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Sony Says Nobody Will Ever Use All the Power of a PS3
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Dec 20, 2006 10:00 AM
from the they-never-heard-of-the-robsort-algorithm dept.
from the they-never-heard-of-the-robsort-algorithm dept.
Tighthead Prop writes "Sony executive Phil Harrison has made some brash comments about the Cell processor and the PlayStation 3. Harrison says that the current PS3 game lineup is using less than half of the machines power, adding that 'nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capacity.' Is he right? 'The major reason Harrison wants to hype up the "unlimited" potential of the PS3's architecture is to downplay comparisons between games running on Sony's console and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The two systems are not completely dissimilar: they both contain a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz, both have similarly-clocked GPUs, and both come with 512 MB of RAM.'"
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Sony Says Nobody Will Ever Use All the Power of a PS3
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This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.electroblog.com/)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.otis.org/)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://insidewoodland.com/)
Will anyone use 100% of the CPU(s)?
AND 100% of the GPU?
AND 100% of the RAM?
If not, Sony can always say they aren't using 100% of the system- so they game didn't live up to its potential.
Show me a game on any system that uses 100% of the resources, and I'll show you a game that hangs like mad and runs like crap.
Once again Sony comes out with an idiotic statement that they think will impress the public.
(Admittedly, the article was
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Insightful)
Guess that means it's impossible for a game to "live up to it's full potential"...
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.router12.net/)
FYI (Score:5, Informative)
Think of it this way replacing 4mb L2 cash with 4 GB L2 cache would speed up most games, however spending that money on several components would be a better use for that same cash. The PS3 is designed to be flexible so you can use the cell to speed up rendering or AI as needed But that flexibility comes at the price of complexity, thus first gen games are using ~50% of the systems capabilities. However games will probably never use more than 80-90% of the systems resources at the same time so the graphics will get better they will not become twice as good.
PS: 3 games may all use 90% of the systems capabilities, but they will probably not use the same 90%.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.intelligentblogger.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 27, @11:47AM)
4K of memory? Luxury! The Atari 2600 had only 128 bytes of memory! You're thinking of the 4K of ROM in the cartridge.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.ceyah.org/~jandrese/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 13, @11:11AM)
Even if you managed that, your game would require two joysticks to play and require constant input on both of them, otherwise you'd be wasting a joystick port. I'm not even going to get into the mode switches and whatnot. It's basically impossible to use 100% of any machine like that.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://sdk-1600.spatula-city.org/ | Last Journal: Monday October 01, @05:36PM)
Well, it seems like it'd be more a bottleneck for the PS3 and Xbox360 than for a lot of machines. I look at the CPU-speed/GPU-speed to RAM ratio on most desktops, and 512MB is just enough for the GPU, with another 1GB to 2GB sitting out there for the CPU. When compared to 3 x 3.2GHz PPC (Xbox360) or 3.2GHz PPC + 8 SPEs (PS3's Cell Broadband Engine), even a current AMD 4x4 system (4 Althon 64s) or a Core 2 Duo system has a run for its money in processing performance. So the ratio of compute to memory is quite a bit off compared to desktop boxes. Granted, the PS3 and Xobx360 don't have all the other miscellany running in the background that a desktop has, but is it really that big of a difference?
Granted, consoles have traditionally gotten by with much less RAM than their desktop counterparts. This was especially true in the cartridge days, where the entire game image lived in ROM, but it seems like it should be less so in the era of optical-media based devices.
About the only way I can see using up all those MIPS is to enable advanced physics and simulation in the game, and enable extra rendering passes to spiffy-up the images. Now that we have a larger deployment of HD-capable displays, spending the MIPS on rendering I guess makes sense. But where are you going to put all the additional textures and data required if you don't have enough RAM? You certainly aren't going to aggressively page it from optical media.
Unless a game specifically targets a console and doesn't bother targeting a desktop in tandem, I can't see the developer getting too excited about developing advanced engines that soak the console CPUs with physics/simulation and coding a cut-down version that keeps up on the desktop. That'd make the game behave noticeably differently on the two platforms. So, we're left with graphics enhancements which only change the quality of the visible output of the game, not the gameplay itself. So, until the desktop platforms get into the same raw-compute territory as the consoles, it's very easy to imagine many of those console MIPS will be left on the table or just spent on polishing the graphics output.
Now to those of you who say "It isn't pushed to its limits unless you're always using 100% of the CPU." Pshaw. I would say a system is pushed to its limits when no one thing is the sole bottleneck all the time, the overall playability of the game doesn't suffer for it, and increasing the depth of any given element would cause the game to lag or misbehave in such a way that playability or enjoyability does suffer. The notion that you have to use every byte of RAM, fill every sector of the disc and use every issue slot on every cycle of the CPU to say you're at 100% is a silly one. It might've made sense when games were measured in kilobytes, RAM was measured in bytes and CPU was measured in kHz or MHz, but not in the modern era.
--JoeRe:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
As far as optimizing for the memory system using prefetches and streamed processing et al., that's the future of performance coding. There's no avoiding these techniques as the gap between memory speed and processor speed looks destined to only get worse. It's a space in which the compiler really can't do much to help you; your algorithm design has to take into account how much slower memory is than compute, and either be able to set up its data transfers long in advance (as in streaming computation), or have something else to do while it waits (as in context switching).
Re:what do I win? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://alumni.imsa.edu/~mliu)
I'm filing a class action on behalf of all who were eating or drinking when reading your post.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with this 100%. Final Fantasy XII is one of the best looking games on the PS2 to date, but There's a good argument to be made that Gran Turismo 4 (which runs in 1080i in one way or another while FFXII is 480i only) surpasses it. But regardless- consoles arent like PC's. there will ALWAYS be an enterprising developer who comes up with some crazy coding method no one ever considered before and squeezes a little more performance out of the system.
Remember when Shadow of the Colossus was released, and everyone was saying things like "no one ever thought the PS2 was capable of things like this?" same principle. There's probably a lot of life left in the Ps2 that no one will ever get around to tapping, because with the existence of the PS3 it's no longer worth the effort to do so. By the time Developers REALLY know their way around the PS3 and are on the verge of squeezing every last ounce out of it, the Ps4 will be out and in the market and it simply won't make sense to bust one's ass trying to max out the PS3.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
That's okay. Nobody else commenting here read it either.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Base Pi?? (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday January 16 2007, @10:33AM)
Re:Base Pi?? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well duh! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.hyperlogos.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 18, @08:19PM)
Unless it's a Honda... then it just sounds like you're breaking the law.
Is this a nice way of saying... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank You AC (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday October 26 2004, @09:56AM)
Re:Architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.antiheroforhire.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 07 2003, @09:06AM)
Re:Architecture (Score:4, Interesting)
Brilliant plan, guys (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean that there won't be a PS4? (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux Performance (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/~eldavojohn/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @03:26PM)
But Harrison could be correct depending on how he defines 'capacity.' In the world of computer science, one must be careful with the absolute of "never ever" but he hasn't defined capacity sufficiently. Now if he means there will never be a PS3 game capable of using it to the full capacity then he's probably right.
Re:Linux Performance (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
Console systems, on the other hand, are engineered for a very tight, very specific, set of tasks. This is why a console with comparatively crappy stats can walk all over a much beefier computer, and vice versa.
Kind of funny. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Kind of funny. (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.bludgeon.org/~darkfred/elk | Last Journal: Monday July 12 2004, @04:00AM)
I'm not a fanboy, I am a game graphics programmer. (but yes perhaps I am a little irritated over the difficulty level as well)
Regards,
Re:Kind of funny. (Score:4, Informative)
And how such a false statement of saying the PS3 will be limited to 256MB of video RAM has been modded as Interesting on Slashdot is absurd. Look at the top level diagram [impress.co.jp]. The RSX can access an additional 256MB of XDR through the Cell. The RSX was designed to work with the Cell, that is why it is different than the conventional console hardware setup.
It's hype all over again, for sure. Every company does it, but it looks like you are being lead into believing the Microsoft FUD-hype instead.
Re:Kind of funny. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.xboxtopic.com/)
Re:Then either (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.chaotic-design.com/)
C) The Cell is a poor general purpose processor.
If you're at all familiar with the fundamentals of CPU design, it should be blindingly obvious that the Cell should be very good at handling streaming vector data, but relatively poor at more general purpose calculations.
Why make it then? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.phpgd.com/)
what he really meant... (Score:3, Funny)
PS/3 perfomance (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
(Sorry. I couldn't help it.)
Not News (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody every uses 100% of the power of their car, either. Sure, you LIKE to have the 250 HP engine, but you only use it for 3 seconds on the on-ramp. And hopefully nobody uses the full power of their 800 watt home theatre system. The excess power is there for the momentary condition - not to use all of the time.
Cell won't run at 100%, thats expected. (Score:3, Interesting)
Guys. There are 2 things here. (Score:5, Interesting)
Having said that, for such a nerd-oriented site, I can't believe some of the parsing going on here, and it must come down at least partially to latent Sony-hate (for whatever reason).
Let's just put the word 'Sony' aside, for ONE second. Just bear with me here.
The PS3's 3.2 GHz Cell processor, developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba and IBM ("STI"), is an implementation to dynamically assign physical processor cores to do different types of work independently. It has a PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible 3.2 GHz Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs), a seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to OS security, and an eighth disabled to improve production yields. The PPE, SPE's and other elements ("units") are connected via an Element Interconnect Bus which serves to connect all of the units in a ring-style bus. The PPE has a 512 KiB level 2 cache and one VMX vector unit. Each SPE is a RISC processor with 128 128-bit SIMD GPRs and superscalar functions. Each SPE contains 256 KiB of non-cached memory (local storage, "LS") that is shared by program code and work data. SPEs may access more data in the main memory using DMA. The floating point performance of the whole system (CPU + GPU) is reported to be 2 TFLOPS[74]. PlayStation 3's Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float and 15 GFLOPS double precision. The PS3 will ship with 256 MiB of Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed.
That is one deeply weird hunk of hardware. And its pretty fucking cool. Or at least, IBM seems to think so.
Someone has tried to dumb down an explanation like this to our boy Phil and he shat out this 'will never use the full potential' idiocy, which in turn riles all the nerds because its just such a lame thing to say, you can poke holes in it all day (such as, 'why build such a complicated beast if we will never be able to program it - equally idiotic).
So the statement is 100% true, and 100% meaningless.
Like the hamburger truck at the end of my street that claims Greatest Burgers in the Universe.
He's right but for the wrong reasons. (Score:4, Insightful)
With the GPU doing graphics, one core doing AI/Gameplay, another doing Physics, another doing Audio/Networking/Input you've pretty much got all the processing power you need. If you start spreading a game out across too many cores it's going to negatively effect the speed of the game due to the fact you're going to spend all your time trying to keep threads in sync. I'd argue that this is why Sony has it wrong and MS has it right. The GPU can handle graphics, then the 3 cores can be used as mentioned above - this seems the optimal division of work in a game engine. I'm convinced that 4 physical processing units at 4ghz would be better than 8 physical processing units at 3.2ghz so perhaps that would've been a better route for Sony if they really felt the need to beat the 360 on performance.
To me the Cell seems more suited to number crunching type applications, the sort where you can offload large amounts of data to each cell and let them go on their merry way processing these chunks without having to worry about whether every few bytes of data is in sync.
I honestly wonder if Sony management just assumed that the Playstation 3 would cell like the PS2 and PS1 and hence just insisted they use it as the tool to bring down the prices of Cell and BluRay regardless of whether they were fit for purpose or not.
Oh really? (Score:3, Funny)
Truth Be Told (Score:3, Insightful)
We still haven't even used the full capability of a 300mhz processor and 32mb video card. The bottleneck is not hardware, it's software. Inefficient code, outdated methodologies, and improper application of libraries is a much greater bottleneck than the hardware in any system.
More cycles and more memory doesn't mean that developers are capable of using better graphics and logic, it means they can be lazier in their optimization. Games which take up 5gb of hard drive space do so because they can, not because they must. Developers know the user has 100+ gigabytes available on their hard drive, so no further optimization is necessary. They know that the video card has 256mb or more memory, so they don't optimize the game anymore than they need to. We only need 3ghz processors because developers can throw away as many cycles as they want. On a needs basis, the actual logic and graphics of the most powerful game available probably would require a 300mhz processor and 32mb of video memory. All the rest is a buffer for waste.
This isn't a sleight against coders, I'm a professional developer too. I've seen a lot of applications that could be optimized further but other tasks are much higher up the priority tree because even though the program could be more efficient, it doesn't need to be.
Re:... right (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let me guess (Score:3, Funny)
Well, since a pedant is concerned with minor details, and not everything is a minor detail, then you couldn't actually be pedantic about everything.
Re:They both have Cell processors... (Score:5, Informative)
The 360 does not have a "2 core cell' it has a 3 core PowerPC.
The PS3's Has 1 core and 7 SPE's, 1 SPE is reserved for the OS, and Sony tells developeres to only use 5 of the remaining 6.
The 360 has more *useable* RAM than the PS3 and from what iv'e read also has a superior GPU.
As far as disc space, 360 games are on dual-layer DVD which is 8.5GB, not 4.7GB. And as long as games like 'Gears of War' and 'Elder Scrolls IV' are fitting on a single disc the Blu-Ray argument holds no water. And worse case scenario...2 disc game! Oh n0's!
Sony has convinced you that you *need* blu-ray..and it's just not true.
Did I mention the 360 can be between $100 and $300 cheaper than a PS3 (depending on configurations for both)? And that it has games out, like, right now? And that you can go into a store and buy one no problem right now?