Do you really need to see the specs? Look at the games. The games will tell you about the specs. I can't believe it has come down to this. People are looking consoles as PC's, Ken's dream come true.
IF PS3 only has 7SPUs
- Thread starter Psychogenics
- Start date
Do you really need to see the specs? Look at the games. The games will tell you about the specs. I can't believe it has come down to this. People are looking consoles as PC's, Ken's dream come true.
I'm hoping that the PS3 does have some way to idle down when not being used intensively. For example, if it can double as a Linux PC when your simply browsing the internet casually and not running some resource intensive webpages would you really need all those SPEs fired up? I want to be able TO use them, but at the same time when I don't need them why waste more electricity keeping them active?
Iron Tiger
Regular
My PDA is smaller than the PSP and can run at 625MHz. But it's got a different CPU, so what does it have to do with anything? Pre-launch PSPs were noted for being rather hot. They also were also running plugged in at trade events, so there really wasn't much solid information about battery life before they launched. Battery life can be fixed afterward with higher capacity batteries. Heat could probably be fixed by some more active throttling introduced in an update, but that could also screw up some games. So it makes more sense to me that they'd reduce the clocks to resolve a heat issue, but of course, that would also help the battery consumption issue.
360 does that now so I'd imagine PS3 will as well
Firewarrior
Newcomer
Its obvious sony has some uninformed staff
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
Well, clock speed on the PSP affects everything since everything shares a clock signal. Going up to 333 MHz means both CPU cores and the FPU and the VFPU are going to go up to 333, the RAM and GPU will go up to 166 (RAM being DDR333, though), the shared bus goes up, and a few other things. So it's not a big surprise that even a little clock increase has quite the impact on battery life/heat... well, and performance for that matter.
Most devs are pretty clearly told not to count on the rate at which something is running anyway. Sometimes they use worrisome wording like saying that such and such latencies are guaranteed to be inconsistent. Even if you "lock" the clock speed at 222 (and you can try 333, but the OS will still lock it at 222), they say it still won't be guaranteed to stay at that speed -- it's essentially more of a "priority" setting that doesn't really apply when the CPU is idle (which is really quite often).
The only time I have ever managed to get my PSP warm was simply by using the wireless intensively, like with Tekken gamesharing. It gets warm, but that's it.
Not that it matters, but the PSP has two CPUs effectively, one 'media engine' and one regular CPU - but they are both running in paralel and the same chip (R4000 I believe).
Anyway, nowadays most games are pretty well optimised I think and they will choose whatever clock frequency they need for whatever part of the game. So if you're in a menu, the clock can go down considerably, as it'll need to do barely more than wait for a button press. This is a lot like homebrew ebook readers which can just drop your clock to 1mhz as long as you're just reading what's on the screen, etc.
But to get back on topic, first of all the SPEs don't really use a lot of power. Very little, in fact. You'd be surprised. This is one of the many reasons why you can have so many of them on a chip in the first place. And the Cell Broadband Engine was developed with laptop computing and CE devices in mind, so power consumption has always been on the agenda.
My main question mark right now is the RSX and how much heat that will produce. Hopefully it has a smarter cooling system than the Radeon 9600 PRO that I bought for this machine (I recently ripped the fan off it, because it was always on - don't worry though, I don't play any games on this machine and Vista ain't touching it either ).
Not that it matters, but the PSP has two CPUs effectively, one 'media engine' and one regular CPU - but they are both running in paralel and the same chip (R4000 I believe).
Anyway, nowadays most games are pretty well optimised I think and they will choose whatever clock frequency they need for whatever part of the game. So if you're in a menu, the clock can go down considerably, as it'll need to do barely more than wait for a button press. This is a lot like homebrew ebook readers which can just drop your clock to 1mhz as long as you're just reading what's on the screen, etc.
But to get back on topic, first of all the SPEs don't really use a lot of power. Very little, in fact. You'd be surprised. This is one of the many reasons why you can have so many of them on a chip in the first place. And the Cell Broadband Engine was developed with laptop computing and CE devices in mind, so power consumption has always been on the agenda.
My main question mark right now is the RSX and how much heat that will produce. Hopefully it has a smarter cooling system than the Radeon 9600 PRO that I bought for this machine
(I recently ripped the fan off it, because it was always on - don't worry though, I don't play any games on this machine and Vista ain't touching it either ).
Folding@LapThe bus is decoupled - so no, it (and devices synced to it) does not go to 166Mhz - you could have the CPU at 333 and run the GPU, Bus etc. at 30.ShootMyMonkey said:
That said, there ARE two R4000 cores, and they both run in sync. Anyway, various individuals have tested their retail PSPs at higher clock and I'm not aware of heat issues being reported - but the question is really whether that applies to average retail unit.
For all we know, the ones people tried with may have been the 2% that just happen to run cool.
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
I really don't recall ever having separate control over them, though. AFAICR, all you really end up doing is setting the maximum speed of everything -- hence, setting a clock max of 333 still applies as setting a max of 166 for the bus and devices coupled thereof. The actual speed of any component at a given moment is never really guaranteed even if you tell it you want a "lock." As I said, though, last time I touched the PSP, firmware 2.0 was still new and 2.5 was only being talked about, so if that's changed... well, that's interesting.
Afaik bus/cpu control was always decoupled, ever since the clockcontrol was made available. It took a little while before documentation was up-to date for it all though. Besides, bus doesn't scale all the way down to 1mhz like CPU clock does, so they couldn't really be coupled.Shootmonkey said:
That much should be obvious to anyone - it's a portable device, the system MUST have the final word on power usage/saving. Application will still get to do what it wants "most" of the time though, and that's all you actually need to know.
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ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
Mmmm... that sounds believable. In my time with it, I was mainly concerned with rendering, but even within that space, I reported around 20 out of a total of some 400+ errata on the newsgroups. Write to the texture cache with/without a flag, my foot. I also loved how much they didn't tell you about things like texture swizzling... "In order to use the FAST mode, you will have to swizzle textures." Ummm... okay... would anyone care to say what the ordering criteria is? "Oh, I'm sorry... We don't provide useful details like that."
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That's one reason I royally dislike working with APIs early on - at least talking directly to hw is predictable and you know it won't change behaviour and introduce tons of new oddities with each SDK update.ShootMyMonkey said:
Yea that kind of stuff cracks me up. On that note, afaik after six years, PS2 SDK still doesn't provide a Working texture swizzling sample (the one sample that was tehre since early on never worked correctly). Though granted, at least addressing modes were documented (and you could preswizzle with hardware itself, so converter isn't even necessary in the end).
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