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Forums - Sony Discussion - ps3 as powerful as sandia lab's asci red supercomputer

Chairman-Mao on 04 February 2011

Wow that's pretty impressive! I know the PS3 is 9 years after but its a bloody gaming console so to be = a 1997 supercomputer is pretty amazing.



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darkknightkryta on 04 February 2011
snakenobi said:
darkknightkryta said:
snakenobi said:
Crystalchild said:

knewing that w/o being a member. :>

yes, the PS3 is, theoretically, much stronger than 360 Wii combined. The Problem is, that the stuff inside the 360 is more opted for gaming than the PS3, so much of this power is gone to waste.


what do you mean being opted for gaming?

the main problem with the PS3 was its architecture which was completely different from the existing computer architecture but had more capabilities at low price and it would be expensive to extract the same performance out of the existing architecture

360 architecture was the same as computers

and Wii was too

 

Interesting that you say that, cause back at release the 360's GPU was very different from current GPUs with its unified shader architecture, yet the PS3 believe it or not was closer to PC at the time, except with an alien processor (Though the 360 had an alien processor at the time too, though not as alien as what the PS3 had).

whattttt

360 had a unified structure but its workings were the same as the computers being used

CELL on the other hand  was and still is different from normal computers out there

 

you talk about that time and now as if alot has changed.its not.

The architecture in the 360 is still very different from current PCs, CPU aside that embedded ram is something that I don't even think current cards have, plus the unified pool of memory.  And things have changed greatly from then and now.



zarx on 04 February 2011
Ssliasil said:

Ignore the GPU and focus specifically on sending graphics and sound data singularly through the Cell and you can make an amazing game (killzone and Uncharted for example)

The Cell (which is one of the worlds best CPU and GPU) doesnt cooperate/communicate with the PS3's Main GPU all that well. 

Uncharted 2 unlocked half the power of the Cell by completely ignoring the main GPU, and Exclusives havent looked back since.

BTW bet on the PS4 having one 16-Core Cell Processor and one 8-Core Cell Processor.  The 8-core being the mainstay GPU and the 16-core as the CPU.  Expect 4 cores of the 16-core Cell to be used as mainstay Security, and one for the XMB2.

 

Leaving 11 Cores for general processes and 8 cores for Graphic rediculousness.

Scoop.


Actually Uncharted 2 uses the GPU in the PS3 extensively they just off load post processing to the CELL to free up the GPU to do other things faster.

" In the case of Uncharted 2, post-processing techniques such as the game's phenomenal depth-of-field effect (pretty much the best seen on console to date) are hived off to the SPUs. It's an intriguing way of using resources. Presumably the GPU would be able to carry out the same task a lot faster, but if the RSX is otherwise engaged in a computationally more expensive task, it just makes more sense to use the SPUs to do the same job."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/uncharted-2-mastering-the-cell-blog-entry

God of war 3 is the same they off loaded post processing and Anti-Aliasing which allowed them to use Morphological Anti-Aliasing but every other graphics task is still done on the GPU because it's better at them than the CELL. Offloading tasks makes games look and perform better by letting the GPU do what it does well without worrying about certain tasks. No game on the PS3 doesn't use the GPU and any that did would look or perform like shit...



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slowmo on 05 February 2011
snakenobi said:
slowmo said:


Architecture means very little on a new system its the dev toolkit that will give you the best results, Microsoft's was outstanding which is expected for a primarily software development company, Sony's was truly woeful by comparison.

Being alien or different didn't cause problems back then it was Sony's poor devkit that caused the most issues.  Thankfully Sony have managed to get their devs to work in unison to improve the tools and knowledge they all have between them.

The 360 was quite different from normal computers too by the way, the difference is the tools Microsoft provided hid the difference to a greater degree.

how does achitecture doesn't matter?

if the devs don't know how to make games with the system which was because the PS3 was totally different to what developers were used to.

it matters big time

and we aren't here discussing MS and SONY's credentials.don't start the war or hate thing.

dev kits are based upon what PS3 was about and so problems were caused

360 was first based on a the existing architechture so devs knew how to work it and the devkits were helped by the Direct X like optimisation on computers which helps devs


The 360 wasn't existing architecture either, stop making this stuff up, the layout is familiar to devs but it wasn't "existing".  The Sony devkit was poor, it's a fact, you cannot win that argument.



Kantor on 05 February 2011

Where did you get that 1.8 TFLOPS figure for the Cell? The estimates I've seen range from 128-256 GFLOPS.



(Former) Lead Moderator and (Eternal) VGC Detective

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Mr.Metralha on 05 February 2011

I bet the computer didn't support 3D.



endoftheworld166 on 05 February 2011

so if you sent a ps3 back in time 10 years you could change the course of history 



GameAnalyser on 05 February 2011

whatever its about.. i still  njoy gaming on my  ps3 deemed supercomputer...



hikaruchan on 05 February 2011
endoftheworld166 said:

so if you sent a ps3 back in time 10 years you could change the course of history 

 "TIME PARADOX "



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zarx on 05 February 2011
endoftheworld166 said:

so if you sent a ps3 back in time 10 years you could change the course of history 


yea but sending an iPhone back would have a bigger effect, with all the interface and UI advancements, sensors like mini gyroscopes, accelerometers, capacitive touch screen, high quality tiny camera, advanced wifi and 3G chips, high tech batteries and tiny energy efficient ARM CPU that would be more powerful than any desktop at the time. and iPhone would revolutionise the world to no end and speed up development in tens of fields computer and gadget design. Far bigger than a PS3 anyway.



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