An interesting article on the PS2 'Emotion Engine'

ozpass

First off: I was debating whether this was the correct board for this, or 'HW Tweaking'. Apologies to the mods if I made the wrong choice.

I was googling earlier today to determine which games console I should buy. In doing so I came across a fascinating (well, it was to me!) article about the 'Emotion Engine'- the custom CPU at the heart of the Playstation 2.

You can find it here:

http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/playstation2/ee-1.html

It's especially interesting in these Mhz obsessed days to read about Sony's approach in implementing the CPU. The architecture of the 'Emotion Engine' (modified MIPS core) has been optimised to a particular application (rendering 3d environments), resulting in a chip that achieves performance through efficiency, rather than a higher number of clock cycles in a given period.

Anyway, if you're a geek like myself and have a spare 10 minutes, give it a quick read.

P.S. I'll probably still buy an Xbox

Gerry

That article is ancient, but extremely good. It must be a year since I read it.. Anyway it does an excellent job of explaining why the ps2 is difficult to program, as well as explaining how it works. If I remember correctly, the graphics engine can perform 16 simultaneous operations, the problem for the programmer is how to keep it busy with 16 things to do at the same time, ALL the time. It usually ends up with less than optimal performance. However sony usually do a pretty good job of optimising their code, and I think newer development kits help the programmer out with optimizing.

I'm not sure about the xbox, I'd rather have something that new and original games are going to be released for, I already have a pc and games seem to be coming out for the pc first still. The ps2 has classic games like gran turismo 3, and it has a bit of a future, since there are something like 40 million ps2's sold.

Matt Simis

Originally posted by Gerry
The ps2 has classic games like gran turismo 3, and it has a bit of a future, since there are something like 40 million ps2's sold.

Sorry, couldnt resist!

Xbox will have a lot of original and Xbox only games soon. Buffy is suprisingly good and Halo was quite excellent for a launch title. PS2 has lots of great games... because its a year old. Xbox isnt going to disappear because MS arent just gonna disappear.


Vain attempt to bring things back on topic ->

http://www.system16.com/sega/index.html (and other HW, on the left frame) Lotsa info (from ancient times to brand new) on Sega Arcade HW. Strange stuff in there, like their massively multi chip PowerVR card(s) based Cabinets, the Triforce and Xbox based "cheap" arcade machines.

http://www.atani-software.net/segabase/index-segadchistory1.html
How the Dreamcast was designed to compete with PS2 a year before its release.



Matt

Gerry

Well Microsofts solution to a problem is to throw horrible amounts of money at it, so I guess they'll just drop the price even more. I didn't make my point very well, I should have just pointed out that xbox sales are crap to say the least.

Those links look interesting, I've read a bit about the virtua racing arcade machine before, some guy restored a broken one, fascinating stuff.

Matt Simis

Ill give you that Gerry, the sales havent been much to brag about. But, as the underdog to the market, I admire them and the Xbox, as it contains spectacular potiential. Mind you, that didnt same the DC, but it had a company with negative amounts of money behind it which didnt help.


The Sega history site is deceptively big alright.. took a looong time to get through it.



Matt

ozpass

The Sega history site was fascinating, cheers Matt. As an early adopter of the Dreamcast (I still play Sega GT) it was interesting/frustrating to see where it all went wrong.

Sorry the PS2 processor stuff was so out of date- I'm not the webhead I once was, and 'twas the first time I'd seen it.

Here's another (old) article about the proposed 'cell' processor slated for the Playstation 3 - another interesting read if you haven't seen it.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2120395,00.html

Gerry

Don't worry about the article being "out of date" ozpass. Its as relevant as it ever was, and the auther ( Hannibal I think) is very good at painting a picture of how a processor works. Its also excellent to have some genuine technical discussion on this board, instead of the usual crap. Anyone who reads that article should read a few more of the articles on that site, like the excellent comparison of the powerpc g4 and intel p4 archictectures.

WRT to Cell, it looks excellent, but we shall see if it lives up to all the hype... Should make the ps3 class either way.

ozpass

With Moore's law starting to reach the end of it's shelf life (it'll be the processor interconnects that rain on the parade, apparently) it's interesting to witness such interest being shown in parallelism within processor design.

Rick Hodgin wrote quite an interesting article in relation to this (another oldie- d'oh!) it's at:

http://www.geek.com/procspec/features/futureprocs/

And just about any google search for Linux on the IBM S/390 will provide fascinating insights into the processor and subsystem design of this Big Iron.

segadreamcast

"http://www.atani-software.net/segab...dchistory1.html
How the Dreamcast was designed to compete with PS2 a year before its release."

One of the best articles I have read about Sega in my life - kudos to matt for the URL .

cerebus

Originally posted by ozpass
With Moore's law starting to reach the end of it's shelf life (it'll be the processor interconnects that rain on the parade, apparently) it's interesting to witness such interest being shown in parallelism within processor design.

Don't forget, people have been predicting the demise of Moore's Law every few years since the late 1970s - I woudn't count it out just yet.

The current ITRS roadmap gets us to 2016 I believe - with a projected drawn feature size of 13nm (and effective gate length of 9nm) for high-performance design.

That's a whole lot smaller than we're at right now, so I'd imagine we still have ~15 years before Moore's law runs out of steam. (Of course, there are probably some assumptions in that roadmap on fabrication methods being able to keep pace, which is not necessarily a given! Some of the stuff being done right now in terms of OPC and the like is pretty wacky, and it'll only get weirder...)

It'll be a rollercoaster ride though - working through all the new issues that have appeared with the last few generations of technology has been a riot

Slutmonkey57b

I'm fairly sure an Irish company actually produces the rendering system (or part of it) for the PS2. Moore's law is by no means "out of steam", it's just irrelevant while current interconnect/mobo architecture cripples the speed increases provided by Moore's Law.

Gerry

Originally posted by NoelRock
"http://www.atani-software.net/segab...dchistory1.html
How the Dreamcast was designed to compete with PS2 a year before its release."

One of the best articles I have read about Sega in my life - kudos to matt for the URL .

Tis a fantastic article, however I will point out one thing that I found a bit strange.

They made no mention of the fact that because the dc uses the powervr tile based rendering archictecture, it is much more efficient than the ps2. So even if it can only draw 3 million triangles per second compared to 16 million for the ps2, the dc is only drawing triangles that can be seen, whereas the ps2 is drawing every triangle. In games that have massive levels of overdraw, that levels the playing field a bit.