Masayuki Chatani (SCEI CTO) interview

[London Geezer]

Why would render farms use PS3's to render movies, when they can get cheaper Cell units without all the things that are in a PS3 but are not needed by a render farm?!!

I can see them using lots of Cell based systems to render movies, but PS3s??

Not only the PS3s will take a lot of space, compared to a group of motherboards in a cabintet, but who needs the 2 HDMI and all the slots and connections?! And how many BDROM do they need!!

I'm assuming a Cell motherboard without all the cool connections and bonuses a PS3 has will be much cheaper.

That's either a badly translated statement or the guy meant "Cell workstations" instead of "PS3".

 

[Acert93]

[quote="nelg"
Now if we want to talk about procedural synthesis that creates procedural textures, than Cell is gonna whip XeCPU into touch in most cases...

Sorry DeanoC, isn't XeCPU supposed to be "procedural synthesis-based"(forget about the spelling, I'm no expert), as
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-1.ars ArsTechnica noted?
Why did you say that Cell whipes XeCPU ?

DeanoC can clarify, but from reading his statement it seems the emphasis was on "procedural synthesis that creates procedural textures". Procedural textures is only one aspect of precedural synthesis.

Actually, I could be mistaken but I do not remember the Arstechnia spending much time on procedural textures at all, but more on how the L2 <> GPU connection, and being able to program/limit/ and bipass L1/L2 caches are going to help procedural synthesis, specifically with realtime tesselation of models made of higher order surfaces to vertices the GPU can use. DeanoC is pretty honest chap, so I would tend to believe him that the CELL has an advantage in procedural textures. Of course DeanoC probably cannot talk much on too many specifics, but I am sure the Arstechnia articles will give us a good idea of how flexible and good they are in these areas in general.

This makes me even MORE interested in the ability of Xenos to work with HOS. Obviously having the CPUs realtime tesselate HOS is nice, but it makes me wonder how intensive the HOS support is in Xenos.

 

[DeanoC]

[quote="nelg"
Now if we want to talk about procedural synthesis that creates procedural textures, than Cell is gonna whip XeCPU into touch in most cases...

Sorry DeanoC, isn't XeCPU supposed to be "procedural synthesis-based"(forget about the spelling, I'm no expert), as
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-1.ars ArsTechnica noted?
Why did you say that Cell whipes XeCPU ?

Procedural synthesis involved making graphics (texture, geometry etc.) from small programs. Cell has better threading for small programs (each SPU is a thread) and more FLOPs, I can't see any major procedural method where XeCPU would win...
XeCPU is better for bigger more complex programs (Lots of branching code with lots of data) but procedural models usually have neither (small code and data). XeCPU wouldn't be bad at it, but Cell is likely to get 2x-3x the performance in most cases of procedural synthesis IMHO.

 

[Acert93]

Procedural synthesis involved making graphics (texture, geometry etc.) from small programs. Cell has better threading for small programs (each SPU is a thread) and more FLOPs, I can't see any major procedural method where XeCPU would win...
XeCPU is better for bigger more complex programs (Lots of branching code with lots of data) but procedural models usually have neither (small code and data). XeCPU wouldn't be bad at it, but Cell is likely to get 2x-3x the performance in most cases of procedural synthesis IMHO.

Good stuff there DeanoC, thanks!

 

[phat]

Why would render farms use PS3's to render movies, when they can get cheaper Cell units without all the things that are in a PS3 but are not needed by a render farm?!!

I can see them using lots of Cell based systems to render movies, but PS3s??

Not only the PS3s will take a lot of space, compared to a group of motherboards in a cabintet, but who needs the 2 HDMI and all the slots and connections?! And how many BDROM do they need!!

I'm assuming a Cell motherboard without all the cool connections and bonuses a PS3 has will be much cheaper.

That's either a badly translated statement or the guy meant "Cell workstations" instead of "PS3".

You forget that the PS3 is going to be sold below cost, and has economies of scale. Plus, connecting a bunch up into a cluster would involve almost no hardware engineering effort compared to designing your own custom cell board. A PS3 render farm would likely give you a really good FLOPS/dollar ratio.

 

[London Geezer]

Why would render farms use PS3's to render movies, when they can get cheaper Cell units without all the things that are in a PS3 but are not needed by a render farm?!!

I can see them using lots of Cell based systems to render movies, but PS3s??

Not only the PS3s will take a lot of space, compared to a group of motherboards in a cabintet, but who needs the 2 HDMI and all the slots and connections?! And how many BDROM do they need!!

I'm assuming a Cell motherboard without all the cool connections and bonuses a PS3 has will be much cheaper.

That's either a badly translated statement or the guy meant "Cell workstations" instead of "PS3".

You forget that the PS3 is going to be sold below cost, and has economies of scale. Plus, connecting a bunch up into a cluster would involve almost no hardware engineering effort compared to designing your own custom cell board. A PS3 render farm would likely give you a really good FLOPS/dollar ratio.

What i'm saying is that having FULL PS3s hooked up together in a render farm is a waste of space. Among other things.
A render-farm-Cell-board would do away with BlueRay, RSX (it's not needed to render movies, since it's all CPU work), and all the bells and whistles a PS3 has.

 

[mckmas8808]

What i'm saying is that having FULL PS3s hooked up together in a render farm is a waste of space. Among other things.
A render-farm-Cell-board would do away with BlueRay, RSX (it's not needed to render movies, since it's all CPU work), and all the bells and whistles a PS3 has.

I agree with you it makes no sense. What I'm wondering is Sony really thinking about doing this. If they do I wondering what the PS3 farm would be able to produce.
________
Voltz

 

[London Geezer]

I'm pretty sure that the guy meant "PS3 chips" as in Cell.

The guy is the freaking Chief Technology Officer at Sony, he would know this kind of stuff.

 

[X-AleX]

[quote="nelg"
Now if we want to talk about procedural synthesis that creates procedural textures, than Cell is gonna whip XeCPU into touch in most cases...

Sorry DeanoC, isn't XeCPU supposed to be "procedural synthesis-based"(forget about the spelling, I'm no expert), as
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-1.ars ArsTechnica noted?
Why did you say that Cell whipes XeCPU ?

Procedural synthesis involved making graphics (texture, geometry etc.) from small programs. Cell has better threading for small programs (each SPU is a thread) and more FLOPs, I can't see any major procedural method where XeCPU would win...
XeCPU is better for bigger more complex programs (Lots of branching code with lots of data) but procedural models usually have neither (small code and data). XeCPU wouldn't be bad at it, but Cell is likely to get 2x-3x the performance in most cases of procedural synthesis IMHO.

So why did the guy celebrate this way the XeCPU procedural synthesis capabilities?

 

[jvd]

What i'm saying is that having FULL PS3s hooked up together in a render farm is a waste of space. Among other things.
A render-farm-Cell-board would do away with BlueRay, RSX (it's not needed to render movies, since it's all CPU work), and all the bells and whistles a PS3 has.

I agree with you it makes no sense. What I'm wondering is Sony really thinking about doing this. If they do I wondering what the PS3 farm would be able to produce.

It would produce anything that a normal render farm would produce. Just faster or slower depending on what we are comparing it too


Anyway as i said they would most likely have multi cell set ups with alot more ram for the cpus to acess and large fast hardrives to store and transfer the data .

 

[mckmas8808]

Anyway as i said they would most likely have multi cell set ups with alot more ram for the cpus to acess and large fast hardrives to store and transfer the data .

You know your probably right, but just the thought amazes me. We went from 8-bit Nintendos in the eighties to 32-bit Playstations in the ninties to 128-bit PS3s that could produce real CGI for a movie. I wonder if any independent movie companies could produce CGI like never before due to lack of resources just using a bunch of PS3s?

Could this be the change in independent film as we know it. *dom dom doooom*
________
Ford Ed Falcon Specifications

 

[Titanio]

So why did the guy celebrate this way the XeCPU procedural synthesis capabilities?

It has some neat features to accomodate such tasks, and he was highlighting that because MS seems to be encouraging their use. It's nicely built to do that kind of stuff as best it can (even if it's best would not be as good as what can be done on another chip). He never made any comparison to Cell in the article with regard to performance in such tasks, so his enthusiasm for the XeCPU's features in that area doesn't preclude Cell being better at that.

I don't think it'd be too surprising to see Cell being better at that kind of thing? It's pretty much an ideal kind of workload for the SPEs, and there is more bandwidth between RSX and Cell as between the X360 CPU and Xenos. From a feasibility point of view, it just seems more comfortably possible on Cell than on X360 too (not that you wouldn't want to use this on X360!) - I'm guessing it's more comfortable to throw a couple of SPEs (out of 7 + a PPE) at the problem than it is throwing a whole core or more (out of 3 cores) at it on X360, from a headroom point of view.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If they get Linux onto PS3, I'd buy one just for raytracing! It'd be heaps faster than my Athlon 2500.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I wonder if this is true. I don't see him lying. I remember Laa-Yosh saying something about rendering farms used to create Episode 3. Hey Laa-Yosh do you think this is possible?

Most movie VFX and game cinematics and ads are rendered on the same platform: PCs. The average render slave has at least 1GB of memory per CPU, but highend studios are using many racks of blade servers, with 2 CPUs and 4GBs of memory (to allow both rendering threads to use all 2GBs of RAM). ILM and Weta have about a thousand CPUs or even more.

The funky part is, however, not the processing speed. When you have a hundred rendernodes asking for the same datasets at the start of a render job, even the fastest harddisks would give up and die... Examples of data include lots of 2K-8K textures (color bump displace specular etc), very large polycount models, lots of keyframe/mocap animation data, precalculated shadow maps, cloth fluid particle and other simulations, etc. Basically everything that can be should be precalculated and saved on the server so that the renderslaves won't waste time on re-calculating it again and again.

So big studios also have to build some very powerful storage and network solutions if they want to feed their renderfarms.
Copying all data onto the rendernodes' local disks is not a good idea because 1. it'll generate as much traffic, maybe even more 2. and it'll do it each time an asset is updated, which is quite frequent, can happen several times a day.

Using PS3s for renderfarms is a bad idea. First the 256 MB XDR memory is far too small to fit even simple scenes into. Then you'll still need a few gigabytes of local storage, depending on how you're working. Then you need a network and a file server system that'll have to get better and better as you increase the renderfarm's size.
For the PS3, the biggest problem is the RAM. For any Cell based workstations/servers, they'll have to be significantly cheaper than PCs to sufficiently change the costs of the entire renderfarm that also includes the network and storage.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

About Cell based workstations, I'll repeat what I've posted in another thread:

CELL's 218 GFLOPS are only valid if you're using its 32-bit, non-IEEE floating point format. Once you want to use the 64-bit IEEE format, CELL's performance will drop to about 25-30 GFLOPS, which isn't that much more than today's dual 64-bit Intel and AMD systems. And we're still talking about peak, ie. theoretical performance.

The PS3 will probably cost more than $300, and will still be sold at a loss. What about RAM, can it use 'cheap' SDRAM? Or do you have to buy the necessary 2-4 GB or more RAM in XDR memory for your workstation? You'll probably end up with a price-to-performance ratio very similar to Intel/AMD systems... There's a reason for the VFX studios' transition to the cheap Linux PC as their renderfarm.

 

[one]

Why would render farms use PS3's to render movies, when they can get cheaper Cell units without all the things that are in a PS3 but are not needed by a render farm?!!

I can see them using lots of Cell based systems to render movies, but PS3s??

Not only the PS3s will take a lot of space, compared to a group of motherboards in a cabintet, but who needs the 2 HDMI and all the slots and connections?! And how many BDROM do they need!!

I'm assuming a Cell motherboard without all the cool connections and bonuses a PS3 has will be much cheaper.

That's either a badly translated statement or the guy meant "Cell workstations" instead of "PS3".

PS3 will be sold at less than those Cell server blades.
Also, nVIDIA Gelato may support PS3 with GPU in the future.

 

[London Geezer]

PS3 will be sold at less than those Cell server blades.

Yes i get that, but that's not the point.
A Cell server blade would only cost as much as 1 or 2 Cells inside, and the RAM, which doesn't even need to be XDR since rendering doesn't need to be in realtime...
It might be sold at a premium (though we don't know the extent of that), but ultimately a render farm needs Cell blades with more RAM, not full PS3s.
And once you take out the BDROM drive, all the fancy connections and slots, the RSX and the expensive RAM, the cost comes down a lot. So the Cell blade might very well cost much less than a nice PS3. And occupy much less space.

Besides, if a "sold at a loss" PS3 does not do a good job compared to a Cell-only system (which might or might not cost less, as i've explained earlier), do you think render farms will care if it costs slightly less?

What is the biggest problem of rendering farms? Cost? Or is it space-performance ratio.

Also, nVIDIA Gelato may support PS3 with GPU in the future.

Yes, with more RAM, a PS3 might be a very good workstation for artists to do their work. Rendering is another beast.

 

[rabidrabbit]

If two PS3s can be connected so that ther will be more processing power for games, then those people who's SONY stuff always breaks just after the guarantee expires, can still use their old PS3 with non-functional Blu-Ray drive (we all know Blu-ray optics wear down in one year) as part of their personal renderfarm.
After five years they'll have a 6 PS3 (Cell 6PPU x 48SPU !!!) monster that is already 90% of human brain
In 2011 you can upload yourself via PS4 into the "Cell Server" and then SONY totally OWNZ YOU!!!

 

[one]

Is there no such algorithm as splitting scenes in parts to fit in 512MB of RAM in PS3 for good parallelism?

Anyway, CELL system is a NUMA architecture, which shares a memory address across all CELLs connected. I guess you see 1 big machine with 2GB RAM and 4 CELLs when you connect 4 PS3 (though Gigabit Ethernet limits performance). Is it more expensive than 4 Opterons + 2GB RAM machine for a typical render farm?

 

[London Geezer]

If two PS3s can be connected so that ther will be more processing power for games, then those people who's SONY stuff always breaks just after the guarantee expires, can still use their old PS3 with non-functional Blu-Ray drive (we all know Blu-ray optics wear down in one year) as part of their personal renderfarm.
After five years they'll have a 6 PS3 (Cell 6PPU x 48SPU !!!) monster that is already 90% of human brain
In 2011 you can upload yourself via PS4 into the "Cell Server" and then SONY totally OWNZ YOU!!!

Until we're the ones doing the plugging, we're the pwners. Errr...