is reported to be up to 10 times faster than current processors.

(but not when you add salt n sauce)

KeyserSoze

[ QUOTE ]
The chip is reported to be up to 10 times faster than current processors.

[/ QUOTE ]

I wouldn't be too eager to believe any statements that come from SCE, their marketing strategy is all about hype and half-truths. Like the new "more capable" PS2 (which isn't able to make use of the PS2 HDD... I believe that is what would be considered LESS capable).


[edit] another thing I miss about the console industry (and dislike about SCE): new, interesting names for new generations of consoles. For Sony it's all business, and name-brand recogniztion takes precedence over creative names... it's all business and money money money

Rick Stirling

(but not when you add salt n sauce)

KeyserSoze

Oh I know, I just went on a small rant to reiterate the point. Sorry, I didn't mean to suck the funny out of your joke .

[edit] also keep in mind I'm an American, so what you're refering to as "chips" I refer to as "fries." These are what I think of when I hear "chips:"

KMan

Aren't those blu ray cd's being made out of salt crystals, anyways?

Rick Stirling

Yeah, it was a shit joke anyway. But branding is king. And I don't see the PC industry renaming the PC every 3 years either.

KDR_11k

I've read through an interpretation of the Cell patent. Didn't like what I saw. That thing sounds like a nightmare to work on and more geared towards supercomputer tasks.

RageUnleashed

I don't care about the console (unless it has some EXTREMELY glaring flaw), gimme info on the games. That's what it's all about anyways right?

Marine

i'm hoping they go with region free for the ps3 like they did with the psp

KDR_11k

The manual and game boxes seem to indicate that the PSP is NOT region free.

pogonip

It's going to be around 4.2-4.6 ghz so I don't see how it can be 10 times faster then current chips if the current top chip is 3.8 ghz ?? Unless the way it handels operations is completly new also ??

Well regradless a chip that powerful in a machine dedicated to game expereince ..wow I can't wait to see the other information on the system like the graphics card !

Toomas

Err i dont think it has separate graphics card, the Cell chip does it all (thats what i THINK).

Marine

the psp is only region locked for movies and music, it's unlocked for games.

Kirin

Well ... you would have to take in consideration that the Cell processor is going to use some kind of PPC architechture. If you compare the speed of some PPC processors (eg. the G5) and some x86 processors of the same clock speed, then you'll see some performance differences, usually in favour of the PPC. So "ideally" it might 10x faster in real-life terms, it might be a little slower than that.

That's my take on it anyway. I for one will probably save up for a PS3 ... and maybe the new Xbox as well.

Joshua Stubbles

Toomas - the PS3 is getting a new graphics chipset from Nvidia (and THANK GOD for that). The CPU structure does sound a bit wonky though.

KDR_11k

It's NOT using a PPC architecture. The main point of the Cell are the 8 vector units (think PS2 VPUs, LOTS of them) and the general purpose core is a simplified POWER5 (not related to the PPC970 aka G5). It's designed for masively parallelized processing or serial processing of datastreams. I'm not sure how well that works for anything but graphics in games and they already added an NVidia GPU for that.
Basically it's a PS2 on steroids and out for blood.

Eric Chadwick

The way I understand it, you need to rethink from the ground up how you code for the Cell, in order to get the increased processing speed. But once you do, it really opens things up. Or so I hear.

Sounds interesting. Also sounds like it will take a couple generations before developers will really take advantage of the hardware (ala PS2 dev).

milla

[ QUOTE ]
I wouldn't be too eager to believe any statements that come from SCE, their marketing strategy is all about hype and half-truths. Like the new "more capable" PS2 (which isn't able to make use of the PS2 HDD... I believe that is what would be considered LESS capable).

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, if you consider a machine that comes with neither NIC or HDD more capable than the same machine that comes with a NIC then that's your call, but I consider the NIC fairly important for online play, whereas I haven't felt the need for the HDD yet.