Recent content by FatherJohn

The "research" on that page looks pretty developer-tech-support-and-small-demos to me. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Did SCEA's tech group do the GCC backend work for the PS2? Did they do the compiler for the VU? Are they doing the compilers for PS3? If so then I'd say they are...

Isn't SCEA's software technology group really more of a developer tech support group, similar to Xbox's Advanced Technology Group? I've always gotten that impression from reading their GDC papers. It seems that they spend most of their time helping 3rd party developers tune their games, with the...

If they aren't going to use Cell for shaders, then what the heck is all that floating point capacity going to be used for? There's way too much of it for just vertex shaders. And the early patents always said "APUs modified for graphics" or something like that, which seems to indicate that...

It depends on how close the GPU's actual architecture is to DX tokens. DX tokens are just a pre-parsed version of DX shader assembly language. The way HLSL is supposed to work is that Microsoft does a ton of optimization in the HLSL compiler, and all the GPU vendor does is translate the DX...

Re: Confirmation: PlayStation 3 will use an in-house GPU(pro That they are just now getting around to advertising for a shader compiler writer probably indicates that they are two to three years away from having a good shader compiler for PS3. However, it doesn't tell us anything about the...

Say what? The "Sparks" demo was a stock out-of-the-box Microsoft DirectX 7.0 SDK demo, and the rest were all custom developed for Xbox. (At the time the external companies that did the demos even advertized this fact on their web sites.) Sparks was pretty lame, but it was shown because it...

In the current generation Xbox has an ooo CPU, while PS2 has an in-order CPU. So PS2 game developers have to think about instruction ordering much more than Xbox devs do. Sony developer support said in a GDC presentation that many PS2 games have trouble getting decent performance out of the...

Xbox 2 is 4 years ahead of Xbox 1 on the technology curve, which means it's roughly 4 to 8 times more powerful. (Moore's Law is 2x every 18 months) in each respect. If you look at the rumored specs you'll see that: CPU: 3 times as many CPUs CPU freq: 5x faster (or whatever 3.5 / .733 is)...

Don't know if you can read the full article without a WSJ subscription. Here's the good stuff. (The rest of the article is fairly light-weight speculation about how Cell will affect Intel, and also what new consumer applications might come from all this extra compute power. Pretty lame stuff...

Yeah, I don't think PS3 will have a full GPU. There's certainly no reason to have any vertex processors. And depending on how the second cell's APUs are configured they may be able to use them as some sort of renderer. (The Stanford Imagine group tried an experiment where they configured their...

Now we still don't know if Sony's going to put 1 cell, 2 cells, or 4 cells in the PS3. Comparing apples to pears: Item 1 cell Xbox 2 CPUs 1 @4.8GHz 3 @3.5+GHz ALUs 8 @4.8GHz 48 @500+MHZ...

We'll all know what it is soon enough -- as soon as Lik Sang gets one to take apart. :-) But my guess is that it's a 2D slider system, rather than a joystick system. HP used something like this for their "popsicle stick" mini mouse that came with their old super-mini PCs. One advantage of...

The PC team is the West Coast team, right? Mostly former ArtX exgineers, that did both the GameCube and later the 9700 and follow-on cards. They seem like they'd be the natural team to do the next Nintendo GPU. Any hints about Nintendo?

I'm mostly interested in technical details, not release dates. But since you raised release dates. With apparently so little game developement taking place for PS3 now, perhaps they plan to lauch with very few games (like the PS2 Japanese launch). I wonder if that would work as well this...

I just realized that I forgot a big source of info on PS3 and GC2: patents. Haven't some Cell and probably also PS3 related patents surfaced? And I know that the N64 was patented in detail back in its day. I guess MS doesn't do that with Xbox. (Or maybe the patents haven't issued yet?) But...