First glance @ PS3 Chip

Stormfox1020

Linkage

Sounds fairly powerful, but im holding all judgements until I see it in action for myself.

madrab

i agree



we all remember the hype over the "emotion" chip

Retr0gamer

i won't believe a word of it. I still remember Sony saying that the PS1 would have graphics better than the special effects in Jurassic Park and also the plain silly PS2 emotion engine comments.

madrab

i agree



we all remember the hype over the "emotion" chip

madrab

not sure why that came up twice......maybe the emotion engine is not happy with my comment

ShiverinEskimo

for those of us not in the know (xbox man) what the hell was the emotion chip?

Thrasher

The Emotion Engine (TM) is part of the CPU of the Playstation2. According to Sony Marketing, this thing apparently was to add all sorts of new fandangled capabilities to gaming that were not possible with Intel, AMD or Mac CPUs.

Apparently, the players thoughts would be transmitted via the controller into the PS2 CPU Emotion Engine where characters would feel with the player and perform all sorts of great things - well beyond the AI or scripting of the game itself.......

Dont be at yourself

Remember those tech demoes for the PS2, featuring these "real-time" characters ball room dancing etc while the demonstrator manipulated the camera with the analogue sticks? Guffaw.

Don't believe the hype.

Raskolnikov

Yep, that article reeks of steaming bull****. 16 giga FLOPS (Floating point operations per second) sounds fantastic but you need to bear in mind that the xBox is supposedly capable on 80 giga FLOPS (that's not a fair comparison of course) already. Not to mention, the xBox2 will allegedly contain multiple CPU's and supposedly will deal with the issue of memory bandwidth that currently plauges graphics chips.

ShiverinEskimo

Already sort of commited myself to buying xbox2. I like the sort of games in attracts...and i guess its as close to pc gaming as your going to get with a console costing the price of a decent pc's gfx card...

Bodan

Im still undecided weather or not to get a xbox .Im very happy with my ps2 and now just after reading a few reviews of the ps3 , i think i just might hang on . It sounds awesome

jesus_thats_gre

The 16 GFlops was referring to a rack of the processors. not a single 1 I think..

po0k

It's just a smp chip.

Afaik it's pretty much a 3-core PPC 970fx, or related to it.

Should be a nice enough number cruncher, but they'll have some loss to cover on the hardware if they want to reach a sellable price-point, what with the shortages associated with 90nm fabs recently.

And the PS2 was a horrible architecture.

L5

Lets hope it can do Toy Story 2 quality graphics just the like ps2 was claimed to be capable of !

koneko

Sony have a tendency (as others have said) of making up complete BS. I'll believe it when I see it.

LookingFor

The figure quoted for that one rack workstation is 16 Teraflops, not 16 Gigaflops (a teraflop = a gigaflop x 1000).

They're not saying PS3 will reach that performance (it won't).

Also, you all need to look back on those PS2 demos and announced specs. They were accurate. A lot of people let their imaginations run wild, probably because they didn't actually understand what any of the specs meant. Seriously, though, I think the original Sony PS2 presentation did end up being accurate (and I'll argue this point in more detail if anyone wants me to).

Retr0gamer

LookingFor wrote:

A lot of people let their imaginations run wild, probably because they didn't actually understand what any of the specs meant. Seriously, though, I think the original Sony PS2 presentation did end up being accurate (and I'll argue this point in more detail if anyone wants me to).

Emotion Engine (snigger )

garthv

The three firms claim that the Cell chip will be up to 10 times more powerful than existing processors.

then why the hell would they put it in a console....
I cant belive its not out till 2006,someone told me that it was going to be next year....i think

monkeyfudge

The emotion chip in my PS2 must be broken... it simply doesn't love me anymore...

Will they have to stop the PS3 from falling into Bin Laden's hands? He could use it to destroy us all... Remember the stories that if you linked 3 PS2's together you could use them as a missile guidance system?

Gilgamesh

was wondering myself, 16 TeraFLOPS sounds more likely, my PC at home allready has 4.7 TeraFLOPS.
But from my understanding, the PS3 is going to contain 16 of these processors, not just a single one.
the performance could be awesome, but also looking at the 2006 release, it could be outdated.
Sony, and Toshiba (and another company I always forget) are going to be implementing this chip into just about any piece of hardware that can benefit from it, e.g. HiFi systems, for more higher performance environment processing, TVs will have them in, and finally, Toshi and Sony are going to try and create a true multimedia device.
A TV which has enough power to run games, without having another box sitting next to it.
could be cool in some ways.

Matt Simis

Gilgamesh wrote:

was wondering myself, 16 TeraFLOPS sounds more likely, my PC at home allready has 4.7 TeraFLOPS.
But from my understanding, the PS3 is going to contain 16 of these processors, not just a single one.
the performance could be awesome, but also looking at the 2006 release, it could be outdated.
Sony, and Toshiba (and another company I always forget) are going to be .

That would be that "IBM" crowd I believe...


Matt

LookingFor

Gilgamesh wrote:

was wondering myself, 16 TeraFLOPS sounds more likely, my PC at home allready has 4.7 TeraFLOPS.

Your PC at home certainly isn't 4.7 Teraflops. 4.7 Gigaflops, you mean?

We'll be lucky if PS3 gets to 1 Teraflop..that would be insane performance. My guess is it'll come in at approx. 500GFlops.

The PS2's CPU was very powerful for floating point performance, more powerful than desktop CPUS of the time. If you bought enough of them and distributed processing over them, you could easily guide a few missiles with them