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Sony Says Nobody Will Ever Use All the Power of a PS3
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Dec 20, 2006 11:00 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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This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
That's okay. Nobody else commenting here read it either.
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well duh! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Unless it's a Honda... then it just sounds like you're breaking the law.
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Is this a nice way of saying... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank You AC (Score:5, Insightful)
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Brilliant plan, guys (Score:5, Insightful)
PS/3 perfomance (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
(Sorry. I couldn't help it.)
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.
Re:Architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:... right (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Linux Performance (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Kind of funny. (Score:5, Informative)
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