@johnlucas

Actually BC began with Atari 7800. (It skipped over to the 2600, but all the good games were those anyway.)

Damn. And I was trying to give Sony credit for doing something significant in this industry.

7800 was forgettable but the truth's the truth I guess.

Thank you for correcting me iznevidelitsa. I like to have my facts straight.

John Lucas 

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.

The PS3 is selling worldwide at about 2/3s the rate of its other two rivals and in recent months has been gaining so first of all, it is apparant that the PS3 isn't doing horrible and secondly seems to be getting stronger....just gradually. =)

SlorgNet you are ignoring one huge fact. Sony had planned to sell 6 million PS3s by end of the first quarter of 2007. That is over 7 months ago. Sony is 1 million PS3's short of that goal seven months later. Its astounding alright, just astoundingly bad.

Also, for the last time. Do not bring up cars to support your PS3 argument. It makes you look like a buffon. The automobile and consumer electoronics markets are vastly different. A premium automobile is never intended to sell in huge quantities. They are meant to sell in small numbers but the lower sales are offset by the huge profit margin. A car like a Corolla has small profit margin but its high sales compensate for the low margin. Once a car is sold, the manufacturer has made their money. The PS3 loses money for Sony on each sale. It needs high sales to build a large enough userbase for software sales to make up for those loses and ensure Sony a profit.

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.

I think the Cell would have been a reasonably good gaming processor if they would've just given it a second core.  2 cores + 7 SPEs would be fine (or 2 cores + 3 SPEs, for that matter, since they're not going to be used that heavily for most gaming applications).  They cut the second core and effectively cut the Cell's prowess in half for gaming.

The PS3 is a ploy to get blu-ray into homes. They are accepting losses so they can get their media format across, cause they will more than make up for the losses that they are accruing due to the cost of the PS3. The real question is how long will theye accept losses in production, before they make drastic changes? This almost reminds me of a Microsoft strategy with internet explorer in windows. It killed netscape navigator, and they lost money because they didn't charge for it (like most browsers before), yet in the end they killed competition and pushed there format further upon consumers. This is of course, just speculation.

Netscape did as much to kill itself than anything that Microsoft did. Netscape simply didn't have a very good business model or management. Apache was much more damaging to Netscape, as it made their expensive server products obsolete.