selnor said: Groucho said: NJ5 said: @Groucho: Are you seriously telling us that PS3's OS/API doesn't take up any RAM?   Of course it takes up RAM.  Don't be so literal.  Do you believe that the flavor of Linux that the PS3 uses, eats up 25% of the PS3's RAM (and VRAM, or whatever that wacky article claimed)?  Or that Windows can be streamlined tighter than Linux can?   Heres an update for you. http://www.deeko.com/news/?p=1316 I'm not just pulling figures out my arse you know. And if you want to argue with IBM be my guest. I'll find the link from IBM that show the 115 GFLOPS of Xennon is actual.

Sony has been improving it by leaps and bounds.  I don't think its much bigger than 32MB anymore.  It never really comes into the picture, performance-wise, in my experience.

I'd be surprised if 3 CPUs with altivec co-processors could outperform 6 vector processors and another CPU with an Altivec.  I sincerely doubt its possible.  Each SPU is much speedier than the PPU's Altivec (identical to the Xenon core's Altivecs), when it comes to vector work.  The Xenon cores can't do out-of-order processing, just like the PPU and the SPUs, and its branch predictor is practically worthless, just like the PPU's (they are basically the same core, with some interesting threading differences).

The X360 CPU is, in essense, a PS3 CPU, with 3 PPUs, and no SPUs.  It really fits well with the unified memory architecture and the flexible GPU.  I'm afraid that flexibility comes at a raw performance cost, in some areas, however.  In other areas, its great.

 

Groucho said: selnor said: Groucho said: NJ5 said: @Groucho: Are you seriously telling us that PS3's OS/API doesn't take up any RAM?   Of course it takes up RAM.  Don't be so literal.  Do you believe that the flavor of Linux that the PS3 uses, eats up 25% of the PS3's RAM (and VRAM, or whatever that wacky article claimed)?  Or that Windows can be streamlined tighter than Linux can?   Heres an update for you. http://www.deeko.com/news/?p=1316 I'm not just pulling figures out my arse you know. And if you want to argue with IBM be my guest. I'll find the link from IBM that show the 115 GFLOPS of Xennon is actual.   Sony has been improving it by leaps and bounds.  I don't think its much bigger than 32MB anymore.  It never really comes into the picture, performance-wise, in my experience. I'd be surprised if 3 CPUs with altivec co-processors could outperform 6 vector processors and another CPU with an Altivec.  I sincerely doubt its possible.  Each SPU is much speedier than the PPU's Altivec (identical to the Xenon core's Altivecs), when it comes to vector work.  The Xenon cores can't do out-of-order processing, just like the PPU and the SPUs, and its branch predictor is practically worthless, just like the PPU's (they are basically the same core, with some interesting threading differences). The X360 CPU is, in essense, a PS3 CPU, with 3 PPUs, and no SPUs.

Well you can argue all you want with IBM. They are the figures and in real world terms the Cell as a whole gets nowhere near 200GFLOPS inside a PS3 for game usage. Although the Ram side can be improved (HOME will likely take that figure back up) The CPU usage cant be changed as much.

 

LOL. I don't even understand what you guys are saying rofl.

that chart that MS released was something like a year before the PS3 was released... they only had information based on what sony released and not the actual hardware...

@Groucho

If you are dev, shouldn't you be able to check how much mem there really is? If theres no functions that tell you the amount of mem available, you can always try to fill it with more variables you actually can, catch error for using more memory there is and throw the results on the screen. I am quite sure that your requirements documents have also some mention about restriction of platform as well(Unless you don't document your work, which is a sure way to developing hell. ;) ).

Regarding to processing power my question has always been "What can you do with all that power?". Games today use only few percents of processing power of CPU even if you help GPU with geometry transformations etc. PS3 has a lot of power but it seems to be power you really dont need or can't really use because of all other restrictions.

@ selnor

You can argue with IBM all you want. I have spoken to several IBM technical specialists, their perspective is the Xenon's theorectical peak is 76.8 GFLops (the equivalent of about 3 Cell PPUs) and the PS3's Cell theoretical peak is 218 GFlops, this while the Cell inside the PS3 is able to achieve much higher real world efficiency and the SPEs are much better suited for various tasks.

For example in 2005 Mikael Haglund, technical specialist of IBM Sweden gave some Cell presentations at the AmiGBG fair in Sweden, with many DemoScene, game developers, OS and application developers attending. Our team did some life coverage, interviews, I wrote a show report and we had our own stand at the event.

@ Deneidez

Power demand and utilization will go up in course of time, you will have to remember where many of the currently adapted game engines originate from (some are built from scratch, but that's also time consuming, some mature legacy PC game engines have been worked on for over a decade).

You had inefficient PC game engines which used up a lot of memory resources in the past and a few years ago could only distribute processing capabilities onto 1 or 2 processor cores. Then you have various game engines which originate from the PS2 and the technical gap between PS2 and PS3 is enormous, the PS3 provides potential for a lot of additional technical abilities (which will have to be developed and added to the game engine).

The way these game engines have been designed caused potential limitations on modern PS3 hardware, first everything has to be adapted like what's being done with Killzone 2 then more and more effects and functionality are being added (thus that chart may be obsolete by now).

Developers will constantly try to enhance their games and thus game engines, due to the PS3's fundamental specifications remaining the same and at least be in mass production for a decade, game engines will mature to a point where they are tapping a vast majority the PS3's resources even with low-level optimisations eventually.

It's a time consuming process, Rome wasn't built in a day.

NJ5 said: Groucho said: The PS3's OS is a custom version of Linux.  You can put your own Linux on it, as well, however.   Doesn't that mean Sony would have to publicly release the source code to their version of Linux according to the terms of the GPL license?

 

BINGO!

 

afree_account said: NJ5 said: Groucho said: The PS3's OS is a custom version of Linux.  You can put your own Linux on it, as well, however.   Doesn't that mean Sony would have to publicly release the source code to their version of Linux according to the terms of the GPL license?     BINGO!

As I understand the PS3 CellOS is based on Sony's own embedded technologies, QNX a really cool realtime Unix-like OS but far more efficient and powerful, as well as using BSD technology.

I was a spokesperson for Phoenix Developers Consortium, we used QNX a lot and hoped to built it into something special for home computer usage as well. QNX Neutrino (the kernel) was once planned to be at the core of a new Amiga system, but at the time Amiga Inc was owned by Gateway (PC clone maker) and Microsoft pressured them to abondon the project, if they went ahead Microsoft would have retracted Gateway's discounts on Windows which would have resulted into many millions of additional costs for which rival PC makers would have gotten a competitive advantage. Later when the project was cancelled and Amiga Inc sold off, a Gateway exec testified this in court during the antitrust hearings.

@MikeB

Isn't that a very bad thing? Whatever you have done on PC is near obsolete and whatever you want to do you need to start it from scratch. Sounds like good deal for big companies only and very bad deal for smaller companies.

But the problem is that you have lots of untapped processing power on CELL and other components are restricting you more than enough. Its like putting tractors engine into cars case and hoping it will be faster than F1 car because it has the power needed for it. Can you give a concretic example for what you could use CELL:s processing power in games, which would make them superior to X360 games for example? Whatever I can think it needs more memory, better GPU... And ppl who built Rome did have steady supply of construction materials. :)

(Btw, thanks for not using words superior, incredible, all superlatives etc. I might even consider taking you more seriously, if you keep it up. ;) )