Slimline PlayStation 2 for £60 – 360 Spoiler Looms

Keep in mind that the SN, Ageia, Havok stuff is destined for inclusion in the standard Dev Kit. The Epic "middleware" comes with a six month trial period, but has an additional fee for deployment - though I believe it's subsidised by SCE.

While we're on this subject, does anybody have any idea why SCE would licence Havok AND Ageia? Two physics middleware solutions seems a bit pointless, unless there are some key points that aren't shared.

Well, Sir Clive Sinclair did that with the C5. You saying that worked out well? And IBM have made some massive losses investing in stuff that never paid off - like OS/2 Warp.

Sony, now Sony rely on Playstation to live apparently; last figure I heard was 60% of revenue. Toshiba... make stuff. Hardly a massive marketing force.

Oh yes, those people make chips... IT people have to DEAL WITH THEM. I know I'd rather replace the cheap triplicate chips than the overblown heatbucket. Why do you think hardly any system builders who are building for themselves use Pentiums anymore?

They've pumped a ton of money into something they have no idea will gain any back, promised us better performance by sharing them all over the world... well, if that idea works so well why aren't IT companies going crazy over the idea? Heck, PCs arguably would be the easiest to use it thanks to the internet, but you don't hear of CELL powered PCs now do you?

No, I don't trust IBM, master of mockups. Toshiba and Sony are hardly high on my "great manufacturers of digital goods" list. So why the hell would I listen to them over people who day in day out repair all sorts of processors in machines of varying complexity running things far more complex than a sodding Playstsation game?

What exactly do you mean by "IT people"? It's such a vague term it could range from ALSI engineers through to front-line support staff (though I've found it's typically used when refering to those occupying the latter end of that scale)
Unless your IT people deal in the realm of coding games or VLSI engineering, I'm not sure their opinion is worth all that much.

Right now, the only people I would listen to WRT coding for CELL are the coders at Epic and the middleware engineers at IBM or Sony. They're the ones tackling the thorny issue of effective thread management on a multi-core processor.



WE FEAR CHANGE

Oh, and the small fact that the processor isn't in mass production yet. It's gonna be a tad diffucult to design and ship CELL-based PCs without any processors.
Plus... CELL isn't Intel, so there's gotta be *some* work done before all those Wintel apps run on CELL.



You're right to not trust them. All mega corps are masters of bullshit. But to dismiss such a huge investment out of hand..?


Repair processors? That's highly complex stuff that, well, nobody does because it's just not worth the effort.

If you're talking about pulling apart PCs, diagnosing faults, replacing dead components, putting them back together - yeah, that's WAY more complex than coding pissy console games.

Hmm, Sir Clive was, shall we say, a bit eccentric. He hardly compares to three large, multinational companies collaborating on a CPU, does he?

As far as OS/2 (with or without Warp) goes, it was reasonably successful, probably made its money back and more, but didn't dent the Microsoft Monopoly. I'll bet Apple are about to run out of money since they only have about 5% of the desktop market, are they?


Sony get a large amount of their income from the Playstation brand it's true, but I bet if they stopped making it and marketing it, their other divisions would just trundle along nicely like they used to.

I don't have any posts to hand, but many, many people on these forums have accused Sony of only getting where they are by marketing the hell out of the Playstation. They have a large marketing department that does good work. However, they aren't the ones that will be marketing the Cell.

And none of that has anything to do with whether Cell is a decent CPU or not.


Please, anybody who replaces CPUs as a large part of their work probably does very little CPU design or low level programming on those CPUs.

Changing a Cell will be the same as changing a P4, the same as changing a G5, the same as changing the XBox 360 CPU if it ever gets into a computer. It's a very quick job that I've done on several of the PCs I've built and used.

Given the facts that I work in IT, have done for over 10 years, program on a daily basis and have studied microprocessor design, I think I have as much ability to comment on the Cell as your mates.

I know very little of the low-level workings of a CPU, but I have programmed distributed systems before and this is a similar architecture. The issue about ease of use will be a small one for the end users since IBM will provide low-level libraries and compiler back ends to make the game developer's job easier. Sony have also licensed several pieces of middleware which will be included with the PS3 dev kits. Epic have already said that Cell is easy to program for.


Again, please! The reasons you haven't seen any Cell-powered PCs are many and varied, but here are a few that come to mind straight away.

1) Sony have bagged most of the first year's production of Cell CPUs for the PS3.

2) You would have to port an operating system to the new architecture and that takes more than the (roughly) six months since the Cell was unveiled.

3) You would have to get Microsoft to port Windows to the new CPU to have any chance of a large scale penetration of the PC market. Look how long it took them to port Windows to 64 bit CPUs.

As to the sharing CPUs over the Internet, please check out SETI@Home and other distributed processing projects that make use of many small CPUs to embarrass super computers.


If you have friends that repair processors in PCs, tell them to sell their skills to Intel!

Nobody repairs CPUs or any other type of chip. They replace them. Your friends may diagnose the faulty chip, they may even have a list of motherboard work arounds for common problems, but they do not repair CPUs.

To put it into perspective for you, your mates are the equivalent of car mechanics who can change an engine or a gearbox. A demanding and skilful job to be sure. However I wouldn't trust them to design a new type of engine. Nor would I expect them to be able to comment on the design of a new high-performance engine, engine management system or automatic gearbox control system.

I will freely admit I do not have the knowledge to make pronouncements on how good the Cell will be or how much better (if at all) it will be than the XBox 360 CPU. However, I don't make my living designing, building, integrating or writing low-level software for CPUs. Neither do your mates.

I think we should all listen to the people who have to use these CPUs at a low level to see what they have to say. We should probably also wait for some games to come out on the PS3 to see how well the whole architecture performs.

Calling the Cell an overcomplicated pile of tosh because you repair PCs and think you know how CPUs work is, not to be too blunt, getting a bit above yourself. Believing that person is, well, daft.

I wholeheartedly agree, with a few caveats and clarifications...For instance above opinion, if formed from presumed reliable second hand informantion and insight, or merely a simple application of Occam's Razor/KISS, s**t mebbe he RTFM...so all I'm saying is that the opinion isn't neccessarily a display of laughable arrogance, even if does appear to be such.

Though incapable of making any knowledgeable pronoucements on the design of the Cell chip, if I look at the multiple cores as exctiting new features on Sony's new console, as Sony has failed to adequately support Link TWICE, I despair on thier behalf.

Yesterday, when thinking about the differences in design of the two processors, I actually felt a moments pity for EA, before my concern for myself and fellow gamers recovered, while pondering...

What Effect Will the Next Gen Consoles Differing Chip Designs Have On Multiplatform Game Development?

discuss...

This would be true if microprocessor magazines and news sources were laughing behind their hands when talking about the Cell, but from what I've seen, they remain cautiously optimistic and interested.

The only people who are being as negative about Cell as fluffy's mates are gamers who heard that the design of the Cell is similar to the design of the PS2 and those that hate Sony on sight.

Those gamers who "know" that the PS2 was hard to program for think that Cell will be harder to program for since there are more equivalents of the VPUs. However, the reason the PS2 was hard to program for was that there weren't any decent low-level libraries for the PS2 when it was introduced to developers. The Cell will have those libraries due in no small part to the involvement of IBM, who have already ported Linux to the Cell.

OK, Kutaragi-san isn't exactly trying to let any bad feeling die down with his Skynet-like future predictions, but he's basically a hype machine in public these days anyway. The sad fact is that apparently the current Cell architecture only allows two CPUs to be connected without any extra routing hardware.


There seems to be a lot of this attitude around the internets these days. The attitude that Sony are responsible for every game that comes out on PS2 and that the reason we don't see innovative games that make full use of the PS2's features, like iLink, is all Sony's fault.

From where I sit (on the sidelines, jeering) the lack of innovative games is, in part, due to the massive presence of EA and their cookie cutter games. It is also partly due to the fact that the market seems to follow EA in producing "same old same old" type of games.

However some of the most innovative games on the PS2 have come from Sony studios themselves. EyeToy and Sing Star are the typicl examples, but even Primal and God of War did new things in their genres.


Wow game in feels pity for EA shocker! Maybe we should interview you! :-)


Simple, they will buy the best middleware they can lay their hands on. Hang on! EA already did that, they liked the middleware that much, they bought the company.

OK, so EA are happy with RenderWare under their belt. That covers every "$SPORT $YEAR" title going, plus NFS, Burnout and Harry Potter. I bet RockStar will keep on with RW, so that covers GTA games.

For any developer who doesn't want to get in to bed with EA over licensing RenderWare, Sony have licensed Unreal and Havoc for inclusion in the PS3 dev kits and Microsoft have XNA. Both of these environments will require a small amount of platform-specific code that will act almost as a hardware abstraction layer does for operating systems.

Of course, I've only covered PS3 and XB360 above, but Rev is so unknown at the moment, I wouldn't want to comment except to say it's supposed to be GC-compatible.

I don't think there will be too much of a problem for devs writing multi-platform releases, they already have to deal with from three to eight (by my count - PS1, PS2, PSP, XB, GC, GBA, DS & PC) differing hardware specs today, adding another two or three into the mix will slow them down a little, but not by much.

s**te, just remembered....I've got a fetish for overcomplicated piles of tosh...I'd be the engineer trying to convince the programmer how great it is...

Here's one for the floor;

With both 360 and PS3 having PowerPC at their core, are we going to see a return to the bad old days of games written for the lowest common denominator (in this case, a single PPC), ignoring each machines additional CPU features (dual PPC for 360, and seven SPUs for PS3)?

It would certainly "solve" the issue for coding for multi-core architectures!

This is an issue that first began to vex me with the second generation of PS games, specifically I was flabbergasted at the lack of Link support for Test Drive 5 and Cool Boarders 3. I think someone from Sony should have been nudging developers toward using it, and they should have used it themselves, not cast it aside...Hell, if Gran Turismo 2 had linked...If Medal of Honor had linked...

I don't let MS off on this issue either, more Link games should have been availible pre-LIVE!...and unless a developer can provide a valid reason for not doing so, all controls should be fully configurable. Its not as though the console manufacturers are complely powerless, and thier first party titles have to provide the example.

If they are going to tout a feature to sell me a console, they bloody well better do what they can to see that its supported. I also think fully configurable controls should be a requirement, barring a damn good reason for not .



I've been playing EA games for an long time, I remember seeing Racing Destruction Set in the store, prolly my second favorite C64 game, after Elite, of course. The packaging they used in those days was pure genius. Made the programmers almost look like rock stars, or at least, popular authors. Sad whats become of them, they were the best, now they are merely wealthy.

or will it all be written just like it would be for a single CPU and all the messy buisness it taken care of automagically? Is that the power of the Cell?

are three heads better than seven?

Cerbrus vs. Hydra...theres an idea, EA could do a non-book related Harry Potter game...release for both platforms, Xbox version, final boss is Hydra, PS3 version final boss is "Fluffy"

Yes it is a spoiler but not that much. It is hard to see HARDCORE gamers NOT BUYING a xbox360. BUt casual and average gamers will not. I AM WAITING FOR PS2 slimline to drop. I still don't have ONE, but i have an old ps2 and ps1 that have not bogged down yet. WONT BUY xbox360 though, so as tell microsoft that WINDOWS in PC is enough microsoft for me. STAY IN software (even the browser is use is FIREFOX). let hardware players do the HARDWARE.