Eurographics 2005- Cell, Xenos, and "NVIDIA game console technology"

[mistan]

New console architectures

Thursday, September 1st, 2005. 11:00-12:30.

Overview of the Xbox360 GPU

Michael Doggett, ATI

The Xbox360 GPU unifies the traditional vertex and pixel shaders of the graphics pipeline enabling the GPU to dynamically balance resources between these two stages. The GPU system consists of two separate devices, the majority of the pipeline is on one die with a second die containing just the Z and Alpha blending operations coupled with embedded memory and utilizing a very wide memory interface. The GPU offers support for Higher Order Surfaces and an advanced shading instruction set including the ability to randomly write data to memory.

Cell processor architecture and programming

Kevin O'Brien, IBM Research

The Cell processor, featured in the recently announce Sony Playstation 3 and jointly developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM is particularly suited to the high performance demands of the gaming and multimedia application areas, but may also be attractive in other fields of high performance computing. The chip combines a PowerPC core (PPE) with 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) to form a heterogeneous, single chip multi-processor. Each of the SPE's consists of a 128 bit wide SIMD processor coupled with a fast Local Store which contains the program and data for the processor. Also on the chip is a coherent bus supporting DMA transactions between the Local Stores of the SPEs, and system memory. Programming to take the best advantage of the Cell processor requires partitioning the application across the different processor types, and two levels of parallelization, one to leverage the 8 SPE cores, and the other to exploit the 4-way SIMD capabilities of those processors. In addition, the orchestration of data into and out of the SPE Local Stores is of prime importance. This talk will cover the broad outlines of the architecture, and share some insights into programming for this chip gained in the development of a prototype C compiler for the architecture.

The Eurographics'05 organisers and IBM Research would like to acknowledge the kind support of IBM Ireland in organising this talk.

NVIDIA game console technology
Henry Moreton, NVIDIA


Next Generation game Technology
Thursday, September 1st, 2005. 14:00 - 15:30



COLLADA 1.4: Mastering next-generation 3D game assets
Thursday, September 1st, 2005. 08:30-10:30.[/i]

Speakers

Robin Green, Sony Computer Entertainment
+ demonstrators ("glamorous assistants")
Abstract

COLLADA is an open source, collaboratively designed specification for representing, interchanging and processing next-generation 3D game assets using standard XML and off-the-shelf database tools. This talk will highlight the latest extensions to the format, COLLADA FX and COLLADA PHYSICS, show live demonstrations of the big DCC applications supporting these new features, show how using COLLADA as the basis for your production pipeline can simplify the problem of creating and processing the large models and datasets required by next-generation games and introduce the standardisation efforts of the COLLADA project. COLLADA and this talk has been created with the support of Softimage, Alias, Autodesk, NVidia, Agiea, Nokia, Sony, and many more vendors.

Lets hope that they are talking about the RSX when they say:
"NVIDIA game console technology"

I can only hope
I mean...what else are they going to talk about :|

 

[mistan]

No replies...415 and nothing?
No debating...arguing, speculating?
This seems like nice info here...come on people

 

[mckmas8808]

Yeah where's the information at? This seems as hot as the GDC in Europe right now. What's going on? I know someone has to be there.

 

[MechanizedDeath]

The NVidia talk is interesting b/c it might have some RSX info, but where's the excerpt? The rest of the stuff is fairly old news. That's why there are no responses. Get that NVidia info. PEACE.

 

[mistan]

It wasent posted on the website...
I wonder why

Those are summaries of the sessions...beforehand not afterwards..
I dont get why you're saying its old..

 

[MechanizedDeath]

It wasent posted on the website...
I wonder why

Those are summaries of the sessions...beforehand not afterwards..
I dont get why you're saying its old..

I'm not knocking you at all. I'm saying we knew about the Xenos and Cell stuff for months now. Those presentations just rehashed the obvious. The NVidia presentation could be interesting b/c it specified "console technology". There's only one console chip they are involved in this gen, and that's RSX, a chip we know little about. All the RSX info is speculation based on the E3 presser. We have an extrapolated dot-product figure, shader-ops per second and clock speed. Getting something....anything at this point would be something new. I think most people are ignoring this thread b/c it just doesn't offer anything new. I meant no offense. PEACE.

 

[mistan]

Oh ok
Thanks

 

[Arun]

There's only one console chip they are involved in this gen, and that's RSX, a chip we know little about.

Lindbergh could qualify as using "console technology", but I would assume that to be a standard G70 - potentially Ultra - personally.

 

[see colon]

don't forget about gizmondo! it's also powered by nVidia.

also, aren't DISCover and phantom using nVidia technology?

 

[mistan]

You guys are giving me lelss hope!!!
...but it is under New Console Architecture...but that could be the G70 or 6800 because those are "new" for consoles

 

[Arun]

So, err... anything, anyone?

Uttar

 

[Titanio]

So, err... anything, anyone?

Uttar

I'm trying to probe around some Irish boards, but nothing really.

I could have attended this conference but it would have cost me €300 and I could only have gone for one day (albeit the day where all the console-related presentations were being made). I kind of regret not going now.

I think the best bet at least regarding the Nvidia presentation would be to try and email Nvidia and suggest that they put slides/video of their presentation up on their developer site. They do that fairly often, but there can be some delay, and I'm not sure if there'd be unique disclosure sensitivities relating to console tech.

Could be worth keeping an eye on this page too for when conference proceedings go up:

http://www.eg.org/EG/DL/Conf

That said, they may be selective about what gets posted online, so there's no guarantee the presentations that are of interest here will show up.