If it's High Moon, then I reckon it's likely to be Mike Acton doing most of the talking. He of www.cellperformance.com fame..
Dean
Dean
"eight years down the road", Huh? Some perspective there.Once those complexities are unwound, how dramatically will the PS3 development environment change?
This is what we’re looking forward to that in eight years down the road, as Sony said they want this machine to be around for the remainder of the decade… Right now, the games you’re seeing come out are using engines that are more in the traditional way of creating games, which is that your engine architecture has access to all the other parts of the engine itself. With the PlayStation 3, we’re going to have to figure out how to divide up these things up so that they’re much more separate.
[We’ll have to] explore things such as procedural synthesis, which really has exciting potential on the PS3. Rather than creating all these environments and all these behaviors by hand, now we’ve got a lot of this power, [so] we can come up with ways that the processor can create environments and create artificial intelligence rules that kind of emerge with gameplay and adjust to the gamers input, so we can have a lot more variety. That could interest somebody with the concerns of the rising cost of development.
If this is even possible, when will developers be able to fully realize the Playstation 3’s power?
That’s something that we’re trying to discover right now. I think that there are games out there that no one’s ever seen before. I call them sandbox games where—take one of my favorite games, which is the Battlefield series—where you get to play with dozens of people online in a large environment with lots of explosives. The thought I have is that every time you play those levels, those levels are the same. They stay the same and they never change.
What I’d love to do is I’d love to play in an environment that changes over time, that if there’s a building where the snipers are hiding in, you can make a big hole in that building and it stays that way for awhile. To do that believably without creating a ton of assets, we’re going to have to mimic real life and real physics. I think that’s the potential for what the Cell processor can do. It can crunch a huge number of calculations if those environments are built correctly [and] if we figured out how these SPEs work. I think [we’re] in the generation to start figuring that stuff out, so we’re trying to bootstrap that and trying to experiment with those things and see what’s possible.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. You understand that's the lifespan of the platform he's talking about? For actually making useful performance of the SPEs, quote the next question :"eight years down the road", Huh? Some perspective there.
Already they're creating unique content, which'll likely show up as a mini-game, which is one key aspect of the eDI. These development strategies enable returns to be made on RnD. Rather than wait for the release of a major title to get returns on the water physics engine you've been exploring, turn that engine into a mini-game.Will it be something like two or three, four more years before we see just truly mind-blowing games and results from the PS3?
I think somebody might surprise us with a few things here and there. We’ve actually got a prototype on the PS3 that simulates liquid like no one’s seen before and we’ve actually built a little minigame around that to take advantage of that… The goal of this small game was that [we] might be able to put out a small downloadable game that somebody might buy for five dollars, play it on their 1080p television set with their PlayStation 3 and just really show people an experience that no other console can give them on their $3000 TV set.
Seems like jumbled speak to me. 8 years to the end of the decade makes no sense. I think he meant 8 years of development progress in a 10 year lifecycle.Did you catch the "remainder of the decade" comment? I had to read that sentence like three times, before posting, WTF? There is only three more years left in this decade, 8 more years puts you halfway through the next decade. So what is he saying exactly?
Did you catch the "remainder of the decade" comment? I had to read that sentence like three times, before posting, WTF? There is only three more years left in this decade, 8 more years puts you halfway through the next decade. So what is he saying exactly?
I´d love to have that freedom in my work.The focus of what we’re doing this week is to have a small team—called Beachhead team—really kind of explore and make small games that can’t possibly be made on any other platform. They don’t have a schedule and basically they’re kind of discovering as they go along.
I thought it was remarkable that he predicts they will keep improving the use of Cell for 8 years more, that was my interpretation. Sony has admitted the PS2 is currently running out of steam, so if what he says is true the PS3 will be honking on a few years more. Well we'll see about that.I'm not sure what you mean by that. You understand that's the lifespan of the platform he's talking about?
Yeah, I actually did, but I assumed he was refering to the PS3s ten year life-cycle as a decade, strange I know. Maybe he thinks the PS3 is a start of a new era and people will have a new time count and refering to the time before and after the PS3.![]()
This is where eDI is truly great, and I think rewards the super-geeks. For all their years creating technologies, now they have a chance to create some games as well. eDI's become the coder's playground, and all those bizarre experiments can be floated to see what the reaction is.BTW I thought this sounded fun:
I´d love to have that freedom in my work.
Eh, no.![]()
You do know that a decade is defined purely as an arbitrary 10 year duration and not constrained specifically to any starting point..?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade
![]()
A decade may also be a well-defined historical period of ten years in a dating system. In that sense, the first decade of the 20th century indicates a period from January 1, 1901 until December 31, 1910.
Eh, no.![]()
My interpretation was restricted to this part:
Yeah, I actually did, but I assumed he was refering to the PS3s ten year life-cycle as a decade, strange I know. Maybe he thinks the PS3 is a start of a new era and people will have a new time count and refering to the time before and after the PS3.
It just makes sense, escpecially the end.
Can cell be cost-competitive with specialized chips that handles the demanding task in set-top boxes or media player ?
I'm curious - what are you basing that on? I would be under the impression the SPEs would be decent coprocessors to a more traditional consumer electronics CPU (such as an ARM), but I am very skeptical the PPE makes sense in those markets. This doesn't reduce the necessity of fixed-function blocks for specific workloads (such as all or part of media/video processing), however.It can if they strip off some SPEs.
I'm curious - what are you basing that on? I would be under the impression the SPEs would be decent coprocessors to a more traditional consumer electronics CPU (such as an ARM), but I am very skeptical the PPE makes sense in those markets. This doesn't reduce the necessity of fixed-function blocks for specific workloads (such as all or part of media/video processing), however.
Something similar has already happened with other IBM microprocessors, and the markets were G3 based processors are currently seen I'd expect Cell processors to take over first. Blu-ray and HDDVD players would also be prime targets for Cell processors, as well as high end scalers.
And what other markets uses G3 processors?
Invited Presentations:
* "A 65nm SPE for a 1 Petaflop Super Computer"
Brian Flachs (IBM)
IBM has a presentation at Cool Chips X in the next month.
http://www.coolchips.org/cool10/advance1.html