http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2005/0603/kaigai185.htm
So here's the part 2 of the interview (the part 1 is here)
It seems now Goto asks questions with other PC Watch interviews with SCE personell such as Chatani and Kutaragi in his mind.
Goto: How do you look at the PS3 architecture? It takes a very different approach from that of XBOX 360.
Allard: I was asked who is the winner of the next-gen. The answer is simple. IBM. IBM that designs all of next-gen game consoles is the biggest winner (laugh)
In various ways, I'd suspected Sony's announcement would have something more. Yet basically it's only the technical spec. About the technical spec, I think it has some misleading points in the comparison of the 2 systems' performance. You'll find an interesting thing if you look at those specs more macroscopically by comparing the transistor counts.
The transistor counts for those two are almost the same. We and Sony arrange the same number of transistors at the same timing. Since the transistor counts are the same, the relative performances aren't much different. The only problem is how you arrange the transistors.
I think (between Sony and MS) there's a fundamental difference in where to put priority. The biggest difference is we give priority on what game developers want. Fon instance we didn't take a split memory architecture. We adopted the 512MB unified memory architecture, for no developer wants memories split by 256MB like PS3. This flexibility can be a strength of XBOX 360.
G: But, because of the heterogeneous architecture of simple CPU cores, Cell has twice the floating point power of the XBOX 360 CPU.
A: They are right on their claim. Indeed their FP performance is twice of ours in the system totals. It's because their hardware is designed for FP operations. But what you forget is, in today's game programs FP operations are 20% and the rest 80% are general integer operations or operations such as branching. They ignore that part. Integer operations are the most computation-cycle demanding part in game programs. Now, XBOX 360 has 3 times the integer processing performance of Cell.
One more important point is the eDRAM in the ATI part. This is another plus against PS3. Both XBOX 360 and PS3 have 512MB memory so it seems 10MB eDRAM makes no difference. However it becomes a different story if it's put on the graphics chip. If a super wide-bandwidth memory is connected with the graphics chip, it allows a shader program to access the memory with a very low latency.
You can conclude that XBOX 360 equals to PS3 by the transistor counts. But, for the arrangement of transistors, I think we could win by optimizing it to the need of game developers. For a system like a game console that is complicated and highly refined, the true key is software. It's indisputable that we can deliver better softwares.
G: How do you look at the difference that XBOX 360 CPU is symmetric multicore and Cell is asymmetric multicore?
A: I think it's an advantage as programmers have experienced multiprocessing already. In the PC side, Intel is migrating to the same type of architecture. So, even if a programmer is not accustomed to multiprocessing, he can get information as much as he want since all books, tools, and lectures at universities focus on this style of programming.
As a computer geek I like the spec of PS3 and from the viewpoint of an electronic engineer it's very interesting, it's interesting also from computer science. But the important thing is games, and developers.
For developers, it's not so easy to understand a whole architecture. So it gets important to offer a software. Then, with the more complicated hardware, Sony has to offer software tools better than ours. But we'll be able to offer better softwares as we are experienced in such things.
G: In the CPU business, processors dedicated to stream processing of data, such as Cell SPE, are catching attention.
A: For Cell SPE, synchronization can be a problem. Also the cache will be a problem too. I think they have not disclosed all the details about the cache architecture. Anyway, these problems will be bottlenecks for the system like in PS2.
G: SCE says "let's create whole computer entertainment beyond games." It's the vision that by creating a wonderful platform for computer entertainment you can also play games on it. Furthermore, they hope to change the computing paradigm by an innovative architecture.
A: Are they serious? (laugh)
I think the focus at E3 should be properly set on games. It was about games also at the press conference.
However, it's not that we ignore entertainment beyond games. I briefly mentioned about such experiences by XBOX 360 too. For example, we told about the innovation that allows us to hear all music we want in a game play. You can have fun by connecting USB tools like music players and digital cameras, you can make photo slide shows, you can voicechat with friends on the internet.
If you want to deliver such experiences, not technologies, to people, you have to explain them more concretely. How Gigabit Ethernets relate to entertainment, how 2 HDMI ports that support 1080 dots HDTVs relate to entertainment. I'm interesed in what experiences those design decisions by Mr. Kutaragi lead to.
My desicion is the fusion of hardware and software service, and it offers users unbelievable experiences. We focus on experiences and design a hardware to realize those experiences. It's different from making a hardware and afterwards thinking about services.
G: The approach of SCE in which the vision was presented rather than the game itself got a favorable reception.
A: You remember PS2 had an IEEE1394 port. It had an HDD port and a USB port. Besides, do you remember what they told about PS2 in '98-'99? They talked about a big dream like changing the computing paradigm and talked about the future of comprehensive computer entertainment. Internet browser, LCD screen, mouse... they talked about various things but almost nothing realized.
Why? It's simple. The important thing is experience, namely games. Unless focusing on there it makes no sense. Therefore we design a product for games.
G: How do you look at the vision of Cell computing by SCE?
A: I want to create an amazing game. No customer wants to buy a new distributed computing paradigm (laugh)
G: More real game graphics becomes, more important the reality of behavior of in-game characters and objects gets. It's because a real picture that doesn't move realistically is unnatural. So I expect physics simulation will be more important down the road...?
A: There are many factors that lead next-gen games to success. If you focus only on realism, then your opinion that physics is important is right. For other factors, for instance, I point out that lighting is also important. The ability to generate textures and geometries in realtime that I call "procedural synthesis" is important too. Even if you create a forest with perfect lighting and a perfect design, it'll be unnatural if all trees are the same. Why we write a program to generate a tree, why we write a program to generate textures to be pasted on trees, that's because they all look different.
These things are also important for realism, I think. So at E3 we made a 90 seconds trailer that focused on how this synthesis looks visually.
But, I want to repeat, from such a technical viewpoint, the both platforms, XBOX 360 and PS3 are very alike. If you look at the total performances the both can do the same things.
G: Do you think the high performance of next-gen consoles will innovate games? There are voices that only with hardware specs there'll be no differences.
A: Looking back, there were 4 important game ideas in these 10 years. Pokemon, Grand Theft Auto, Sim Series, and Halo. All of these had no special 90 seconds trailers. Halo is the only one with amazing graphics, physics and realism.
Therefore I think we should expand the concept of what to challeng to. I think Realism and physics are important factors. But you should not forget that what drives this industry is a great innovation.
A platform and an innovation on it have a close relationship. The PC platform is a right platform to innovate Sim Series. If you see the combination of Gameboy and Pokemon you know it's a right platform too. We did all kinds of things to make Halo a success on the XBOX platform. Xbox was a platform to innovate Halo. But, for GTA, graphics was not important. It's innovative that it's a new game metaphor.
By looking things like this, you know you should be cautious about the view that the spec drives gaming. I believe I designed a super high-performance system with competitive power that surpasses Sony's.
But the task we have is to make game developers think about the future. For that purpose experience is more important than technology. What kind of new game experiences we can promote, what new services we can offer. By that service, developers can innovate and offer users new ideas.
A new idea may be a thing that has unbelievable realism, graphics, and physics that exploits XBOX 360 power like Halo in XBOX 1. Or, it may be just a wonderful idea like GTA. To produce various innovative games, not only technical specs but also hardware, software and service, all should be offered as one, that's the important thing we think.
So here's the part 2 of the interview (the part 1 is here)
It seems now Goto asks questions with other PC Watch interviews with SCE personell such as Chatani and Kutaragi in his mind.
Goto: How do you look at the PS3 architecture? It takes a very different approach from that of XBOX 360.
Allard: I was asked who is the winner of the next-gen. The answer is simple. IBM. IBM that designs all of next-gen game consoles is the biggest winner (laugh)
In various ways, I'd suspected Sony's announcement would have something more. Yet basically it's only the technical spec. About the technical spec, I think it has some misleading points in the comparison of the 2 systems' performance. You'll find an interesting thing if you look at those specs more macroscopically by comparing the transistor counts.
The transistor counts for those two are almost the same. We and Sony arrange the same number of transistors at the same timing. Since the transistor counts are the same, the relative performances aren't much different. The only problem is how you arrange the transistors.
I think (between Sony and MS) there's a fundamental difference in where to put priority. The biggest difference is we give priority on what game developers want. Fon instance we didn't take a split memory architecture. We adopted the 512MB unified memory architecture, for no developer wants memories split by 256MB like PS3. This flexibility can be a strength of XBOX 360.
G: But, because of the heterogeneous architecture of simple CPU cores, Cell has twice the floating point power of the XBOX 360 CPU.
A: They are right on their claim. Indeed their FP performance is twice of ours in the system totals. It's because their hardware is designed for FP operations. But what you forget is, in today's game programs FP operations are 20% and the rest 80% are general integer operations or operations such as branching. They ignore that part. Integer operations are the most computation-cycle demanding part in game programs. Now, XBOX 360 has 3 times the integer processing performance of Cell.
One more important point is the eDRAM in the ATI part. This is another plus against PS3. Both XBOX 360 and PS3 have 512MB memory so it seems 10MB eDRAM makes no difference. However it becomes a different story if it's put on the graphics chip. If a super wide-bandwidth memory is connected with the graphics chip, it allows a shader program to access the memory with a very low latency.
You can conclude that XBOX 360 equals to PS3 by the transistor counts. But, for the arrangement of transistors, I think we could win by optimizing it to the need of game developers. For a system like a game console that is complicated and highly refined, the true key is software. It's indisputable that we can deliver better softwares.
G: How do you look at the difference that XBOX 360 CPU is symmetric multicore and Cell is asymmetric multicore?
A: I think it's an advantage as programmers have experienced multiprocessing already. In the PC side, Intel is migrating to the same type of architecture. So, even if a programmer is not accustomed to multiprocessing, he can get information as much as he want since all books, tools, and lectures at universities focus on this style of programming.
As a computer geek I like the spec of PS3 and from the viewpoint of an electronic engineer it's very interesting, it's interesting also from computer science. But the important thing is games, and developers.
For developers, it's not so easy to understand a whole architecture. So it gets important to offer a software. Then, with the more complicated hardware, Sony has to offer software tools better than ours. But we'll be able to offer better softwares as we are experienced in such things.
G: In the CPU business, processors dedicated to stream processing of data, such as Cell SPE, are catching attention.
A: For Cell SPE, synchronization can be a problem. Also the cache will be a problem too. I think they have not disclosed all the details about the cache architecture. Anyway, these problems will be bottlenecks for the system like in PS2.
G: SCE says "let's create whole computer entertainment beyond games." It's the vision that by creating a wonderful platform for computer entertainment you can also play games on it. Furthermore, they hope to change the computing paradigm by an innovative architecture.
A: Are they serious? (laugh)
I think the focus at E3 should be properly set on games. It was about games also at the press conference.
However, it's not that we ignore entertainment beyond games. I briefly mentioned about such experiences by XBOX 360 too. For example, we told about the innovation that allows us to hear all music we want in a game play. You can have fun by connecting USB tools like music players and digital cameras, you can make photo slide shows, you can voicechat with friends on the internet.
If you want to deliver such experiences, not technologies, to people, you have to explain them more concretely. How Gigabit Ethernets relate to entertainment, how 2 HDMI ports that support 1080 dots HDTVs relate to entertainment. I'm interesed in what experiences those design decisions by Mr. Kutaragi lead to.
My desicion is the fusion of hardware and software service, and it offers users unbelievable experiences. We focus on experiences and design a hardware to realize those experiences. It's different from making a hardware and afterwards thinking about services.
G: The approach of SCE in which the vision was presented rather than the game itself got a favorable reception.
A: You remember PS2 had an IEEE1394 port. It had an HDD port and a USB port. Besides, do you remember what they told about PS2 in '98-'99? They talked about a big dream like changing the computing paradigm and talked about the future of comprehensive computer entertainment. Internet browser, LCD screen, mouse... they talked about various things but almost nothing realized.
Why? It's simple. The important thing is experience, namely games. Unless focusing on there it makes no sense. Therefore we design a product for games.
G: How do you look at the vision of Cell computing by SCE?
A: I want to create an amazing game. No customer wants to buy a new distributed computing paradigm (laugh)
G: More real game graphics becomes, more important the reality of behavior of in-game characters and objects gets. It's because a real picture that doesn't move realistically is unnatural. So I expect physics simulation will be more important down the road...?
A: There are many factors that lead next-gen games to success. If you focus only on realism, then your opinion that physics is important is right. For other factors, for instance, I point out that lighting is also important. The ability to generate textures and geometries in realtime that I call "procedural synthesis" is important too. Even if you create a forest with perfect lighting and a perfect design, it'll be unnatural if all trees are the same. Why we write a program to generate a tree, why we write a program to generate textures to be pasted on trees, that's because they all look different.
These things are also important for realism, I think. So at E3 we made a 90 seconds trailer that focused on how this synthesis looks visually.
But, I want to repeat, from such a technical viewpoint, the both platforms, XBOX 360 and PS3 are very alike. If you look at the total performances the both can do the same things.
G: Do you think the high performance of next-gen consoles will innovate games? There are voices that only with hardware specs there'll be no differences.
A: Looking back, there were 4 important game ideas in these 10 years. Pokemon, Grand Theft Auto, Sim Series, and Halo. All of these had no special 90 seconds trailers. Halo is the only one with amazing graphics, physics and realism.
Therefore I think we should expand the concept of what to challeng to. I think Realism and physics are important factors. But you should not forget that what drives this industry is a great innovation.
A platform and an innovation on it have a close relationship. The PC platform is a right platform to innovate Sim Series. If you see the combination of Gameboy and Pokemon you know it's a right platform too. We did all kinds of things to make Halo a success on the XBOX platform. Xbox was a platform to innovate Halo. But, for GTA, graphics was not important. It's innovative that it's a new game metaphor.
By looking things like this, you know you should be cautious about the view that the spec drives gaming. I believe I designed a super high-performance system with competitive power that surpasses Sony's.
But the task we have is to make game developers think about the future. For that purpose experience is more important than technology. What kind of new game experiences we can promote, what new services we can offer. By that service, developers can innovate and offer users new ideas.
A new idea may be a thing that has unbelievable realism, graphics, and physics that exploits XBOX 360 power like Halo in XBOX 1. Or, it may be just a wonderful idea like GTA. To produce various innovative games, not only technical specs but also hardware, software and service, all should be offered as one, that's the important thing we think.
JK