The Crux of Sony's Strategy Problem

[Sqrl]

TheBigFatJ said:

Sqrl said:

 

Very few things are absolute, but I feel confident in saying my point was true for a reasonably large percentage of uses. But thats really not the central issue here, the big thing is that the architecture is not practical for gaming purposes. Expense was spared in places (as you pointed out) like memory where it could have done a lot of good and it wasn't spared in other places where they were recieving diminishing returns.

As far as Sony not wanting scientists to buy the console, I disagree. They absolutely love the PR generated by these sorts of stories as it perpetuates the idea that the PS3 is a supercomputer even though that just simply isn't the case, its a very robust system no doubt, but it is truly several orders of magnitude away from being in the same league as current supercomputers. Anyways, as I was saying this sort of PR is great for them and even if we assume they are taking losses on the 8 or 9 consoles they sell to these guys they easily recoup that value in free advertising....but can you imagine if someone were to actually cure a disease or make truly important discovery on a PS3? That would be the PR equivalent of winning the $320 million jackpot.

When it comes to everyday folks there really isn't a lot they can do to stop you from purchasing the console simply for a cheap workstation. Not like they can stand at each store and screen folks. But what they can do is pack-in some games and hope it intrigues folks into buying more.

I happen to be an HPC admin. A minority of jobs run on my clusters can be done in less than 512MB/memory per job, and that alone wouldn't fit within the PS3's system memory (256MB). In fact, in 2004 we purchased our first 192GB memory machine so we could run models that consume hundreds of gigs of memory. And recently I upgraded one of our clusters to 16GB of memory per node. Necessities for performance.

What's more, I/O is becoming a bigger and bigger necessity. A single gigabit connection isn't enough anymore. The PS3 could be used on small scale for very specific tasks, but the users would quickly discover that they're limited to a tiny problem space whereas much of the interesting stuff requires significantly more memory. Hell, I just added 250TB to our data center to hold data, and we already had significantly more spinning disk than that.

Not all things require that kind of memory, SETI workloads, protein folding, etc...all have small amounts of data that need to be in memory for processing but require a complex procedure to be performed that takes some time to do.  I realize you guys are trying to point out the memory limitations here, and I completely agree it is severely limited in the memory department both for many science applications and for gaming applications.

But I don't think that effects my point at all, the architecture is still the root cause of many issues as I said in my first post and in general I think most people agree that even keeping Blu-Ray and going with a very powerful architecture they could have made something more developer friendly and that change alone would have made a big differnce as many games would likely not be delayed and the PS3 would be getting into the thick of this "console war" this holiday instead of waiting for the blockbuster games to arrive in '08. A pretty big difference imo.