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PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - Last Exile - 02-07-2005
Some interesting news:
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The chip that will run the next version of the PlayStation video game machine will have nine processor cores and run faster than 4GHz, the chip's designers revealed Monday.
Engineers from Sony, IBM and Toshiba revealed those and other specifications for the Cell processor during a press conference at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, where technical papers on the Cell design will be presented this week.
The three companies have been working on the Cell for several years, promising to deliver a high-performance chip optimized for multimedia applications. Test production of Cell chips is set to begin later this year, and the processors will appear later in workstation PCs optimized for animation and other graphics chores. The chip will also power the next version of Sony's PlayStation game console, which is widely expected to be released late this year or early next year.
While analysts and researchers have already puzzled out most of the basic aspects of the Cell design, Monday's announcements included some of the first specifics.
The Cell will have a 64-bit Power processor and eight "synergistic processing units" capable of handling separate computing tasks, said Jim Kahle, an IBM fellow. The multicore design will give software developers tremendous flexibility, Kahle said, allowing them to run multiple operating systems on the same chip and experiment with variations on grid computing.
"It's designed from the beginning to work in a world where all the computers are tied together," he said.
Future versions of Cell chips could have more or fewer processing units depending on what device and software designers require, Kahle said. "There are a number of different ways to implement parallelism on the chip," he said.
How those processing units are used is up to software developers, including the game makers who will soon start wrestling with the PlayStation 3. Kahle said IBM and its Cell partners will provide game developers and other code writers with open-source tools and guidelines for working with Cell, but game developers will have final say on how they chop up computing tasks among the processing units.
"It's really...up to the game developer," he said. "You can program it in many different ways."
Other Cell numbers include the following:
? The first version of the chip will run at speeds faster than 4GHz. Engineers were vague on how much faster, but reports from design partners say 4.6GHz is likely. By comparison, the fastest current Pentium PC processor tops out at 3.8GHz.
? Cell can process 256 billion calculations per second (256 gigaflops), falling a wee bit short of marketing hyperbole calling it a "supercomputer on a chip." The slowest machine on the current list of the Top 500 supercomputers can do 851 gigaflops.
? The chip will have 2.5MB of on-chip memory and can shuttle data to and from off-chip memory at speeds up to 100 gigabytes per second, using XDR and FlexIO interface technology licensed from Rambus. "One of the key messages you hear from the architects of next-generation chips is that their performance is being limited by off-chip bandwidth," said Rich Warmke, Rambus, product marketing manager. "We've really licked that with Cell. 100GB per second is really unprecedented in the industry."
? The chip will have 234 million transistors, measure 221mm square and be produced using advanced 90-nanometer chipmaking processes.
While the PlayStation 3 is likely to be the first mass-market product to use Cell, the chip's designers have said the flexible architecture means Cell will be useful for a wide range of applications, from servers to cell phones. Initial devices are unlikely to be any smaller than a game console, however--the first version of the Cell will run hot enough to require a cooling fan, Kahle said.
Some competitors, however, are skeptical that Cell will find much of a home outside of video games. One of the big problems with Cell, said Justin Rattner, an Intel fellow, is that the processing units aren't identical, a situation that increases complexity and the opportunity for bugs.
"You've got this asymmetry," Rattner said. "It's like having two kinds of motors under the hood. We are very reluctant to adopt architectures like this because they take compatibility and throw it out the window."
By David Becker -- News.com
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Well it looks like Sony will have a very powerful console to hit the market with a giant impact. I just wonder what , microsoft and nintendo are planning now after hearing this news????? this years E3 is going to be full of a lot of answers i hope.
-LE
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - Andromeda18_ - 02-07-2005
I'm already drooling.
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - evilomar - 02-07-2005
The original specs for the emotion chip were much more then it actually turned out to be. I will wait at least a year before getting a PS3, if anything interest me at all. Let those first generation models burn out first before they start making a decent system.
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - Cidien - 02-07-2005
I have a first generation ps2 that still works perfectly. =P
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - Robojack - 02-07-2005
Nah, the 1st gen models die the fastest when you mod them. I'd better wait for the second gen, since I'm definately gonna mod it.
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - Last Exile - 02-08-2005
my ps2 sucks it doesnt play bluediscs and also the sound on it sucks no dolby support at all on that piece of shit. i hope the new ps3 is backwards compatible if not they will burn for it.
-LE
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - Elcoholic - 02-08-2005
Last Exile Wrote:my ps2 sucks it doesnt play bluediscs and also the sound on it sucks no dolby support at all on that piece of shit. i hope the new ps3 is backwards compatible if not they will burn for it.
-LE
Ps2 does have 5.1 dolby/DTS support on movies (It has optical out). On games I'm not sure about the 5.1 part but SSX3 has a DTS track that has 4.1 support. It has tracks for everything except the center speaker. Plus there are many games with Prologic 2.
I read on another forum that the ps3 will have 4 of these cell processors in it. That's some serious power if its true.
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - Schultz - 02-08-2005
Also last exile where ever you quoted that its wrong.. its going to be a 8 processor core chip not 9.. (where in the computer world have you ever had on odd number anyways)
And read again.. the beginning is wrong but the statement in the article is right.. and i suggest people to subscribe to slashdot.org you can read all about this stuff in there daily news letter..
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - Last Exile - 02-08-2005
i took this from gamespot.com they heard first hand so im not sure how they could be wrong hearing from sony themselves... so im just posting the news here so people that dont go there or to other game sites will know the news.
so dont blame me blame them at gamespot.
-LE
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - wrxh8r - 02-08-2005
If you want up to date cell news chech out beyond3d forums http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=4&sid=e1cef18cbf6d8f2ac3c05ac981786353
They talk about all the technical side of what was released.Nothing has been confirmed for ps3 yet and it actually sounds like all three consoles may very well be of similar spec.I think hoping for 2 processors in a ps3 may be to much. as an idea the current ps2 apparenty runs at about 6.5 gflops or something like that(feel free to correct me i dont know what all that means anyway) Also take into acount those figures are for the cell chip alone we will also need to take into account nvidias side of things.
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - Schultz - 02-08-2005
Actually only way i could see the 9 is the cell processor will have 8 cores on it while the other processor might not be a Cell one but designed to do something else.. possibly the I/O process which is the same in the Playstation and PS2 which made it be backwards compatable. Who knows.. But another thing if you want real full info about the Cell process here
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html
i posted that in the other thread but i guess no one read it.. The Cell processor has some very nice benifits if computing starts using them.
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - geo85 - 02-08-2005
I have learnt not to get my hopes up when it comes to sony, the ps2 have numerous glitches that plauged its Japan debue, as well as serious dust collection problems with the first couple of us models, the ps3 will definitely be released next year and probably not in the us till end of 2006, with such a new and unexplored form of processor you can count on glitches, bedsides unless they make the ps3 twice backwards compatible there are going to be a lot of angry fans and useless hardware and software. microsoft will just offer downloadable upgrades and nintendo has a working formula which wont change in the near future. On the last note developers never pushed the ps2 to its fullest capabilities as microsoft did with the ninja gaiden so I don't expect anything special.
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - wrxh8r - 02-09-2005
I dont get why everyone like ninja gaiden.Maybe its because i played it on a projector screen but it looked like poo.Not a game that blows up very well i guess.Even graphicly what it was pushing didnt seem all that special considering time between loads.I guess its a matter of art style.
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - geo85 - 02-09-2005
What other game have you seen that functions with that level of graphics all the way through on every object without lagging. I dont think any game blows up well why would you want bigger than 32 anyway. have you watched the movies in that game, its almost like ff spirits within.
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality - geo85 - 02-09-2005
oh and the loading only takes long if you play infrequently. if you play often the system should load in a few seconds, at least mine did.