MikeB said: @ selnor 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. 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 at various tasks. For example in 2005 Mikael Haglund, technical specialist of IBM Sweden gave some Cell presentations at the AmiGBG fair in Sweden, which 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.

I have seen it all now. You argue that IBM's own website provides the cells Theoretical peak performance and you dont believe it? You seem miss informed to. 218 GFLOPS is the speculative theoretical performance of the cell. To get this number they test in a static environment 1 SPE on it's own. to get 25.12 GFLOPS. They than X that by 8. That is not theoretical it's speculative thoretical. There is a difference.

Now Theoretical performance of the Cell testing is done as follows. The entire Cell is tested in the same environment. So thats all 8 SPE's and PPE (as SPES cannot run without the PPE it is full theoretical Cell performance). So testing the Cell in the same environment provides us with 155 GFLOPS according to IBM themselves. Sony chose to take the speculative theoretical performance of which the numbers come from a single SPE test at 25.12 GFLOPS.

Now again, 2 SPE's in the PS3's Cell are NEVER used for games. That is fact. So that leaves 6 SPE's for games. So immediately 155.5GFLOPS in the PS3 Cell is not available for game programmers. Now the Xenon unfortunately the Theoretical performance peak numbers are not available from IBM's website. But many Tech sites claim that the theoretical Performance is 115 GFLOPS tested as the whole CPU (rather than testing on thread and adding them up).

We know as fact that only 3% of the xenon is used for OS so the rest is available to Programmers for games.

With this information, many people do not choose to show this info and continue to use Sony's claims (which is based off Speculative Theoretical performance).

Now go ahead and argue with IBM's official Theoretical performance of the CEll in PS3 if you want. But it makes you look extremely silly.

 

MikeB said: 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.

Fuckit MikeB, there is no relation between the xmb and qnx!

You just mentioned it, to pull off your anti ms crap.

We all know by now bill gates raped you whole family including the dog.

 

@ Deneidez

Many PC game engines are obsolete anyhow with the way PC technology is moving towards quad and more core architectures anyhow. The PS3 is only leading the way.



Housemarque the devs behind Super Stardust HD or Media Molecule the devs behind LittleBigPlanet aren't exactly huge.

Houseemarque is a small team and a result of the merger of Terramargue (behind a game like Elfmania on the Amiga 500 and Bloodhouse (which developed Stardust (low end Amiga 500 footage) for the Amiga published by Team 17).

Their game engine is based on the PC game engine they developed and it now runs extremely well on the PS3, but for their follow up PS3 game they will be able to achieve 50% extra graphics performance by using the Cell SPEs some more. Check out the game, it's worth it!

Media Molecule is a small team of ex-LionHead (a breakaway from Amiga/Atari games pioneering company Bullfrog before that) developers founded in 2006. They built the LittleBigPlanet game engine from scratch in a reasonable short time with great results, check this out as well.

Of course it sucks for small companies a company like Epic does not put more effort into developing their cross platform middleware technologies for the PS3. Probably this has to do with their dealings with Microsoft.

@ afree_account

PS3Rips at PS3hax wrote this for example:

MAC : 00:19:C5:70:93:B9 (Sony Computer Entertainment,)
Warning: OSScan results may be unreliable because we could not find at least 1 open and 1 closed port
Device type: general purpose|game console
Running: NetBSD 4.X, QNX 6.X, Sony embedded
OS details: NetBSD 4.99.4 (x86), QNX 6.2.1 (x86), Sony PlayStation 3 game console

(Note the x86 result is of course wrong)

@MikeB

Some engines can still have the same code from 90's or early 2000 because it just works and the way of PS3 isn't the same as homogeneous platform way. Sure there are more cores, but you need to use them differently.

 

I know Housemarque(Finland is small place, you know) and stardust wasn't exactly kind of game I was referring. LBP is more like it, but still didn't media molecule get a lot of help from sony when they were making it? Can sony help every dev out there the same way?

Or they are they just more farsighted and realistic by not learning type of platform that might last only one generation? I mean there is no guarantee that PS4 will use CELL or anything like it. I can remember all the fuzz with Emotion Engine and how it was incredible, it was going to be used forever, even Saddam tries to get it etc. And now we have another generation with CELL and same show has started again. What can you do with the knowledge of optimizing EE now? Use your knowledge to make another PS2 game... :)

MikeB said: @ afree_account Fuckit MikeB, there is no relation between the xmb and qnx! PS3Rips at PS3hax wrote this for example: MAC : 00:19:C5:70:93:B9 (Sony Computer Entertainment,) Warning: OSScan results may be unreliable because we could not find at least 1 open and 1 closed port Device type: general purpose|game console Running: NetBSD 4.X, QNX 6.X, Sony embedded OS details: NetBSD 4.99.4 (x86), QNX 6.2.1 (x86), Sony PlayStation 3 game console (Note the x86 result is of course wrong)

OMG, this is a result of a portscan, u 're kindding me.

ps3rips at ps3hax, hmmm, sounds like a reliable person.

afree_account said: MikeB said: @ afree_account Fuckit MikeB, there is no relation between the xmb and qnx! PS3Rips at PS3hax wrote this for example: MAC : 00:19:C5:70:93:B9 (Sony Computer Entertainment,) Warning: OSScan results may be unreliable because we could not find at least 1 open and 1 closed port Device type: general purpose|game console Running: NetBSD 4.X, QNX 6.X, Sony embedded OS details: NetBSD 4.99.4 (x86), QNX 6.2.1 (x86), Sony PlayStation 3 game console (Note the x86 result is of course wrong) OMG, this is a result of a portscan, u 're kindding me. ps3rips at ps3hax, hmmm, sounds like a reliable person.

I must agree with afree_account even if he is acting like idiot all the time. Thats not really a good base for 'fact'. I also don't think that portscanner is able to recognize system if it hasn't been able to find ports it needs for recognizing. :)

Heres my GFs comp:

MAC Address: 00:E0:7D:B1:52:26 (Netronix)
Warning: OSScan results may be unreliable because we could not find at least 1 open and 1 closed port
Device type: general purpose
Running: Microsoft Windows 2000
OS details: Microsoft Windows 2000 Server SP4
Network Distance: 1 hop

....

Its running XP with SP2.

deneidez Some engines can still have the same code from 90's or early 2000 because it just works and the way of PS3 isn't the same as homogeneous platform way. Sure there are more cores, but you need to use them differently. ... Or they are they just more farsighted and realistic by not learning type of platform that might last only one generation? I mean there is no guarantee that PS4 will use CELL or anything like it. I can remember all the fuzz with Emotion Engine and how it was incredible, it was going to be used forever, even Saddam tries to get it etc. And now we have another generation with CELL and same show has started again. What can you do with the knowledge of optimizing EE now? Use your knowledge to make another PS2 game... :)

 

You have pointed out the challenge vs the promise of PS3 and Amiga architectures.  In the mid-80's I was a huge Amiga fan and remember the period with a smile.  That machine was definitely ahead of its time, capability wise.

The problem was that the architecture wasn't easily scalable like the PC/Mac architectures.  What the Amiga did with finesse via a very elegant architecture (Jay Miner was a hardware genius), the PC and Mac eventually accomplished via brute force ability.  Had another company besides Commodore owned the technology, the Amiga would likely have lived much longer.  However, I have no doubt that it would have eventually faded in prominence.  The Amiga's unique and well orchestrated hardware allowed it to do what was then considered amazing, but which would now be considered mundane.  By the 90's, a middle of the road PC could emulate in software all the customized hardware in the Amiga several times over, without breaking a sweat.

The Cell processor seems to follow a philosophy similar to that of the Amiga design: provide a significant leap in potential capability by taking a very customized, elegant approach.  But it trades ease of programming for raw performance that must be hard won by programmers.  The Amiga was fairly easy to program if you wanted to write a VT100 emulator or a very simple game using built in objects such as sprites, blobs, etc. (I created both kinds of programs for fun).  But the most compelling games on the Amiga required a programmer to dig very deeply into the lower levels of the APIs.  This required quite a bit of work, particularly to get the blitter, copper, etc. to do eveything a programmer wanted and to get it all to sync up properly.  The PS3 is the same way from what I can tell... you can create a simple game fairly easily, but really tapping the hardware can take a lot of work.  Using 4 cores on a modern PC isn't too much more difficult than using 2 cores.  In the future, using 8 cores probably won't be much more difficult than using 4 cores.  The approaches tend to be scalable.

If IBM can find a way to scale the Cell architecture so that each successive generation of CPU can be used by programmers without having to do a lot of code redesign, then they might have a shot at making the Cell mainstream.  Video cards already do this through very sophisticated APIs and drivers that hide the inner-workings of the GPUs from the application to a large degree.  If a game programmer didn't have Direct X or Open GL as an abstraction layer, then he would have to code a part of his app to handle the many video cards in the market, an the PC gaming market would suffer as a result.  IBM/Sony need to find a way to do the same with the Cell so that the power of the processor can be tapped without having to worry about which flavor/generation of Cell is installed in a device.

 

superchunk said: makingmusic476 said: superchunk said: So does this mean they won't launch a ps4, just tell everyone to buy another ps3 and connect them?!   They'll also be offering special deals on duct tape so you can stick them together. :P Again, Sony lacks any originality.

 

=D =D

@ crumas2

Of course it was, you could upgrade 80s high end Amigas in the 90s with graphics cards which used the same chips as their PC or Mac equivalents. Classic Amigas can even be upgraded to run AmigaOS4.x from 2008.

Amigas from the 80s could be upgraded like no PC or Mac from this era could.

Emulation was nothing new, Amigas emulated x86 PCs right from the beginning. In the 90s you could emulate a 68k Mac faster than an equivalently specced Mac, the fastest "68k Mac" was in fact an Amiga which unlike the Mac could multi-task, running several 68k Macs simultaneously through a software emulator.

Amiga emulation didn't become feasible long after Commodore went out of business (due to losses to their PC branch and after that a patent hold-up preventing them to sell launch stock for the United States).

Cuirrently we use WinUAE to emulate classic Amigas which is based on UAE. UAE stands for UNIX Amiga Emulator, although the "U" originally stood for "Unusable" as in 1996 on a 90Mhz Pentium the emulation was still about one third as fast as a 7 MHz A1000 from 1985.

To put things into proper perspective.