Sony is phasing out the 60 gb to be replaced by the 80gb

[sieanr]

Andir said:

Oh, sorry, the EE+GS were one chip as your second picture shows. Both are gone in the newer PS3. EE is the Emotion Engine (Physics + CPU) and the GS was the Graphics Synthesizer. They consolidated them to one chip. There's really no need to keep the GS without the EE since the new RSX replaces the GS. Think of it like an nVidia 5500 vs an nVidia 7900, the RSX handles everything the old GS would seamlessly. They are direct descendants. Now, as far as backwards compatibility, all Sony has to do is change the calls for the old GS to run off the RSX and all the old EE calls to the Cell in a wrapper functions on the PPU and a SPU or two if needed.

 

Running the GS on RSX is like running an old DirectX/OpenGL game on a new DirectX/OpenGL card.

What you wrote could not be farther from the truth. Seriously.

It was widely suspected that the GS was removed since the EE/GS was one chip. However, this is not the case. The GS was simply kept by itself and moved to a slightly different location.

Articles proving I'm not full of shit; 

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/151

http://ps3.qj.net/SCEI-comments-on-Euro-PS3-s-BC-issues/pg/49/aid/84182

http://linuxps3.net/articles/technology/european-ps3-introduces-new-hardware-revision.html

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/767/767810p1.html 

 

Regarding the RSX, it could not take over the GS's job. Your analogy about 5500 v 7900 is a very bad one, especially since they are not direct descendants by any means. Getting the RSX to take over the GS task would be impracticle since true software emulation can do it far easier, and likely with better results.

Basically, the GS does some really screwy stuff, especially with how it works with memory that would be very difficult to emulate. Thus they decided to keep the GS, or a variant therof, in the PS3 to make emulation much easier and gain better compatibility.

Then again, it looks as though they may integrate the GS in the RSX. So you were right, but not in the sense you intended. According to a couple of reports, Sony has pretty much quite working on the software BC beyond bugfixes and the like. This likely means that the GS will never be fully emulated and later integrated into the RSX.