new (?) Rambus XDR memory and PlayStation 3 information
- Thread starter Megadrive1988
- Start date
Megadrive1988 said:
Whatever the PS3 turns out to be, there will always be a weakest link for people to complain about!
What would it be? Here's a link to an old poll on what would get sacrificed from consoles...no one wanted to drop RAM or Bandwidth! IMO, drop the hard disk (make it optional) and gimme more RAM and Bandwidth! 8)
Quite an old article dated July 2003, but very informative.
This is probably old - assuming devs get dev kits tomorrow they need to produce an application within half a year. Current opinions place release in 1st quater of 2006.
Which does mean that the memory configuration that was guessed in the article may be subjected to slight changes. Upgrade? 8 chips @ 512MB @ 50GB/s.
OK, that's maybe going into the realm of fantasy.
This is probably old - assuming devs get dev kits tomorrow they need to produce an application within half a year. Current opinions place release in 1st quater of 2006.
Which does mean that the memory configuration that was guessed in the article may be subjected to slight changes. Upgrade? 8 chips @ 512MB @ 50GB/s.
OK, that's maybe going into the realm of fantasy.
If the PS3 has Blueray as its format of choice and it is recordable then there really would be no need for a hard drive. Sony could offer some sort of firmware update for a small cost in order to activate media writing capability. That does assume that the drive in the PS3 will be able to do it.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
Instead of a harddrive, I would like to see PS3 have some flash memory, or some type of solid state storage, like Xenon is probably going to have.
data coming off the Blu-Ray disc, going into flash memory, streamed to main external system memory, then on to the embedded memory, caches and APU local storage should be great.
a harddrive is faster than Blu-Ray for streaming but flash memory is faster still, for streaming 8)
data coming off the Blu-Ray disc, going into flash memory, streamed to main external system memory, then on to the embedded memory, caches and APU local storage should be great.
a harddrive is faster than Blu-Ray for streaming but flash memory is faster still, for streaming 8)
Personally, I am a bit worried about the notions of supposed large eDram buffer on the CPU.
For one, that would pretty much guarantee no L2 cache on PEs - and I don't need to go explaining why that could be a problem (I'll let ERP do it instead
).And secondly you insert another layer of DMA juggling between the already non-trivial juggling from main-APU local memories.
Now, granted - at 64MB the above is not that much of an issue since you could be really lazy with reloading it - the thing is I sincerely doubt it could be anywhere that big.
What I'm worried about is that we'll end up with something like 2-4MB per PE, and still no actual cache for the CPU. :?
Well to chip my 2c here, I'm very much with you that compression will be important area nexgen, but I don't think most it will necesserily need to be on-demand, so there may be more leeway with performance there tooDeano said:
Panajev2001a
Veteran
I do think we will have at least a 64 KB L1 cache per PU ( 32 Kb Data and 32 KB Instructions ) which is more than 2x what the EE RISC core has ( 8 KB for data and 16 KB for Instructions, am I right ? ).
In terms of pure L1 Data cache, such a PU would have 4x more cache than the EE RISC core.
Sure, it would not be otpimal, but it would be a good jump from the EE RISC core.
I would go as far as to say that unified 128-256 KB L2 cache for the PUs might not be a crazy ideas: IBM knows the pivotal point the PUs have in CELL and Sony has heard enough people complaining about memory accesses for the EE RISC core due to poor cache hierarchy.
In terms of pure L1 Data cache, such a PU would have 4x more cache than the EE RISC core.
Sure, it would not be otpimal, but it would be a good jump from the EE RISC core.
I would go as far as to say that unified 128-256 KB L2 cache for the PUs might not be a crazy ideas: IBM knows the pivotal point the PUs have in CELL and Sony has heard enough people complaining about memory accesses for the EE RISC core due to poor cache hierarchy.
passerby said:Which does mean that the memory configuration that was guessed in the article may be subjected to slight changes. Upgrade? 8 chips @ 512MB @ 50GB/s.
OK, that's maybe going into the realm of fantasy.
Why not? Nitendo 64 was an memory upgrad, and in my opinion it was great, because in the early games you dont need so much and you get the full performance to the late game at a nice price. You will need a good form of market implementation though.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
512 MB @ 50 GB/sec does not seem like fantasy whatsoever. in fact it's what many people concider to be the bare minimum for nextgen consoles. I would concider it to be simply... decent.
I suppose that 1 GigaByte @ 102 GB/sec might be pushing it for a console--but even that is still within the capability of Rambus Yellowstone / XDR memory.
I suppose that 1 GigaByte @ 102 GB/sec might be pushing it for a console--but even that is still within the capability of Rambus Yellowstone / XDR memory.
Hey what's up with that last picture? The 1996 Mario is not from n64(which had 500MB of bandwidth....for both memory and cart slot I think or perhaps the cart was just limited by the memory), I don't even think a single n64 could do that mario in real time, and probably not even within the 4MB of memory the system had.
And what picture is the last one? It says EA Big, and since it's 2001 I'm assuming SSX or SSX Tricky, but what's with the glowing lights and thing in the background that looks like it's flying? Looks more like a harry potter game.
And what picture is the last one? It says EA Big, and since it's 2001 I'm assuming SSX or SSX Tricky, but what's with the glowing lights and thing in the background that looks like it's flying? Looks more like a harry potter game.
Evil_Cloud
Veteran
Fox5 said:
First generation titles on N64 and PS2 (Super Mario 64 and SSX), landmark title on SNES, and one of the first videogames on primitive hardware.
Evil_Cloud said:
Well I knew the games(except for hte last one) but....
First one I think is pong on an atari I'd guess.
2nd is super mario all stars on snes playing super mario bros 2.
3rd is just a 3d render of mario, not mario 64.
And 4th I guess is SSX, I think if you could see it clearly though you'd probably say the mario render looks better.
Evil_Cloud
Veteran
I don't think the render was meant to be representative of the game's graphics. More like 'Mario 64' in general.
It's only a slide! they used that image cause it's a very common and cute image of Mario! It's not indicative of anything, it's just giving us a rough separation between generations. If they wanted to make the slide indicative of each generation's power, they would have put images of the same size, using the best offerings from each platform.
