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New PS3 Model pics leaked
- Thread starter Pooya
- Start date
Too late for that if it is going to be announced for GamesCom, we had leaked pictures of the Slim long before the GamesCom where it was announced and they were final models.
It isn't going to change.
Pretty sure you need to submit the final design for these sorts of electrical/radio certification things?
At 16GB, it is almost certainly not a traditional 2.5" HDD, and probably some sort of low cost flash memory.
OldJadedGamer
Banned
No different than people who bought a launch 20 gig.
I know that but all of the models are the same besides the Hard drives so if the other models have harddrives the 16GB one will also have a place to put a hard drive.
Theonik
Member
The unanswered question is, will that hard drive be a standard 2.5" HDD or will they go the MS route of hard drive in proprietary shell.
OldJadedGamer
Banned
They did go that way with Vita so anything is up in the air.
Years? It is still common for games to have mandatory installs. Even still, someone buying a new system today isn't going to limit themseves to current games and will want to play all games from the back catalog. Install or not.
You'll just have something like this in the HDD bay of the 16GB version:
Here's the link
Think of the an ultra cheap version of what's on the link and you'll get the idea.
Here's the link
Think of the an ultra cheap version of what's on the link and you'll get the idea.
You'll just have something like this in the HDD bay of the 16GB version:
Here's the link
Think of the an ultra cheap version of what's on the link and you'll get the idea.
or they can just stick a 16GB flash chip to the motherboard
googleplex
Member
Maybe this from the other thread?
Jeff - is this your PS 3.5:?
http://kotaku.com/5927310/unboxing-the-nasne-sonys-new-media-hub/gallery/1
Graphics Horse
Member
iamshadowlark
Banned
Seems cool. How come I haven't of this before?
Selling a PS3 model with flash is smart because most of the products that are being sold right now use flash memory so the price is just going to keep getting cheaper & cheaper & it's smaller & more can be made a lot faster than a harddrives & will save a lot of money on shipping & storage for the manufacturer.
Selling a PS3 model with clamps is smart because most of the products that are being sold right now use clamps so the price is just going to keep getting cheaper & cheaper & it's smaller & more can be made a lot faster than a screws & will save a lot of money on shipping & storage for the manufacturer.
You're an apple!
or they can just stick a 16GB flash chip to the motherboard
That would result in a more complicated motherboard which will need to have the interface with the on board SSD as well as SATA, not to mention 2 different motherboards. Then there's the software where PS3 OS doesn't support 2 SATA devices.
IchigoSharingan
Member
I came into this thread when the pics first were revealed. I thought "nah I'll come back to this, maybe I'm just being visually salty"
I came back.
Those pics are fucking uglier than I even remember! Quack the fuck have you done sony!
I came back.
Those pics are fucking uglier than I even remember! Quack the fuck have you done sony!
Solder it on. Don't solder it on. Bam. Two products, same motherboard.
Why use SATA for an onboard flash chip? You realize there already is an onboard flash chip (for firmware only, so far) in every PS3. Doesn't use SATA either.
OldJadedGamer
Banned
Goes back to show what happened with the original Xbox. HDD's are an anchor when trying to lower the price of the system. Interesting to see what MS and Sony do next gen in regards to storage.
This doesn't make sense at all...
I don't think there's any doubt. They will both offer a low-end model with some flash and no hard drive. As you say, the hard drive has a price floor that is much higher than flash.
This is an overdue move for Sony.
Yes, but it's done over the network now (like a NAS), and more powerful I think.
You'd need to have the traces for the flash, in ADDITION to the traces that go to the HDD slot on the motherboard, even if you don't solder on the chip, adding cost to the motherboard. And you HAVE to use SATA, since the PS3 OS is set up to read/write from a SATA HDD and PS3 software counts on that SATA device being present. You can't install anything to the onboard flash chip besides the essential part of the system software that gets loaded first, as it's treated differently by the PS3 security system.
Brad Grenz
Member
You are significantly overstating the problem. The 360 didn't have any issue adding the same exact thing to that platform, although they just use what is basically an internal USB drive from what I remember, rather than flash soldered to the board.
360 OS and software do not require a hard drive to be present, that's why they used USB for interfacing with the 4GB onboard flash, as it's no different than plugging in a 4GB USB stick to the 360 from a software/OS standpoint.
You cannot get away with the same design on the PS3, since you can't use USB drives as the system drive, and the OS and games expect a storage device connected via the SATA port to be present. They are not going to update the OS to allow USB storage to be used as boot drives either, as that would break their security model.
The only way it could be integrated on board is if they update the OS to handle 2 SATA devices AND run the traces for 2 SATA ports on the motherboard (1 to the slot, 1 to the soldered chip). I think this would be significantly more expensive than just sticking a tiny SATA board with 16GB's of flash in the HDD slot.
There's no reason to believe even filesystem-specific code is hard-linked into any application, much less interface-layer code. In any sane system those are abstracted away into OS layers and none of the using code can tell the difference between writing to a network share across the globe or writing to /dev/shm.
It's easy enough to see that the PS3 already supports several filesystems across several interfacing layers, can support encryption in a configurable manner, and has a mechanism in place to restrict content per interface class.
- You can actually download store trailer content straight to USB sticks right now. Or copy them. But you can't download demos and full games to USB.
- You can copy out saves, but only some of them.
- The internal drive is always fully encrypted, while USB is not encrypted for open media, but then again encrypted on a per-file basis for saves.
Adding a direct-to-chip interface, if it indeed does not exist yet, should not be hard. It's the easiest kind of interface you can abstract in software, because it doesn't need to be compatible with any outside device. It can use the same filesystem as the HDD. Those are independent blocks to mix and match.
They even already changed the storage policy for the firmware itself. Launch models had a big chunk of flash (256MB? 512MB? don't remember) to store the whole thing. Revisions then switched to storing only a small bootstrap fragment in a 16MBish flash chip, with the rest spilled out to the HDD. So they actually did something like that before. Arguably harder than moving user storage back to flash.
...
I'm sure there'll be a firmware update to establish a common code base between old and new models. But I really don't see a non-SATA interface as a technical challenge or cost problem.
Board traces also aren't produced individually. You start with a surface fully plated in copper. Then you litographically "harden" the parts you want to keep. All the rest is removed with acids, then the board is coated in an insulation layer (again masked out at contact points). It's a full-surface process at every step, and, as long as the number of layers and the outer dimensions of the board remain constant, it makes no difference if you have fewer traces or more traces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board#Manufacturing
zomgbbqftw
Banned
We already know what Sony are doing, Gaikai.
They obviously know enough to differentiate between a blu-ray, hdd, and usb. adding a hdd2 would complicate things.
Is it really EASIER or CHEAPER to make a new interface, write the driver for it, and extensively test it compared to just sticking 16GB of flash in a SATA interface? Why would Sony go that route when all they're trying is to reduce costs with the PS3? It's a lot more effort.
Not the same thing as they did not increase the number of devices in the system. Less stuff was kept on the boot flash and more on the HDD. They did not make any part of the boot flash accessible to the user outside of applying firmware updates, so they can't just add 16GB to there and make it user accessible like a HDD.
Why spend all that money testing an update over all PS3's when you can get away with not having one for this purpose and work on adding other features? How would spending the money and resources this way benefit the consumer in any way? How would it benefit Sony?
Don't you think the PS3 board is already as small as it could be and has as few layers as it can get away with the components it has on board? What do you think adding an extra SATA interface will do to it? You can certainly design a board that's smaller if you don't have to worry about routing traces for extra chip(s) on the motherboard.
well they changed from Harddrive to System Storage so something has changed.
well they changed from Harddrive to System Storage so something has changed.
Maybe they realised it was confusing if somebody connected an external hard drive via USB and used that option. You know, they'd have wiped their entire PS3 unintentionally.
Without commenting on whether or not Sony will add the 16GB to the motherboard, I do feel like pointing out that the PS3's OS is based on FreeBSD. It already supports all the SATA devices the hardware can throw at it, and like virtually all Unix derivatives, it completely abstracts extra drives as folders that can be mounted anywhere. All Sony would have to do is simply add a line in the boot script so that if it found two SATA hard drives, mount the 16GB flash as OS storage space. Maybe throw in a script to copy the contents of the flash onto the hard drive after it formats the hdd.
Or, you know, just don't mount the 16GB flash.
MadScientist
Banned
That realization came at an interesting point in time then.
phosphor112
Banned
....no.
Refreshment.01
Member
Im not following this thread much, yet this post made me want to comment. In what sense does introducing PS2 BC to the PS3 could make any sense?
Compoanies are better of now just releasing quick HD remakes and selling them for high prices, it even encourages the original game's owners to buy the product a second time.
Compoanies are better of now just releasing quick HD remakes and selling them for high prices, it even encourages the original game's owners to buy the product a second time.
Theonik
Member
Full software PS2 BC isn't quite a reality even now. They have had a PS2 emulator in FW for a while now but hadn't actually used it because only a very small amount of games worked with it and even those needed to be optimised on a case by case basis. Re-introducing PS2 BC seems off the cards for now especially since they can milk that limited amount of games on PSN.
Not to mention HD re-releases. They struck gold with that and I can't see them backing out at all.
shinra-bansho
Member
I'm not sure why anyone would expect the return of BC.
I thought their full SW emulation solution was relatively bespoke, and there are like 80 titles available from the PS2's enormous library.
They're not going to reintroduce the Graphics Synthesizer chip as it would defeat the point of the cost reduction.
Maybe PS4? When the bell finally tolls for PS2.
I thought their full SW emulation solution was relatively bespoke, and there are like 80 titles available from the PS2's enormous library.
They're not going to reintroduce the Graphics Synthesizer chip as it would defeat the point of the cost reduction.
Maybe PS4? When the bell finally tolls for PS2.
Huh? No it doesn't.
Code:
//global list of all sata devices
SataDevice sataDevices[1]; //one should be enough for anybody.
//Also, hardcoding this, because we're idiots.
Haha, where's this from?