PS3 internals

one said:
Great find! I'd though it's a bit overkill for the PS3, but if PS3 has it it may be a subset of it.
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It would seem a bit of overkill but it may have been designed in before nVidia came on board and they would have had enough problems with bolting that on without getting Toshiba to design a new southbridge at the same time, perhaps Sony agreed to buy this (large) chip off Tosh as part of the deal when the cell visualiser thingy fell through.

If it is indeed an SCC under that heatspreader it does make the PS3 seem a bit of a FrankenConsole, three great components that were never really designed from the ground up to work as a system cobbled together with a mix of memory and buses then a complete PS2 tacked on the side!
 
scaling

Reading thru the Toshiba white paper it appears that among other things the SCC can do image processing... could this chip be intended to do the scaling for PS3? This chip has to be very expensive I cant understand for the life of me why Sony would include a chip like this and not something as simple a as a 5 dollare scaler... Unless they plan to use it to do i/p processing prior to sending info to the AV or HDMI port
 
Crossbar said:
I really cannot see the logic behind including an SCC chip as is. There is so much redundant functionality provided with regard to the needs of the PS3, and besides it only provides an ATA HDD interface, the PS3 uses a SATA HDD interface.
I do not rule out a heavily modified SCC though.
Click to expand...

Modifying something like this chip takes time?

I wonder if the reason why Sony isn´t using any of the exotic features in this chip is simply because they play to exchange it for something else? If not i hope they get it "online" and working...
 
Crossbar said:
I really cannot see the logic behind including an SCC chip as is. There is so much redundant functionality provided with regard to the needs of the PS3, and besides it only provides an ATA HDD interface, the PS3 uses a SATA HDD interface.
I do not rule out a heavily modified SCC though.
Click to expand...

And the USB, and the Gb Ethernet, ... also has a scaler
 
Even if there is an SCC in there (anyone fancy peeling the heatspreader off thiers?) would the scaler be usable, the SCC could do HDMI out but is it actually connected to the HDMI port and could it read the framebuffer from RSX fast enough (it would have to go through cell and RSX to get to the GDDR).

Is there any way the video out from RSX could be directly connected to this mystery southbridge because it doesn't look like it from the M/B pics above.

Kryton said:
And the USB, and the Gb Ethernet, ... also has a scaler
Click to expand...

The Gb ethernet on PS3 also seems to be at least based on the SCC port as some googling also found evidence the PS3 linux ethernet driver "gelic" is a copy of the one for the SCC (spider_net).


Crossbar said:
I really cannot see the logic behind including an SCC chip as is. There is so much redundant functionality provided with regard to the needs of the PS3, and besides it only provides an ATA HDD interface, the PS3 uses a SATA HDD interface.
I do not rule out a heavily modified SCC though.
Click to expand...

The fact that there is this big chip there 'and' an outboard SATA controller suggests to me that Sony did not get a redesigned southbridge for PS3 as surely they would have integrated SATA during the redesign.
 
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Shifty Geezer said:
HDMI is by a SiI chip.
Click to expand...

I thought that was an HDCP transmitter but I am not sure what difference it makes, the SCC can output a DVI style signal, if that needs to go through an HDCP/HDMI chip it doesn't really alter whether the SCC can ouput video without going back through RSX.

However If we know the Sil chip is not connected at all to the Cell South bridge then that would be a clue.

nonamer said:
http://www.hotchips.org/archives/hc17/2_Mon/HC17.S1/HC17.S1T3.pdf

At 12.71mm by 12.71mm, that's not a cheap chip.
Click to expand...

Found the following - looks like someone has measured this chip:-

PS3 VS Wii, Comparisons of Core LSI Chip Areas
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20061127/124495/
Nikkei Electronics has measured chip areas of microprocessors and graphics LSIs mounted on the main boards of the "PlayStation 3" (PS3) and "Wii." As we removed heat spreaders stuck on the upper surface of respective product packages
Click to expand...

The chip, which works as a south bridge in the PS3, measured 13 x 13 mm
Click to expand...
 
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Just two days ago I was wondering about this same thing. Wow, SCC inclusion would certainly be something. The first question of course is "why?"

RSX was put into motion in 2003, so I certainly don't think there's accidental feature overlap where it could otherwise have been hedged. It could just be that Toshiba didn't design anything further custom for the PS3 beyond what they are doing for Cell reference designs in general, and there's business/politics going on behind-the-scenes to help Toshiba out. Not to mention, perhaps as with Cell in general, part of the ecosystem drive as a whole involves a mass fabbing effort to reduce the cost of the SCC, and part of that involves putting it in the PS3.

Anyway this is definitely an interesting topic to watch develop.
 
Which chip are people talking about? The one labelled as a Sony controller chip? If it's the Toshiba SCC chip, why isn't it labelled as such? Customized varient? The design and size of this package seems to match the Toshiba SCC, and would be an additional substantial cost for PS3, explained in PS3's high price.

As for inclusion, the mind boggles! It's an IO feed. It'd be ideal to supply a dozen TV streams to PS3 for digital recording...but there's no input. Are we looking at intended PVR functionality via a USB addon? What exactly does the SCC do?! It seems a massive* bit of silicon for just redirecting signals, yet surely it doesn't handle scaling or decoding as that's what Cell's supposed to do.

* Edit : Actually for massive, I can't find any transistor counts for the SCC. Could be a big lot o' pins for what'sa pretty tiddly piece of silicon inside.
 
xbd said:
...and there's business/politics going on behind-the-scenes to help Toshiba out. Not to mention, perhaps as with Cell in general, part of the ecosystem drive as a whole involves a mass fabbing effort to reduce the cost of the SCC, and part of that involves putting it in the PS3.
Click to expand...
I think that's kinda reaching.

Toshiba : "What about us?"
Sony : "Well, what do you want in PS3?"
Toshiba : "We've got a great SCC."
Sony : "How will that help PS3?"
Toshiba : "It won't. But we want these things being massed produced so we can get costs down to sell it to other devices."
Sony : "Ah, okay then. In it goes. Has any other company got some new chips to add to our console that won't do anything useful, but will help the chip to get established...? [/open invite]"
 
Shifty Geezer said:
What exactly does the SCC do?! .
Click to expand...

The Toshiba hotchips white paper that has been linked a few times here gives a really good overview of the capabilities of the SCC http://www.hotchips.org/archives/hc17/2_Mon/HC17.S1/HC17.S1T3.pdf

edit: You also asked about transistors shifty, it's a 90nm part around 160mm2, almost the size of Xenon which is 165Million transistors, I guess the transistor density could be quite different but would it not cost a vaguely similar amount to churn out if it's a similar size.
 
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Shifty Geezer said:
I think that's kinda reaching.
Click to expand...

Well, reaching or not, the chip seems to be in there. And even though there's nothing rock-solid indicating it's the SCC shown at hotchips, at 13mmx13mm, it has to be something at least very similar. The Gigabit Ethernet driver supports this theory also. And when you look at what the SCC *is*, there are indeed - in any circumstance - some unused functions. Prominent in this list would be the memory controller intermediary for the use of DDR2 with Cell. That just simply has nothing to do with anything as far as PS3 is concerned. Although I never expect that mentioned feature to come into play, I do expect either some wacky future unlocking of potential on PS3 via the SCC, or a much smaller revision of this SB chip to come in on future PS3s. The chip presently in there, for whatever reasons it is in there, seems less than the ideal from a cost/functionality perspective. For now I have to stick with the 'Cell ecosystem' theory, although I'm sure a more focused revision of the chip is in the works.
 
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xbd said:
Prominent in this list would be the memory controller intermediary for the use of DDR2 with Cell. That just simply has nothing to do with anything as far as PS3 is concerned.
Click to expand...

My reading of the hotchips paper indicates that the DDR2 is required as some kind of local buffer for the scaling type functionality, if there isn't *any* on the PS3 motherboard it may not be able to scale anyway.
 
Yeah, reviewing the doc I do see that also.

Well, I guess a good question would be if on the existing pics of the PS3 motherboard layout, DDR memory modules are visible in close proximity to the SB chip.

EDIT: Luckily, we're in the right thread to get those questions answered. Here's the link to the motherboard layout:

http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2006/1111/ps3_32.jpg

Indeed, it seems as if the SB does have an associated outboard DDR2 memory module associated with it; and then next to that, a Samsung module that if I didn't know better I would say looks like traditional DDR.

EDIT 2: The chip in between the Samsung module and the SCC must just be something else, because the Samsung chip definitely seems to be RAM from the text indicators on the chip itself.
 
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