Ynos Yrros
Banned
I doubt they will change cooling system. It would affect products quality, and they don't want to do that, given the premiium price of PS3.
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65nm Cell; PlayStation cost controls on the horizon
- Thread starter TheIkariWarrior
- Start date
Well you got two other groups of people as well. Those that didn't buy the previous system which generally will probably like that BC was included. Then you have people that had the previous system and appreciate not having to cram systems into their TV area.knitoe said:
I too would like for the PS3 to upscale games to 720p or 1080p but if you look at how the 360 does this and compare it to the size of its library it would be absurd to think that the PS3 could do this without either resorting to just basic scaling or re-tooling all the games (isn't this what the 360 does? Not just straight up scaling?).
With all this talk of the cost of the EE+GS, I wonder what the actual cost of those 7+ year old chips actually are? $2 each maybe, and I bet SNE has a huge inventory of those very chips collecting dust anyway, so they've already paid for those chips so the cost to put them on the motherboards is probably quite small. It's really easy to guess what's cost effective for Sony, but if you don't know their inventories you could very easily be wrong.
As far as the HD goes, I kinda doubt Sony would offer a 500 gig drive. Sony can have profits from the non tech savy consumers that will buy their drives, and they will also make the techies happy since they can put any size drive in they want. hopefully Sony has learned a lesson from Betamax, if you're too heavy handed you'll lose the market. What happened to MiniDisc?.... yeah it's another forgotten trash heap Sony proprietary format.
As far as the HD goes, I kinda doubt Sony would offer a 500 gig drive. Sony can have profits from the non tech savy consumers that will buy their drives, and they will also make the techies happy since they can put any size drive in they want. hopefully Sony has learned a lesson from Betamax, if you're too heavy handed you'll lose the market. What happened to MiniDisc?.... yeah it's another forgotten trash heap Sony proprietary format.
Oh no doubt. I'm hoping that they can hammer out software emulation to the point where it does not tax Cell and/or RSX and we may see scaling or maybe some FSAA or AF ala the PS2 emulators for the PC. Seing some screens of FFX running in high resolutions it's jaw dropping.theBishop said:
So you believe it would be better for "business" if Sony released PS3 with 5% compatibility and enjoy the massive surge in negative PR this would generate from media and fanboys alike?speculawyer said:
You realize that there's about a milion emulators out on PC, PSP and many other machines that Upscale (not change rendering resolution) games without a scaler?theBishop said:
Why people believe this would have some big impact on quality I have no idea though - any fixed pixel HDTV upscales all your PS2 games.
Stronty said:
Well, they won't do a 500GB hard drive because you can't get a 500GB 2.5" drive. The biggest i've seen is 200GB.
As for the EE+GS chip, the chip may not be too expensive (i would think more than $2 though), but having it also requires other hardware to connect it. The motherboard has to accommodate it, it has to connect to the AV DAC/HDMI. So that stuff adds up. Especially when they are ramping up production to 2 million/month.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
speculawyer said:
I know I'm late, but wow at this statement. Some people man. Damn!
UltimaKilo
Gold Member
SleazyC said:Oh no doubt. I'm hoping that they can hammer out software emulation to the point where it does not tax Cell and/or RSX and we may see scaling or maybe some FSAA or AF ala the PS2 emulators for the PC. Seing some screens of FFX running in high resolutions it's jaw dropping.
PLEASE!
Well why did'nt Sony just wait 6 months to launch if they were this close to having a cheaper more efficeint console this close to launch. They could have had a proper launch with some good games instead of the abortion so far. Looks like euro launch is the real launch, I was going to pickup a 20gig in march but I may as well wait for the new model.
speculawyer
Member
Fafalada said:
Actually . . . yes. The fact that the EE+GS chip was for cost reduced PS2 helps, but I think that saving money by removing it from the PS3 would have been the better business decision. They should have done what MS did . . . try to get the most popular titles working in software only BC and work on the others later. How much negative media did MSFT get? Do you hear anything about their lame BC these days? No.
The big problem for Sony with regards to BC is that they they are now stuck with really high expectations. What happens if the software-only BC system can't handle many titles? Right now, Sony is struggling to get all these titles to work in software-only BC . . . and the longer it takes, the more this is costing Sony in EE+GS chips put in the PS3. And the PS2 has a weird architecture that is pretty hard to emulate in software only BC.
Remember, this is just my opinion . . . you can disagree with it. I won't be offended.
Zombie James
Banned
kiUNiT said:
That's like asking why Microsoft didn't launch a year later so they could have avoided the huge software drought, the production issues, and maybe done something about all those red lights. Or maybe Nintendo should have launched the N64 in 1998 so it would have more than two games at launch and Nintendo would have seen how successful CDs turned out to be. Or maybe the 3DO should have launched in 1996 so it wouldn't have been $800 at launch.
If everything launched later than it did, everything would have been better. Hindsight's a wonderful thing, isn't it?
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
kiUNiT said:
Because some people wanted to play 100 hours of Resistence online NOW and not wait until March.
CurseoftheGods
Banned
So let me get this straight. A PS3 model with gimped BC is in the works?
Early adopter ftw.
Early adopter ftw.
Moderation Unlimited
Banned
I'd imagine any cost savings past on to the consumer would amount to a $50.00 USD price cut at best ($550 and $450, respectively). The magic number would be $100.00 USD, but this won't happen for 1.5 to 2 years.
speculawyer
Member
CurseoftheGods said:
It seems like that may be the case. Yeah, it seems illogical to me too, but I'm getting flamed for saying that.
speculawyer said:
I think you're getting flamed for 1) assuming that backward compatibility is automatically going to be gimped, when the whole point of going with hardware BC initially was to give Sony enough time to get a software-based solution working acceptably (that is, not at X360 compatibility levels
), 2) disparaging Sony for bothering to make BC with a high compatibility rate a priority right out of the gate, and implying that taking a slight loss to include hardware-based BC in the initial units in order to meet consumer expectations was a mistake, and 3) suggesting that Sony should have adopted MS' flawed, foot-dragging approach to BC (they never wanted to bother, and only went ahead after they realized consumers weren't really buying the 'you won't want to play Xbox games on your 360!' spiel, IIRC) instead of handling things the way they have.How much profit do you think MS makes on their HDD??
How much more money do you think Sony is going to make when a hardcore user fills up their 200GB HDD with downloadable trailers, demos and paid for content???
Gripshift + Tekken DR + Blast Factor + Lemmings + PSP games == £$£$£$
How much more money do you think Sony is going to make when a hardcore user fills up their 200GB HDD with downloadable trailers, demos and paid for content???
Gripshift + Tekken DR + Blast Factor + Lemmings + PSP games == £$£$£$
Synth_floyd
Banned
In the long run backwards compatability doesn't really matter to the casual market (which is the primary market of the consoles). How many people now are playing PSX games on their PS2? It's primarily just a rhetorical tool they can use ("look! our console already has a library of X games!") and something that fanboys can argue about on the internet. In the beginning of the console's life, then maybe it will get a decent amount of use, but once the newer console hits its stride in terms of a library nobody will really care about it anymore.
MS will probably won't ever do another BC update, and it doesn't matter and they know it but they won't outright say "we're finished with BC" cause it will upset the fanboys.
MS will probably won't ever do another BC update, and it doesn't matter and they know it but they won't outright say "we're finished with BC" cause it will upset the fanboys.
Shogmaster
Member
I wonder which is easier? 360 doing soft BC of XBox or PS3 doing soft BC of PS2? I personally think Sony will retains some hardware BC elements in the next PS3 revs.
No. Sony doesn't do gimped BC, hence going with a hardware alternative when the software alternative wasn't up to speed with system launch. The PStwo's BC isn't gimped in any way for that matter. It'll be the same level of BC for everyone, >95% compatibility and if Sony's software emulation is strong enough to feature framerate or resolution enhancements it'll be built into a firmware flash that everyone will then move to, and early adopters will have an unused PS2 chipset in their PS3's collecting dust.CurseoftheGods said:
Sony preemptively cycled down PS2 development to avoid huge chip overstocks, they've done it each of the last two generations, thats the advantage of being the clear cut market leader. Your hardware shipments tail off gradually as opposed to having to throw on the breaks because no software is forthcoming or the retail chain is backed up.
The EE+GS is also the primary cost for the PStwo, so its probably a lot more than $2, more like $20 or $30. That combined with more expensive cooling, extra assembly steps, and a more complex mobo design needed to add it probably combines for something like a $50 price hike to the system as a whole.
If Sony gets reliable yields on the cell at 65nm, moves to software emulation, and can consolidate other chipsets into less expensive multichips by next fall they'll find themselves on good footing to challenge the 360 from a pricing standpoint. Until the first two arrive though they don't really have a shot, and the 3rd would be somewhat needed to take an advantage.
deathkiller
Member
I think that emulating a Pentium III 733Mhz in a in-order PPC based CPU is harder than emulating anything that the PS2 had.Shogmaster said:
Software emulation will happen, the question is how much different it will be from "hardware emulation". For me I would sacrifice the compatibility with some games if the add perfect progressive output for every game.
Shogmaster
Member
deathkiller said:
I don't know about that. There are 3 seperate cores clocked about 3 times as fast emulating a single core X86 CPU with small cache. OOOe or no, I don't think it's as bad as doing proprietary/native nVidia functions in NV2A in software with Xenos.
As for the PS3, the aspect of PS2 emu I'm worried about is not EE anyways. It's GS with it's rediculously huge eDRAM bandwidth.
Yeah. I many ways, I find software emu more exciting even as a consumer than a perfect but plain hardware BC.
deathkiller
Member
I have thought various options to compensate that the GS edram have bigger bandwidth than the PS3s GDDR3 but I don't know if they are feasible:Shogmaster said:
1- Is the lossless RSX framebuffer color/z compression enough?
2- Can they put the back buffer in the SPUs Local Store and leave the textures/front buffer in the GDDR3? (by textures I mean the ones that would be in the eDRAM in the PS2).
3 - Same as 2 but using the XDR memory instead local store (easier?).
DonasaurusRex
Online Ho Champ
-Rogue5- said:
I dont know if you can really compare it to the 360's transition, the 360's cpu as far as i know is exclusively on the 360, Toshiba and IBM also use the CELL, and ibm had cell powered solutions available to buy before the PS3 launched. So basically even though PS3 is only a few months old the fab process used for cell processors was well under way before it launched, seems like PS3 just released at the end of hte .90nm life cycle.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Shogmaster said:
Exciting yes. But which would you rather have? 33% BC with last gen games with software emu or 99% BC with last gen games with plain hardware BC?
kiUNiT said:
It would have been a PR nightmare. It might even be a blessing in disguise that they had Blu-Ray problems early on in the manufacturing process, allowing them to goto 65nm close to launch and reduce costs ASAP, rather than have 10M 90nm units out there losing $250 a pop. Then again, it's only about a $50 savings per console right now.
It is. Sheer processing power aside, splitting OOO processor instructions across 3 PPC cores and getting the performance the 360 gets is the most impressive feat of emulation that has ever been acheived. And even if it were just a matter of how much more powerful the next-gen CPUs were, the gap between PS2 and PS3 is much wider than that of the XBOX and the 360.Shogmaster said:
NV2A/EE may be proprietary, but they have even more room to play with and they didn't swap processor architectures.
Well for emulation on each respective hw, I would guess P3 should be more challenging performance wise(it's not really OOOe alone, console PPCs just have lousy single threaded performance, period), and EE poses more challenges for compatibility (6-7 independently programmable units that have to be emulated perfectly as lots of software took advantage of even little quirks in their behaviour).Shogmaster said:
It's not eDram that's the issue, it's basic architectural features. State changes and operations that are free on GS often cost hundreds of cycles on PC GPUs, and in your typical PS2 title, such operations are executed hundreds, sometimes thousands of times per frame.deathkiller said:
It basically comes down to whether emulator can reinterpret display list "intentions" and output something that is ordered friendly to PC style GPU, but still renders the same visual output.
You do realize EE includes 3 300Mhz cores as well as a wealth of other processing units? It's a lot of ALU power in there - the advantage is that it's already distributed so it fits multicore emulator easier.terrene said:
Risc->PPC, Little Endian -> Big, AoS -> SoA, I'd say there's enough architectural changes in there to keep emulation people busy for awhile.
From what I understand there are low-level aspects of NV2a that can't easily be abstracted either - hence you run into architectural issues as well.
inpHilltr8r
Member
Aren't the VUs only 150Mhz?Fafalada said:
Here's another article on both manufacturers attacking the 65nm chipset.
PS3 and the 360: The race to 65nm
PS3 and the 360: The race to 65nm
dirtmonkey37
flinging feces ---->
The PS3 has been looking much nicer in my eyes recently.
Maybe it's EGM's next cover story on the sequel to some of the most engaging titles I've ever played (R&C - Deadlocked).
I'm excited. Maybe this generation will be a first: I will purchase all three consoles!
Maybe it's EGM's next cover story on the sequel to some of the most engaging titles I've ever played (R&C - Deadlocked).
I'm excited. Maybe this generation will be a first: I will purchase all three consoles!
TheIkariWarrior
Member
65nm Cell die picture from ISSCC 2007
thanks to "one" on B3D
thanks to "one" on B3D
Zombie James
Banned
Chrono said:
Hopefully.
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