PS3 to be a "Low-Show" at E3?

I'll add myself and 3 friends to the list of launch x360's working perfect.

I'm on my 2nd PSP and 3rd PS2 tho....

/don't even get me started on PSOne ....

 

So what has Sony been doing for the last 6 years?

 

Counting all of the money....

 

fixing broken ps2 / ps1 systems ?

to be true i would be really scared if a company like sony would bring the ps3 with a decent number of games out worldwide for xmas 06

in germany we had a project to collect toll from trucks on the german autobahn it was developed by some of the biggest technology companys in germany siemens and such things they had billions of euro and ten thousends of programmers to get the system out

guess what it didnt work for over a year some problems you just cant break with as much money as you want so i dont see sony making thousends of ps3 per day till november whatever money they spend there

 

The problem with most forums is that they are inherently negative (especially about hardware). You don't get people writing in saying how well their PS2 and Xboxes are running, only when they break down or have a problem. This tends to skew the perception that somehow there's an inherent fault. I've got 26 PlayStations in all, and only one of them (my Debugging Station, which has had a hard life) has had a problem. Even my PS1s still work, no probs with lasers and the like.

It pays to remember that Sony and Microsoft et al are building these things to a price. They do heaps of durability studies to calculate mean time between component failure, then they weigh up the cost of making components more durable versus the expected aveage usage, they'll pick a percentage (say 99.99%) and say that they'll design a component to last sufficiently for it to be not a problem for 99.99% of users, on average. The problem with averages is that what they really mean is that 50% of items will fail before the average, and 50% after the average.

There's no reason game consoles are any different to any other consumer goods. There are ways to protect yourself, if that's your concern. There's a general rule in motorcycles and cars that you never buy the first year of a new model, because there are bound to be recalls. As hard as the factory may try to iron out the bugs, their testing can't compare to one or three million people all playing their units for years.

Siting here speculating about the durability of an unreleased system is an exercise in guesswork as far as I can see....

 

We *assume* that they are performing stress/durability/usability studies because that would be the prudent thing to do. However, we cannot say for sure that they are, or at least to what extent. With the rate of overheating on the 360's, it is heard to believe that MS appropriately tested the PS for thermal stress before releasing the console.

 

What vast rate of overheating? MS has been running with less than a 3% failure rate on the Xbox 360 the last time I checked numbers. That's not a large percentage and that's certainly not indicative of a failure to test.

-hl718

 

I won't give out the official numbers, but even 3% is high. The return rate is a bit lower than that even.

Microsoft did quite sufficient testing, just read the thread i started a few weeks back about the QT, barcelona, xblade, etc.. projects. I expect there will be a book out about it within a year.

 

Actually any full percentage for a commercially released product is a large number. The impact is lowered with a high volume, but that is still 3 out of every 100 units shipped.

Of course, this is only among those who recognize the problem and report it. No one knows how widespread the problem really is. I am sure a lot of people have a system which overheats after a few hours of play, but they let the system cool down before playing again instead of returning or complaining about it. This may seem perfectly reasonable to some, but it is still a symptom of the overheating problem.

 

The nVidia GPU is already gold so no prob on that. About the audio processor, I dont have any info on that.

BTW, I was thinking, couldn't sony fix the memory address problem by just placing a cache alongside every thread/sub-core in the cell?

 

They could, And I'd imagine already does. This doesn't solve the problem that data has to come through the master though, which is the bottleneck

 

I see, well I misundertood the original problem. Honestly I dont know why they went with the cell idea in the first place...

 

True enough, and the types that spend all day on gaming forums are not your average users (one would assume). Step out into the liiiiight!

 

Each of the 7 SPEs(vector processors, basically) has a 256KB local memory. The local memory can be thought of as a programmer controlled cache. Each SPE also has a memory flow controller which handles dma transfers between the SPE and main memory. Dma can be initiated by either the SPE or the main processor(PPE). So, I don't think it is true that the PPE is a memory bottleneck. Of course, in some cases you might want to prevent SPEs from touching main memory, to prevent memory conflicts and things like that. Perhaps that is what a lot of developers are doing in their launch games.

IBM has an excellent site with Cell documentation: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

Also, I've written a technical article comparing Cell with the 360 here:
http://taipeigamer.blogspot.com/2006/04/celling-revolution.html

Personally, I think Cell sounds really exciting. I just hope the PS3 is as open as Sony has claimed it will be. <keeping fingers crossed for hard disk with linux!>

 

Very interesting Blog. A question not answered for me concerns the PS3 having matching RAM and CPU frequencies but the XBox360 having slower RAM. How will the bottleneck issue compare between them in this respect?

Reading your blog (and I'm not very technical in this respect, so I am probably making mistakes) it would appear to indicate that multi-threaded code across the 3 cores of the XBox360 will also cause a bottleneck because each thread can only access the memory solo and the other threads will have to wait until it is done. All this is controlled by the OS at software level on the XBox360, rather than via the PPC core of the PS3 at hardware level so developers will need to control the DMA themselves? Sounds very complicated to me! No wonder Sony are chasing up middleware support.

EDIT: Ah, from reading on the IBM Cell dev forums it seems Sony are putting Linux on the PS3 to aid developers, not us. Maybe this OS is to help with the DMA issues?

 

I'm not that sure about this, since I'm more of a software guy.

A lot depends on how much state is shared between threads. There could be a lot of bottlenecks or only just a few. It is mostly a sofware issue, but a harder one to get around than on the PS3, because each thread doesn't have its own private memory. Also, I think memory latency in general will be more of a problem on the 360.

I thought I read somewhere that Sony said the hardware peripheral will come with linux like it did with the PS2. Also, I think the PS3's game OS will be something other than linux. I could be wrong about both of those, though. All I know for sure is that the main tree of the linux kernel now has support for Cell.

 

Link to the forum thread here:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/dw_thread.jsp?message=13799988&cat=46&thread=111538&treeDisplayType=threadmode1&forum=739#13799988

It might be speculation, I'm not sure. Sometimes you find out interesting info by browsing on non-gaming websites though :nod:

 

Judging from the loud and huge development units of the PS3 already presented, it is hard to imagine the commercial version being "quiet" and "cool". Also, based on PlayStation tradition, I fear that the A/C adapter will be incased in the Ps3's shell (unlike say the GameCube's or the XBOX 360's)

 

In EDGE this month, Phil Harrison says the Cell CPUs are already in mass production. It looks like Killzone won't be playable at E3 though...

 

Is for the best....

I can only imagine the devastating impact on PS3 hype a crappy "not even close to last E3s video" Killzone game could have.