Playstation Live ...No Try Playstation Life

[Inane_Dork]

Your probably right about the PS3 not being able to record and play games at the sametime, so just don't play your games while the box needs to record. Any problems with that?

HECK yeah.

The TiVo at my house is recording things about 4-6 hours of the time people are awake. The Xbox has been moved off to another TV simply because TV/movie/Xbox was far too much for one screen. Now, TV/movie on one screen is too much, so we're constantly using available PCs to play movies. Granted, not everyone is in a family of 6, but the same timing problems can exist with a family of four, four being quite common.

The all-in-one device is always its own worst enemy. It only takes two person before two of its abilities are needed at the same time. And in this case, it may only take one.

 

[valioso]

Your probably right about the PS3 not being able to record and play games at the sametime, so just don't play your games while the box needs to record. Any problems with that?
.

most of the time I play games my dvr is recording something

 

[Titanio]

The all-in-one device is always its own worst enemy. It only takes two person before two of its abilities are needed at the same time. And in this case, it may only take one.

I'm as sceptical as the next about PS3 offering DVR functionality, but imagining that it did - again, why would you not be able to record something and play a game at the same time..?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Inane's talking about recording Program 1, watching Program 2 (previously recorded) and playing Game A at the same time.

 

[mckmas8808]

Inane's talking about recording Program 1, watching Program 2 (previously recorded) and playing Game A at the same time.

Damn even I think that's way to much for a system to handle. Shifty in that example you are talking about having to screens hooked up to the PS3 right? In theory can't the PS3 play a movie saved to the HDD, while somebody else is playing a game?

And I still don't understand how the PS3 having DVR abilities (I personally don't think it will keep in mind) is a bad thing. If you record 6 hrs worth of TV during the day and would like the play the PS3's games at the sametime (given that recording and game playing couldn't happen at the sametime) wouldn't you (i.e. Inane) just buy a more dedicated DVR?


If the PS3 had DVR capablities it would be for people like me that don't want to play the extra money for a seperate device and don't mind having some nice DVR features cut out in the process.

Disclaimer: Like stated above I don't believe for one bit that the PS3 will have DVR capablities.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Damn even I think that's way to much for a system to handle. Shifty in that example you are talking about having to screens hooked up to the PS3 right? In theory can't the PS3 play a movie saved to the HDD, while somebody else is playing a game?

If the OS supports that, for sure.

And I still don't understand how the PS3 having DVR abilities (I personally don't think it will keep in mind) is a bad thing.

If they add no extra cost the system, netiher do I. Saying DVR is a waste because you can't use it at the same time as playing games, is like saying DVD on PS2 is a waste because you can't watch DVDs at the same time you're playing games. For those that want to record movies and play games at the same time, buy a separate DVR, which you'll have to do anyway if PS3 doesn't suport DVR. For many people, like sudents or people like myself that don't live in AV demanding households, the optional DVR would be very nice. If its not enough in itself there's nothing stopping me from buying an a seperate DVR. God forbid, I could even buy an evil MS Media PC and connect it to a Sony LocationFreeTV transmitter thingy, breaking the unwritten law that you NEVER, EVER, own and use products from rival companies...

 

[patsu]

I'm as sceptical as the next about PS3 offering DVR functionality, but imagining that it did - again, why would you not be able to record something and play a game at the same time..?

Hm... how should I say it ?

I thought next-gen games run well on PS3 because of the "closed box/world" assumption. Many (all ?) of them are optimized for fixed number of SPUs, dedicated bandwidth, etc. etc. ...

If we have external programs running in parallel like a PC, the closed world assumption may be broken and bad things may happen... unless Sony has a clear and strict policies today reserving "static" SPU, memory and network resources for these programs.

What excites me regarding this news is DLNA compliance: I can mix and match components based on my needs. Personally, I don't mind tying up the entire PS3 for recording when I'm not playing games. I only play games late at night, usually alone. Watching TV with my small family on a PS3 DVR at prime time sounds good to me. For others with more advanced need, they can either run a DLNA software on their Linux/Mac/Windows whatever, or buy a dedicated DLNA media server.

Making "Location Free" kit open source is another great move from them.

 

[Inane_Dork]

I'm as sceptical as the next about PS3 offering DVR functionality, but imagining that it did - again, why would you not be able to record something and play a game at the same time..?

Technical feasibility and technical possibility are two different things. Without having PS3 developing experience, I can't really say whether your situation is feasible. It is definitely possible, though. Programming for Cell is a tricky thing, and I doubt that adding a background process would not affect a running game. Even if you saved a portion of resources for such an eventuality, the dynamics of the whole thing might be chaotic.

And then there's the situation Shifty brought up which I did not think of.
If the PS3 would be a DVR for more than one TV, yeah, that would get crappy.

The whole PSP interaction and online access ties in with this as well. As powerful as the PS3 will be, you can't tack on arbitrary workloads without risking the others.

 

[mckmas8808]

And then there's the situation Shifty brought up which I did not think of.
If the PS3 would be a DVR for more than one TV, yeah, that would get crappy.

The whole PSP interaction and online access ties in with this as well. As powerful as the PS3 will be, you can't tack on arbitrary workloads without risking the others.

Well Sony has already said that the PSP will be able to view and use the items on the PS3 from a remote location so...

 

[Titanio]

I thought it was fairly well accepted that Sony was likely to reserve a SPU for PS3's OS (aka this kind of functionality?). And probably a little PPE time too?

Nearly all of the extra-gaming functionality Sony discussed at E3 was in the context of it being simultaneous with gameplay, so that suggests the OS has a certain amount to play with - a certain amount reserved - without encroaching on what's guaranteed to developers.

I'm fairly sure a SPU or whatever could take an input from a video-in and stick it on the HDD while the game runs Again, not that I think it'll have DVR..but if it did.

Ditto for the rest of the functionality they discussed.

It's not a matter of risking other workloads. You fence off a certain amount for the OS, and the rest is what devs have to work with and can rely on. It's nothing new, MS has done the same thing with 360.

 

[Inane_Dork]

Well Sony has already said that the PSP will be able to view and use the items on the PS3 from a remote location so...

...what?

It's not rocket science that variable performance background tasks stand a good chance at effecting the performance of the foreground app.

I thought it was fairly well accepted that Sony was likely to reserve a SPU for PS3's OS (aka this kind of functionality?). And probably a little PPE time too?

Nearly all of the extra-gaming functionality Sony discussed at E3 was in the context of it being simultaneous with gameplay, so that suggests the OS has a certain amount to play with - a certain amount reserved - without encroaching on what's guaranteed to developers.

I'm fairly sure a SPU or whatever could take an input from a video-in and stick it on the HDD while the game runs Again, not that I think it'll have DVR..but if it did.

Ditto for the rest of the functionality they discussed.

It's not a matter of risking other workloads. You fence off a certain amount for the OS, and the rest is what devs have to work with and can rely on. It's nothing new, MS has done the same thing with 360.

I don't think you're being critical enough.

You can reserve PPE time, but what about cache? You can reserve an SPU, but what about feeding it? In the PS3, it's not as simple as just setting aside something or other. The same is true on the X360 because of shared L2 and other things. The only difference is that, to my limited understanding, when anything like an OS kicks in, the game usually pauses. There isn't anything DVR-like on the 360 that I'm aware of.

The effect will only grow over time as games tap more of the system and more delicate relations are made between processors. If you really want to reserve enough of the system that all these things can be running in the background with no effect on the game, you're going to minorly cripple it at running games.

 

[one]

It's not running on Windows, but on Cell hypervisor and a realtime OS which enable partitioning for critical mission and security.

I don't think PS3 has DVR capability, it will be for a home server product with Cell. PSX can record TV while you play PS2 games. But if you only want LocationFree TV via PS3, they can release a TV tuner box and stream TV via GbE/USB to PS3 and from PS3 to PSP.

 

[patsu]

Where can I find more info about Cell's hypervisor ? Can the hypervisor manage other parts of PS3 (I/O and RSX) rather than just the CPU ?

I know it exists but to be able to do what you described, essentially all the games are running in some sort of low-level virtual machine. At the same time, someone was saying Sony has to-the-metal API for RSX, which would interfere with such a hypervisor setup, no ?

 

[Inane_Dork]

It's not running on Windows, but on Cell hypervisor and a realtime OS which enable partitioning for critical mission and security.

Whatever you want to call it is fine with me. If it's running, taking up bus space and cache, it'll affect whatever else is running. In a system so dependent on cache hits, that's a potentially big thing.

 

[one]

Can the hypervisor manage other parts of PS3 (I/O and RSX) rather than just the CPU ?

Though I have no concrete info, isn't it required for DRM?

Whatever you want to call it is fine with me. If it's running, taking up bus space and cache, it'll affect whatever else is running. In a system so dependent on cache hits, that's a potentially big thing.

Does it depend so much on PPE cache? SPE can work on its own after getting an initial kick. Xbox 360 also reserves some CPU resources for system use.
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=561340&postcount=1

+ Among 3 cores in Xbox 360 CPU (codenamed "PX"), Core 0 is primary and Core 1/2 are secondary. Core 0 is fully usable by a game program. Core 1 and Core 2 are shared by a game program and the Xbox 360 system. Network stacks, services, drivers such as a USB driver run on those secondary cores. 5% computation usage of both core 1 and core 2 are reserved by the system.

 

[Inane_Dork]

Does it depend so much on PPE cache? SPE can work on its own after getting an initial kick.

If everything was implemented on 1 SPE, sure, it would have little PPE cache effect. It would still have an effect on the bus, but that would likely be more minimal.

Come to think of it, Internet communication might also be an issue when multitasking.

Xbox 360 also reserves some CPU resources for system use.

Yep, and I already referred to it. As long as the "system use" is constrained to things that happen during normal use (controller driver code), games are fine. There's no process like DVR that I'm aware of that runs on the 360. User-initiated stuff that cannot be forecasted is more the kind of thing I would expect to cause problems.

 

[Titanio]

Relevant?

CBEA defines other optional additions to the 64b Power architecture to enhance the real-time characteristics. The extensions include “replacement management tables (RMT)” for various caches in the system allowing the user, compiler, or OS to control cache management. Another extension is token management. This controls the arbitration points in the system to provide a guaranteed fraction of access (memory or bus bandwidth) to a “resource allocation group”. These facilities make it possible, for example, to have a real-time, and a non-real-time OS partition to coexist at the same time on a single chip while still providing real-time guarantees to the real-time partition. With CBEA processors envisioned to perform real-time tasks such as gaming or streaming in combination with non real-time tasks such as web browsing, this was seen as important functionality.

Real-time responsiveness to the user and the network

From the beginning, it was envisioned that the Cell processor should be designed to provide the best possible experience to the human user and the best possible response to the network. This ‘‘outward’’ focus differs from the ‘‘inward’’ focus of processor organizations that stem from the era of batch processing, when the primary concern was to keep the central processor unit busy. As all game developers know, keeping the players satisfied means providing continuously updated (real-time) modeling of a virtual environment with consistent and continuous visual and sound and other sensory feedback. Therefore, the Cell processor should provide extensive real-time support. At the same time we anticipated that most devices in which the Cell processor would be used would be connected to the (broadband) Internet. At an early stage we envisioned blends of the content (real or virtual) as presented by the Internet and content from traditional game play and entertainment. This requires concurrent support for real-time operating systems and the non-real-time operating systems used to run applications to access the Internet. Being responsive to the Internet means not only that the processor should be optimized for handling communication-oriented workloads; it also implies that the processor should be responsive to the types of workloads presented by the Internet. Because the Internet supports a wide variety of standards, such as the various standards for streaming video, any acceleration function must be programmable and flexible. With the opportunities for sharing data and computation power come the concerns of security, digital rights management, and privacy.

And a little more explanation/detail:

The PPE supports a conventional cache hierarchy with 32-KB first-level instruction and data caches and
a 512-KB second-level cache. The second-level cache and the address-translation caches use replacement
management tables to allow the software to direct entries with specific address ranges at a particular subset of the cache. This mechanism allows for locking data in the cache (when the size of the address range is equal to the size of the set) and can also be used to prevent overwriting data in the cache by directing data that is known to be used only once at a particular set. Providing these functions enables increased efficiency and increased real-time control of the processor.

The second objective (good responsiveness to the user and the network) is met as follows. By providing
each of the synergistic processors with the capability to individually and autonomously schedule and receive DMAs as well as interrupts, the Cell processor can provide a very good response to external network events. Real-time responsiveness is also enabled through the control and determinism of the memory structures. The local store provides a fixed memory that is fed by fixed latency DMAs. The cache and translation resources are controlled by resource-management tables, and bandwidth can be controlled by resource allocation on the entry points to the internal fabric.

The synergistic processors in Cell provide a highly deterministic operating environment. Since they do
not use caches, cache misses do not factor into the performance. Also, since the pipeline scheduling rules
are quite simple, it is easy to statically determine the performance of code. Third, even though the local store is shared among DMA load and write operations, load and store operations, and instruction pre-fetch, DMA operations are accumulated and can access the local store for at most only one of every eight cycles, and instruction pre-fetch typically delivers 16 cycles worth of instructions. Thus, their impact on load and stores and program execution times is limited. Also, the Cell processor provides mechanisms that manage replacement in the various caches in the Cell processor: the L2 on the Power processor and various translation caches. These mechanisms allow the programmer to keep certain pieces of data or code (and the associated translations) on the chip to guarantee real-time behavior. In addition, resource-allocation mechanisms allow for bandwidth management, so that time-critical processes can be provided with bandwidth and access guarantees.

It seems likely cache is being reserved either for the OS or the game via locking, and then these other "resource-allocation mechanisms" would guarantee bandwidth and access (for the game, I presume). RAM can be reserved, of course. They also seemed to be thinking about the same concerns as Inane regarding internet communication, responsiveness to the network etc.

 

[slider]

Have only skimmed the last page, but in relation to DVR-ing has anyone mentioned Toshiba's super-companion-chip? That'd have relevance in this scenario wouldn't it?

 

[Inane_Dork]

It seems likely cache is being reserved either for the OS or the game via locking, and then these other "resource-allocation mechanisms" would guarantee bandwidth and access (for the game, I presume). RAM can be reserved, of course. They also seemed to be thinking about the same concerns as Inane regarding internet communication, responsiveness to the network etc.

Apparently so. It's too bad that games won't be able to fully use the available power, but oh well.

I guess that answers my queries.

 

[Titanio]

Apparently so. It's too bad that games won't be able to fully use the available power, but oh well.

Just the way it is with the form of the modern console, really. I guess its down to the platform makers to ensure the functionality makes it worthwhile..although I know some will never be happy about it. But it's worth thinking that if "all" these machines did was play games, they may not be able to - strategically or otherwise - justify the investment made in technology on their behalf, and justify the amount that gets packed in for the price we pay. So that's another way to look at it..give a little to get a lot.