Ken Kutaragi - PS3 Hardware Upgrade Possible

upgradable console / dvd player/recorder.

I think the beauty of consoles is that they dont need to be upgraded.

I think sony are loosing the plot more and more with every press release/interview.

I think most people also prefer a standalone dvd player / recorder.

Sony need to take a close look at thier market. If they think that even half of PlayStation 2 owners want an all in one media PC, with gaming not the focus, they are deluded.

They might gain new customers with this, but I'd be willnig to wager they'd lose a whole lot of thier installed userbase, more than the new customers make up for...A LOT more.

For serious...

Next year what will be my media hub...etc??? Well considering my media hub right now is my vista media server (i have had the ctp build for several weeks as an msdn programmer go and get it now if you want to do the public beta), and using xbox360 as my player on whatever TV in the house i want to use it on for music or video.

So i assume this time next year it will still be vista and i will still be using my $399.99 x360 to play all of it on. Why wait for sony's promises when you can have it now for cheaper and with more functionality between different non sony equipment.

I don't think that is the case. Nobody is going to ditch their PS2 because the PS3 plays MP3s or movies. Some people who were looking to buy a PS3 may decide to get a 360 instead, in which case they will probably hang on to their PS2 so they can continue to play the games they do now. In either case Sony's overall share doesn't budge an inch. At least not until people do get rid of their PS2s.

Another day, another Sony bit of dumb thinking. While the media hub biz looks attractive most folk don't care for it. This thinking isn't gonna capture the people who bought the PS0ne and PS2.

Focus Sony muppets, no bloody movies and crap, just the damn games.

it's a computer now!!??
WTF!!

Nevermind focus Joji. I think if Sony was a person they'd be showing the first signs of demetia.
They really don't seem to know what direction they are going anymore. Is this just an excuse to cover up the high pricetag and not a genuine lack of direction?

I like consoles because I don't have to stick in a new video card every third week. Sony is trying to go in a new direction, thats fine, but... Their whole Playstation thing as a games console seemed to work in the past. Not exactly sure why they want to start changing that. They had most of the market with the PS2 and PS1, why not use the same formula and continue with the success. So like what...

$600 - PS3
$140 - 2 games
$??? - Upgrades.

Really, thats over a grande. Their missing the market of your mainstream teenager who buys NFL every year.

If Sony manages to pull off an ass kicking this time around, I'll eat a Dualshock.

If i wanted a media center i'd buy a windows xp compatible media center.Adding an already established DVD component and succeeding is one thing, and trying to establish your own format by attaching it on your console in hope that it will sell as many as your previous generation is tottaly different. UMD anyone? lol

Having upgrades in mind, the mainstream PC market where media centers draw their components is a lot more comfortable for my pocket and poses as a more realistic, safe and open choice than a specialized sony component that works for sony alone and would certainly be as overpriced as ps3 itself.

If they really want to "save" themselves they better come out with a low cost PS3 with simple DVD on it. If they want to have a chance to dominate in the same way PS2 did.

As for comparing with dell lol what can i say ...are they saying they'll try to take dell's or even worse PC market as well now? lol

Sony's thinking is definitely funny.At least i give them credit for amusing us with pure next gen humor :D

You want opinions, I'll bite.

This is something I advocated for years, for the PC Xbox. But this is not so useful for the PS3, or the Xbox 360, as they are more custom. With PC technology, it is developed and subsidised by the PC industry, it surpassed the console tech fairly quickly last cycle. With the console industry you are outlaying a lot of cost and time to develop custom solutions likely to only stay ahead of leading edge PC technology for 1 to 2 years. The problem with the PC is their are so many configurations to support, or produce trouble and inefficiencies. Using this technique in a console, does not pose as great a problem as it first seems. In a xbox like console you could upgrade the hardware once a year after the first 2 years, get higher performance while reducing power and size factors and pull ahead of the custom competitions illogical and totally stultifying seven year cycle. The reason it's not such a problem, is instead of supporting hundreds of configurations, the configuration is locked down to one a year after the first two year run, with a totally new model at five years, so only four locked down targets have to be accommodated. You could also have a universal API virtual engine, so that if the developer so wishes they only need to do one (most non cutting edge games do not require more), or two, either the most popular or recent hardware configuration, plus a universal one for the rest.

For the Playstation 3, they have been talking of going to media centre and the rest since before the PS2, and talking of PC aspirations since then, it is no surprise. So, it is good for improving the functionality and interfaces each year, this year the fabled much cheaper Media centre, then computer, and keep upgrading with the latest bits over it's ten year cycle. But as well, they could change the GPU and add a faster and larger cell array. even some of the PC add ons meant to compete with the cell. So yes, it is a good idea.

MS was reportedly designing a Xbox PC, this has disappeared, and the Power PC based 360 does not help, unless they aim to go to 360 based, Power, PC's. Their is suggestions of more Microsoft branded hardware products (I forget what the latest was this week). This should worry the PC industry like absolutely mad, what do they do if MS produces it's own PC's, with an xbox PC able to take any consumer market it is placed in by storm? Where do vendors go to, if there is no market under 500 pounds for their hardware, or an updated MS OS, Linux?

I'm not a developer and I don't have a PC powerful enough for XP, so WTF are you on about?

Why would anyone ever want to upgrade from 2k to Vis(as)ta?

Thanks for your insight.

The reason why consoles work is because they are based on a fixed internal system with a fixed instruction set. This does not lock out all of the i/o (inputs and outputs), from controllers, to media inputs(dvd, HD-dvd, usb etc), but the system itself is contained and controlled.

Why would would a game company want to allocate resources to releasing 4 different iterations of a single game for a single system (with multiple hardware configs). This would require 4 times the beta testing, 4 times the amount of post patching, 4 times the amount of support, and still not a single version would totally optimize the exact hardware.

Your statement is retarded and is one of the problems with PC gaming. I am a PC gamer, but no i cannot expect every game to run flawlessly on my system without doing some optimizations.

Listen and learn, and I'm sure there are a few users left that didn't upgrade from 2K to XP as well. Like it or not, even XP will probably become dated (when we get 2GB machines). I've even got Geoworks around here that could also be useful for 2K users if they don't want to upgrade.

I deal with retarded people all the time when I post, they are usual self opinionated barely able to string facts together, let alone recognise them.

A bit of advanced thought, and fact stringing, reveals, that the hardware differences are only a small part of the equation in software development, that is why they invented "computer languages" and those other funny things you may not be entirely aware of, called firmware, and a C.o.m.p.u.t.e.r O.p.e.r.a.t.i.n.g S.y.s.t.e.m. that smooth out programming for hardware differences. Apart from this they have libraries and A>P>Is to perform similar functions where greater hardware differences are there. Lets string some further facts, 80 to 90% of coding usually can be made hardware independent, with optimised libraries and APIs covering the rest. As you are working with common language, firmware, operating systems and APIs, very little time has to be spent on the ten percent+ of code that requires full speed or optimisation. Coding is only a small part of production, the rest being other things like Design, sound, graphic and overheads. Now days more than 10% of games might be cutting edge in performance, and a few tittles when the PS3 initially gets released, mostly though, 80-90% of games wouldn't be, so the performance difference makes even less of a difference in those cases. Given that they will broadly retain the same instruction set, large portions of optimised machine code can remain virtually untouched, so optimisations further come down to the code actually handling different hardware. For the majority of those hardware differences, an API can do the job very pre-optimised in itself. So you are left with only a limited amount of cases, and machine code that needs to be uniquely optimised. I have described a streamlined design and production process. Of course, if you design/program this programming system like a moron, you will stuff all this up. If you program this system like a moron, you won't get the full benefit from it, but this is what happens already with single configurations.

So, most of the time it just won't matter that there are 4 configurations, the effort, time and money to incorporate them is relatively small (especially compared to hundreds/thousands of PC configurations) with them pre-optimised for the handful of configurations. It is called proper software management, which is beyond even most programmers, but why there are people out there to manage this.

I sure hope you now, know what you are talking about in the future.

I *read* and din't learn a thing, because you completely neglected to answer my question. Maybe you're too self-absorbed to read what I wrote, so I'll try again;

why would anyone want/need to upgrade from XP (or even 2k) to Vista?

why would I need a 2GB machine, other than to support an overweight OS?

All your condescending diatribe about APIs, OSs, firmware etc etc doesn't explain how even with this magic stuff , PC games still suffer from cripling bugs with differenet harrdware.

Console games have bug - it's unavoidable. When you bring in 4 different configurations you increase the chances of bugs by at least 4 times.

and then you've got to look at the difficulty/cost/feasibility of coding for different levels of capability. It's the reason ps2 hardrive wasn't well supported - developers couldn't be bothered with the extra coding for a fragment of the market. Same will happen if there were 4 configs - the most popular would be the best supported by software. A killer app might boost a higher config, but the config owned by casual gamers would be the most most widespread.

At least the 2 PS3 configs don't offer any huge difference for developers, unlike the 360 configs.