Sony Says Nobody Will Ever Use All the Power of a PS3 581
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.'"
This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
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
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)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, A CPU with 4gb L2 cache is better than the same CPU with 4mb L2 cache.
However, 1000x L2 cache does not make a system 1000x faster because something else will bottle neck the system.
Or in simpler terms it would be useful to have an iPod with 100x as much space. But most people would go for an iPod with 10x as much space and 10x as much battery life because that much extra space is useless but more battery life is useful. (Assuming the same price.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
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, Funny)
That's okay. Nobody else commenting here read it either.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
I think you're confusing bottlenecks, but it's easy to do. At the very least, I may not have been entirely clear about which bottleneck I consider most important.
First, a short primer on how the SPE works. You can find a more in-depth explanation in Al Eichenberger's paper on IBM's site. [ibm.com]
The SPEs have flat memory and software managed paging to help hide the latency of starting a new task on an SPE. A separate DMA controller brings code to the SPE's local memory, ideally well ahead of when it is needed.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm missing a sentence I needed to fully make my point, without being apparently contradictory. I said: Indeed, memory interfaces have grown from 8 bits and 16 bits to now 128 bit and 256 bit. (A dual Opteron system with RAM populated on each memory port has a 256-bit wide memory interface, effectively.) Add after that: However, to keep pace with the phenomenal growth in CPU performance we've seen, they'd easily need to be 10x that width, depending on how you measure things.
This issue deserves greater
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, your comment does raise a valid point, and deserves a more thoughtful response.
A console definitely demands a different approach to player interaction than a desktop does, for a variety of reasons. On the desktop you always have a keyboard and always have a display capable of at least moderately high res (800x600 minimum, usually more these days), whereas on the console you pretty much never have a keyboard and are still stuck with a large number of NTSC displays. How you interact with the game
Re:what do I win? (Score:5, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
You can't really directly compare a racing game with, well, anything else. Racing games need zero deformable objects - everything is rigid but the eye candy - and they have a very predictable path. If the view changes rapidly you're probably spinning in circles so the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You could just guess...you have reasonably good odds of getting it correct. I bet it's 7.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Base Pi?? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Base Pi?? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Well duh! (Score:3, Insightful)
That is what had happened after the SNES-Genesis-etc days (From the N64 onwards), the "next gen" iteration life span has became shorter and shorter so developers just start to get familiar with the system when the Next-gen system gets out.
I will sound like the old-grandpa but I liked more when the game generations lasted longer, you could see really nice things done with the technology and the hardware had more "value" (see
Re:Well duh! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dreamcast doesn't count here because they will never have a next generation console. Playstation 1 came out in September of 95 (in America) and the Playstation 2 came out in October of 2000 (also in America). That's onl
Just look at history. (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember, when the NES came out, the video game market was just recovering from a horrendous crash. (that, for a couple years, prevented Nintendo from gaining ground in America) No one knew how long the console would "last," so there was no reason not to try to squeeze everything out of it possible. (resulting
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm, good point. Maybe I should stop accelerating to near c while playing on my Gamecube.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Insightful)
Familiar indeed.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Unless it's a Honda... then it just sounds like you're breaking the law.
Slashdot replies.... (Score:2, Funny)
Is this a nice way of saying... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Untitled"? From "TBD" studio?
I LOVE that game!
Good thing I only have to wait until "TBA" for it...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I could be snarky, but I'll just say this: Please, be honest, or leave. As a Sony employee, you could probably offer a lot of insight in these discussions. But you aren't - you're astroturfing. Please go away.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlike the fellow above, I actually hope Sony is not paying you, because I would hope they'd get more for their money than a list of "Untitled" exclusives...
Re:Thank You AC (Score:5, Insightful)
Architecture (Score:2, Insightful)
Conclusion: they are trying to present a bad news as a good one, business as usual...
Re:Architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Architecture (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For publishers like EA, this is absolutely true, and has been for some time (see: Call of Duty). But for the first-party stuff, they will still be leveraging whatever strengths the console has (Gears or War for Xbox
Brilliant plan, guys (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The hardest thing would be figure out wh
Does this mean that there won't be a PS4? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Woh! Business model! (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux Performance (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or perhaps the PS3 utilizes a stupid design considering that developers have repeatedly shunned the most complex console.
Even in the 16 bit days a lot of developers went with the genesis rather than the SNES even though the SNES had greater capabilities because the genesis had more CPU and it was simply easier to develop games for it.
In the 32 bit era the Saturn was basically ignored by everyone because it was a nightmare to code
Re:Then either (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Kind of funny. (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3)
It's not exactly the same. In fact all three consoles of this generation use a variant of the same PPC core, but all of them are customized. The 360's processor is reputed to have more capabilities than the one in the PS3, because the one in the PS3 is there to do a little bit of general purpose processing, and to hand work off to the
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
sure (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
seismic (Score:2, Funny)
I'm pretty sure I could saturate the CPU and all 6 available SPE's with seismic data. Though it probably depends on the FSB and cache.. considering all the SPE's share the same 512k cache.
Even then, I still wouldn't be touching the GPU since it seems to be off limits from linux for a while
-metric
Difficult to develop for? (Score:2)
Why make it then? (Score:3, Insightful)
what he really meant... (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe it won't be used (Score:2)
Well, sure. (Score:2)
Case Study: Sega Dreamcast.
Reminiscent of the Wii (Score:2)
Sony seems to be getting similar press for stupid/silly decisions, but uh.. they don't seem to be working out. I do agree that the hardware is impressive, and the ability to run linux is great. Hopefully they won't kill it by too many boneheaded PR/Marketing/Business decisions.
It's technology (Score:2)
Ah, it's technology. It'll be maxed out in just a couple years if not sooner. Of course no current game is using more than 50% of it's power. It can take a couple years to develop a game. Those game companies get a dev. kit late in the game and have to push the game out on launch of the PS3. There's no chance to play with the system to find out what tricks will pull out the power of the PS3.
It's not until companies can spend time playing with the system and finding 'tricks' of squeezing power out of
Cell Processor Mystique... (Score:2)
Anyway, it seems to me that Sony are betting on the mystique of the Cell Processor to get people all excited about it and give it an edge over the 360. I don't think it'll work because people who know about the hardware aren't going to buy into the hype, and people that don't will make decisions based on how the games look, not the promised potential of how the games COULD look.
Because if I'm the average consumer the "Reality Synth
PS/3 perfomance (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, 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: (Score:2)
I just think in powers of two when dealing with memory, so that's what popped up, I always remembered it as about 1/2 MB.
Re: (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:... right (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The biggest unreported story of this console generation is that you can, more and more, "go into a store and buy a PS3 no problem right now".
I've been offered 3 this past week alone when asking for a Wii. Yes, I do far too much xmas shopping
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That depends... I actually bought a PS3 almost solely for watching Blu-Ray movies. If you look around, the 20G PS3 is actually the best high definition DVD player for the money. It's even cheaper than standalone players that won't do a fraction of what the PS3 can do. I know the 360 has an add-on but the lack of HDMI output was a deal-breaker for me. For someone who doesn't need/want HDMI then the 360 + add-on is also a very attra