Article on bringing parallelism into consumer devices (CELL)

[Brimstone]

Surprised I haven't seen anyone post this. Sorry if it has.

Here is a small sample.

Back in 2000, engineers from IBM Corp., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. sat down to discuss a possible collaboration. IBM had been among the first to get to a gigahertz-class processor, and the engineers around the planning table were "looking at more traditional organizations of machines," Kahle said. "But what we found was that they didn't give us the computational efficiencies that our partners-Sony and Toshiba-needed."

Then the trio went to that proverbial clean sheet, drawing upon the symmetric-multiprocessing experience within IBM. The planning team "looked at the whole gamut of how to get to new levels of efficiencies," said Kahle.

Smart Processors



I find this intresting.

Overall, the processor design community has "reached the practical limits of bumping up the power consumption," said Dan Bouvier, PowerPC design manager at Freescale Semiconductor Inc. Even multithreading, as wonderful as it may be in terms of improving efficiencies, still causes more transistors to turn on, which burns more power, he noted.

If CELL totally ignores multithreading, how much of a gain in performance will it get?

 

[McFly]

With a few dozen workstations based on the Cell processor now in the hands of key videogame companies, expectations are high. The plan is that the experienced software developers in the videogame market, accustomed to parallel graphics processing, will exploit the multiprocessing Cell design.

The cell workstations are already in the hands of "key videogame companies"?

Damn, why was this not in the news?

Fredi

 

[London Geezer]

With a few dozen workstations based on the Cell processor now in the hands of key videogame companies, expectations are high. The plan is that the experienced software developers in the videogame market, accustomed to parallel graphics processing, will exploit the multiprocessing Cell design.

The cell workstations are already in the hands of "key videogame companies"?

Damn, why was this not in the news?

Fredi

I think it's all a conspiracy. People have had Cell for the last 5 years, some people are now working on PS4 games, in order to maximise profits for current and older generations of hardware... all while we wait.

 

[passerby]

Damn, why was this not in the news?

Could be a misquote or mistake. Or, it could mean that Japanese studios REALLY ARE more secretive.

 

[one]

The cell workstations are already in the hands of "key videogame companies"?
Damn, why was this not in the news?

Apparently Koei has it now but Tecmo doesn't

Cell teammates: Masakazu Suzuoki, Sony Computer Entertainment vice president; Jim Kahle, IBM fellow; and Yoshio Masubuchi, director of engineering at Toshiba America.

Watching patents by Masubuchi, at least he hasn't submit patents lately.

 

[Qroach]

The plan is that the experienced software developers in the videogame market, accustomed to parallel graphics processing, will exploit the multiprocessing Cell design.

That's the part I'm curious about. Just how many game developers do they think is capable of that? I'd be willing to bet it would be small fraction of the programming community.

 

[zidane1strife]

With a few dozen workstations based on the Cell processor now in the hands of key videogame companies, expectations are high. The plan is that the experienced software developers in the videogame market, accustomed to parallel graphics processing, will exploit the multiprocessing Cell design.

The cell workstations are already in the hands of "key videogame companies"?

Damn, why was this not in the news?

Fredi

IF true it'd seem that the psm/opm(don't remember which) were right after all.

 

[McFly]

The plan of course was end of 2004 for the workstations, but I expected a press release from Sony with some pictures ... yeah, I want pictures ... or even better ... videos, demos ...!

Fredi

 

[jarrod]

Apparently Koei has it now but Tecmo doesn't

When was it revealed Koei had kits? Unless you think Oni's announcement automatically means they do?

 

[London Geezer]

The plan of course was end of 2004 for the workstations, but I expected a press release from Sony with some pictures ... yeah, I want pictures ... or even better ... videos, demos ...!

Fredi

Yeah, i want to see how Ps3 renders an old man's face.
And 1920189183 butterflies on screen at the same time at 500fps.

 

[one]

Apparently Koei has it now but Tecmo doesn't

When was it revealed Koei had kits? Unless you think Oni's announcement automatically means they do?

First, 'PS3 dev kits' != Cell Creative Workstation.
Second, it's just a speculation from the (joking?) comment of Kou Shibusawa that he knew PS3's power but he has to keep silence as SCE doesn't allow otherwise etc.

 

[wco81]

If they're going to show something at E3, not just talk about the next gen Playstation, the developers would have to be working on stuff now, no?

So somebody must be working on demos. If it's like the PS2 unveiling where they had mockups of characters from Tekken Tag and other recognizeable game characters, you would think some key developers have access to at least what kind of specs. to shoot for.

Hard to imagine they will just talk about it without having something to look at.

 

[London Geezer]

If they're going to show something at E3, not just talk about the next gen Playstation, the developers would have to be working on stuff now, no?

So somebody must be working on demos. If it's like the PS2 unveiling where they had mockups of characters from Tekken Tag and other recognizeable game characters, you would think some key developers have access to at least what kind of specs. to shoot for.

Hard to imagine they will just talk about it without having something to look at.

They could *easily* show some prerendered footage and say it is what is expected from PS3 specs. But it would be all rather useless. When we have final hardware, or we are much closer to it being finished than we are now, then we can talk.

 

[wco81]

That is what they did with the first mention of the PS2, right, show the prerendered demos and talk about the EE and 75 million polys/sec or whatever the figure was?

Since they're doing a new architecture, it could be the same thing, talk more about the general technology, some broad specs. or benchmarks.

But no pictures of the industrial design, no sense of which launch games, launch dates, etc.

Could all depend on how much Xenon info. is out in the public by then or at the show. Maybe Sony shows more cards if Xenon gets a favorable reception.

Wonder in what order the companies will do their pre-conference presentations. MS may be smart to let Sony go first, if they have a choice.

 

[London Geezer]

That is what they did with the first mention of the PS2, right, show the prerendered demos and talk about the EE and 75 million polys/sec or whatever the figure was?

Since they're doing a new architecture, it could be the same thing, talk more about the general technology, some broad specs. or benchmarks.

But no pictures of the industrial design, no sense of which launch games, launch dates, etc.

Could all depend on how much Xenon info. is out in the public by then or at the show. Maybe Sony shows more cards if Xenon gets a favorable reception.

Wonder in what order the companies will do their pre-conference presentations. MS may be smart to let Sony go first, if they have a choice.

If my memory serves me right, all the demos i saw on pre-launch were realtime.
Maybe i missed the prerendered ones. I did see MS and N's showed pre-rendered videos though.

 

[wco81]

You may be right that they were using realtime engine demos, not prerendered.

But were they interactive?

It wasn't until a second showing where they generated a lot of buzz (or added to the buzz). IIRC, they showed stuff in Japan and then the following E3, they showed MGS2 and a bunch of other games. Even Madden surprised people.

 

[one]

That is what they did with the first mention of the PS2, right, show the prerendered demos and talk about the EE and 75 million polys/sec or whatever the figure was?

Since they're doing a new architecture, it could be the same thing, talk more about the general technology, some broad specs. or benchmarks.

But no pictures of the industrial design, no sense of which launch games, launch dates, etc.

EE's detailed technical spec was revealed at ISSCC 1999 in Feb. 1999.

In the PS2 world premiere in March 1999, FF dancing demo / 'duck in sink' demo / particle effect demo, probably all real-time demo (pre-recorded I guess), were shown IIRC.

In May 1999 at E3, you could play the GT2 playable demo (incidentally, at the same event, Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden was announced to be released on PS2 ).

Then, PS2's Japanese launch was in March 2000.

PS3 in sync? You'll see in several months...

 

[London Geezer]

You may be right that they were using realtime engine demos, not prerendered.

But were they interactive?

It wasn't until a second showing where they generated a lot of buzz (or added to the buzz). IIRC, they showed stuff in Japan and then the following E3, they showed MGS2 and a bunch of other games. Even Madden surprised people.

The Duck demo was interactive, just not for the public.
All the demos (that look like utter crap compared to latest PS2 software) were realtime, GT2000, Tekken demo... Ew ew ew...

 

[megateto]

But it would be all rather useless. When we have final hardware, or we are much closer to it being finished than we are now, then we should talk.

Fixed. Because you won't me, well, you, as I can only manage to read all your posts and make dumb questions/comments, get into wild posting activity, thus making the forum collapse once the first screenshot or video coming off PS3 (and Xenon and Revolution) reaches the net...

Could all depend on how much Xenon info. is out in the public by then or at the show. Maybe Sony shows more cards if Xenon gets a favorable reception.

Definitely. Specially after seeing how well it has worked with the PSP price announcement.

PD: Is Ladbrokes doing any bets on next gen launching dates? 8)

 

[corysama]

You may be right that they were using realtime engine demos, not prerendered.

But were they interactive?

I think some of them were interactive, but I seem to recall that many of them were actually a PC feeding pre-recorded command streams to a GS (PS2 rasterizer). No EE (CPU) or VU (geometry processor) involved.

In theory, the GS can draw 1 triangle for each of its 150 million cycles per second. In practice, most games are getting 10-20 million polys per second out of the PS2.