Console crackpots -- what's your favorite?

[seebs]

I was recently reading some arguments from someone who concluded, among other things, that RSX is probably a multicore architecture like Cell, only Sony's "locked" the other cores until they need to show off a big performance boost, Cell has access to GDDR at the full rated bandwidth of the FlexIO bus, and Cell dynamically clocks its parts as high as 6GHz under load. (He reacts angrily to claims that it's ridiculous to imagine the original 90nm Cell running at 6GHz by saying that he never said it was a fixed clock.) Various parts of these threads have involved international conspiracies to conceal the true power of the PS3, and so on. Oh, and the GDDR3 chips are so close to RSX that they probably get bandwidth more like that of the EDRAM in the 360, making them eGDDR3.

So... What's your favorite console crackpot story? Got anything great from the days of speculation about the 3DO M2? Maybe an argument that revolved around mistaking mega- and giga-? Share your wacky stories!

 

[ShaidarHaran]

Wow. I'm a PS3 fan but that guy's a fanatic. And insane.

 

[vazel]

loonies on my internets??? Unpossible!

 

[seebs]

What got me was that, when I cited the relatively low rates at which Cell could access the GDDR3 memory on the RSX (assuming the old slide with the "not a typo" comment is legit, and it seems reasonable), he quoted the Samsung GDDR3 spec sheets at me.

A few paragraphs later, he was explaining why it's ridiculous to think that RSX has "only" 22.6GB/sec available bandwidth to and from its memory.

I seem to recall some moderately epic stuff from the old Genesis/SNES wars, but I didn't know enough to know how ridiculous stuff was. (Of course, I do remember once telling someone I liked the Genesis better because it was the only one with any RPGs. I didn't even do drugs back then; I have no excuse.)

I know there was some absolutely crazy stuff in the run-up to the N64 release, although a fair amount of what I thought was crazy at the time (both positive and negative) turned out to be true. Sadly, we never did find out how much of what was claimed about the M2 was just crackpottery.

I once saw a 360/PS3 crackpot battle in which they were competing on "bandwidth", which they did by simply adding up every bandwidth number they could find. (So, say, 256GB/sec of EDRAM "memory bandwidth" to trump XDR's 25.6GB, retaliated to with 300GB/sec of EIB bandwidth...)

My favorites so far:

http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=122078
http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=120130

(This guy insists that ProFX is lying about not having had a page up claiming PS3 numbers for that benchmark. I don't find myself trusting him.)

 

[Carl B]

So... What's your favorite console crackpot story?

I hate all of them equally.

Seebs I hope you'll understand why I have to close this thread; it's just not constructive in the context of the console technology section, even though I know your aim was simply to voice aloud your frustration with some of the insane theories floating around.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This thread makes me think of going to a school for kids with learning difficulties and laughing at how stupid they are. Not very nice. The internet is full of confused and deluded people. I don't think pointing to them here has any worth, certainly not outside the Sociology forum!