The Future of the Playstation

[babcat]

Quite frankly, I don't think it matters much if Nintendo or Microsoft go ahead and launch their next console first. I think the PS3 will keep selling and selling. If the PS3 continues to sell well that is all that matters.

By the way, each time a new console is launched Sony just needs to offer a new model of the PS3 and a hot new game.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Quite frankly, I don't think it matters much if Nintendo or Microsoft go ahead and launch their next console first. I think the PS3 will keep selling and selling. If the PS3 continues to sell well that is all that matters.

By the way, each time a new console is launched Sony just needs to offer a new model of the PS3 and a hot new game.

So they would have been better off polishing up the ps2 instead of releasing the ps3? Because that's the situation you're suggesting, only 5 years in the future.

 

[wco81]

Happened to glance at the Gamespot game charts.

Madden 360 was number one.

But Madden PS3 was like number 3 and actually ahead of the PS2 version.

Who knows if that reflects actual sales.

But when you consider that the installed base of PS2 is like 10 times the combined installed base of the PS3 and X360, that's pretty incredible.

Maybe that's not indicative but I believe the X360 has a bunch of top 10 hits this year.

 

[babcat]

Alpha Wolf,

I am now convinced they launched the PS3 way too early.

I think they should have waited a couple of years.

By the way, I think the PS3 will have a longer "useful life" than the PS2. For example, it's one of the first multicore CPU consoles. I think that developers will still be pushing more out of the Cell years from now.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Alpha Wolf,

I am now convinced they launched the PS3 way too early.

I think they should have waited a couple of years.

By the way, I think the PS3 will have a longer "useful life" than the PS2. For example, it's one of the first multicore CPU consoles. I think that developers will still be pushing more out of the Cell years from now.

One of the first meaning... the second? 360 was the first.

I agree the ps3 with blu-ray was too early, but that doesn't mean it would have faired better if they released it later and tried to enter the market against a 30 million installed base of wii and 360.

 

[babcat]

Alpha Wolf,

I think it would have done just fine if Sony had waited until the 65nm process was mature, until they had plenty of Blu-ray drives, and they could bring the cost per unit down. Also, if they had waited they could have launched with more numerous and higher quality games (not that the current games are low quality but it's obvious a few of them were rushed).

 

[liolio]

Alpha Wolf,

I think it would have done just fine if Sony had waited until the 65nm process was mature, until they had plenty of Blu-ray drives, and they could bring the cost per unit down. Also, if they had waited they could have launched with more numerous and higher quality games (not that the current games are low quality but it's obvious a few of them were rushed).

We're almost fall 2007 what games would have really throw the ps3 appart from the 360 on the "flashy graph stuffs"?

More what if MS hadn't encountered problem with its hardware...
I guess it's likely that MS would have cut the price more than 50$.
Sony had deal with the movies industry, Sony has no monopole when it comes to shrinking process if the ps3 is cheaper so are the 360 and the wii.

And the ps3 can keep selling and selling but on an economical point of view it should better start to sell well soon.
Investissors could be angry, movy industry could be angry, games editors could be angry.

Something else will somebody stop to speak about outstanding ps2 sales without mentioning that a lot of consumers consider the games as free on this platform...

it helps a lot when the system cost 150$ and has a lot of outstanding free games.

 

[one]

The IBM roadmap shows 2PPE+32SPE DP Cell at 45nm for 1TFLOPS performance, probably it's a good chance to revise the hardware. DP may be cut if not necessary. The RAM is XDR2 or beyond though XDR2 is likely to be put in PS3 when it makes sense to reduce the number of chips. It'll be launched when 45nm becomes mature at the end of 2011, and quickly move to 32nm. Isn't it familiar?

But I don't think it's called PS4. IMO PS4 is not about clients, but massive server farms as repeatedly suggested by Kutaragi and others. What PS3 represents is a Cell PC as a generic platform with Cell instead of Intel CPU. But it's not as chaotic as the PC market as it is today, but more like Mac SKUs with a simple, linear hierarchy. There'll be PS3 with more RAM, with a different GPU with FlexIO, even a version of RSX not made by NVIDIA, and so on. Games will be like PC games, they run differently on high-end models and lower models. You can play Crysis on a 2002 PC with all options off. In short, PS3 is a plan to make a game console into Mac, or something in-between a dirt cheap toy with razor-thin profitability and a workstation with super-fat profitability. Do you remember these Kutaragi interviews? Part 1 & Part 2.

The "10-year life of PS3" I imagine is like this: Right now PS3 is independent game consoles, in future it will become a thin client for PS4 or a "visualizer" of what is happening in remote servers, without a Blu-ray drive but with a local storage drive with a minimum size as a disk cache. If you have a launch PS3 you'll see a relatively poor picture compared to PS3.1 or PS3.5, but it still works. All PS4-format contents are beyond the network.

But it's a relatively distant future with a better online infrastructure such as 1Gbps FTTH connection in most countries. Cutting the cost of the current PS3 while building competitive game softwares or online features are the current most important tasks under the Hirai regime, you won't see a higher game profile until 2010.

We're almost fall 2007 what games would have really throw the ps3 appart from the 360 on the "flashy graph stuffs"?

GT5 Prologue comes to mind. Yes it's a prologue of what to come soon

 

[joker454]

By the way, I think the PS3 will have a longer "useful life" than the PS2. For example, it's one of the first multicore CPU consoles.

One of the first meaning... the second? 360 was the first.

Poor Sega Saturn, never gets any recognition

 

[AlphaWolf]

Poor Sega Saturn, never gets any recognition

The what?

 

[Blade47167]

So they would have been better off polishing up the ps2 instead of releasing the ps3? Because that's the situation you're suggesting, only 5 years in the future.

Lawl... That time has came and gone bud.

In September of 2004, in time for the launch of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (the best-selling game during the 2004 holiday season), Sony revealed a new, smaller PS2 (see Hardware revisions). In preparation for the launch of a new, slimmer PS2 model (SCPH-70000; also known unofficially as the "PStwo").

So somewhere between 2010~11. Smaller, quieter, and cheaper on the wallet. PSthree enters the wild. Along with Grand Theft Auto 4: (Insert Some Random Location).

PStwo's sold over 50mil if its true that production on the PS2 was immediately stopped. Doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.

 

[Fafalada]

Poor Sega Saturn, never gets any recognition

Well he did say multi-core, not multi-chip. So by popular definition* first multi-core consoles were handhelds.


*Vector units aren't cores by popular definition.

 

[Color me Dan]

I don't think, personally, that Sony could have waited any longer then they did. They had to bite the bullet or cede dominance to Ms in the console market. As it stands now Ms and Nintendo are selling far more then Sony is, but if Sony had been even later they would have no support from game devs. No games, no console. Games don't get better because you push back the release date of your console, people stop making games for said console because it's not out yet and if it's not out you don't have any market to sell your games too. It's a tough business.

This is partially why we are seeing corporations like Capcom and SquareSoft, who have in the past been Sony/Nintendo exlusive, start turning their franchises into a multiplat direction; DMC4 is a good example.

It may be prohibitative for Sony to create a server based gaming device. Even though some of us are surfing on broadband connections most, i dunno 80%?, are still on dial-up or DSL. Making a game console with broadband as a minimum spec would be shooting yourself in the foot. ISPs would go crazy as well, it would put an enormous strain on capacity that i don't think they would be either willing nor thinking of supporting. Japan will be creating and testing their new internet infrastructure said to be in place

 

[_xxx_]

I wonder if their work on CUDA might be preperation for this in the longterm, adding a layer for programers to use in order to get more out of idle parts of the "gpu" in the Cell. Would be an interesting solution not only for that but also to free up SPEs, or alliviate them, when doing physics for example.

I wonder if these are the first steps towards a platform which will fight the x86 Intel-world (EDIT: talking nVidia here, unrelated to Sony).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Make sure this thread talks about what the future PlayStation tech will be, and not what Sony's past marketing and strategy should have been. That's not a topic for the Tech forum.

As for One's idea, that makes me feel all icky inside. I want consoles as consoles. The moment they go all shades-of-computer on us, they'll screw up game development. Either devs will target higher end machines and leave the bottom end chugging, or target bottom end and leave the top end wasted, or have to try and target both which gives them a headache. Cell PCs for doing work, fine. And if they play PS games, okay. But the actual console aspect has to remain a fixed platform IMO. A single target for devs to shoot at, rather than a range of hardware they have to accommodate.

 

[Titanio]

But c'mon, cell is gonna be old as hell at the time. Lets hope they'll use optic processors or something. Is that the only new processor tech underway, accept maybe quantum computers?

IBM et al continue to refine their methods. Cell today will be old as hell, but Cell in 2011-2012 will be 'new' and different from what we have today, benefitting from the years of development and process improvement.

There were a couple of announcements in recent months by IBM that seemed to be well timed for a PS4 kind of timeframe, like chip stacking for example. And STI are now researching at a lower more fundamental level than before, undoubtedly seeking to incorporate new lower-level techniques into future Cell chips.

I think nVidia as a GPU partner is a good bet. Whether it'll be a PC variant or something more custom than RSX was, I'd be hesitant to say. They should have time on their side for a more custom approach this time around, but costs may encourage them to leverage existing nVidia product more heavily also (and I think cost will be more on their mind with PS4).

BD should buy them a significant reduction of losses vs PS3, as mentioned, of course.

I think, though, one major thing I want to see them focus on for PS4 is the readiness of the software platform from day one. They need to build and extend on what they'll have from PS3 rather than throw out and start again. I'll SCREAM if we have to go through another cycle of incremental updates, waiting for download managers and friends lists And I'm sure on the developer side, they'd scream too if they're back to square one.

I'm slightly hopeful for something more radical on the interface side of things. I was kind of surprised that a new kind of eyetoy wasn't standard in PS3 (although not so much when the realities of the cost of the rest of the system came to light).

I think though, in general, there's going to be a lot of discussion at Sony over strategy for PS4, and it's hard to say for sure what the outcome of that might be from a technical perspective.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think nVidia as a GPU partner is a good bet. Whether it'll be a PC variant or something more custom than RSX was, I'd be hesitant to say. They should have time on their side for a more custom approach this time around, but costs may encourage them to leverage existing nVidia product more heavily also (and I think cost will be more on their mind with PS4).

This matter would also need regards for nVidia's road map. Do they feel conventional discrete GPUs are where we'll be at in 6 years? Or will they be trying to get CPU+GPU multipurpose combo processing going? Will nVidia regard themselves as a maker of GPUs, or a maker of SIMD-array processors for graphics, physics, and general acceleration? I'm not sure the conventional standalone GPU will exist as a product then. The lowend PC market will be covered with mobo chipsets. Anyone buying a plugin card is surely going to be expecting processing acceleration too (PhysX etc.).

 

[Titanio]

Yeah, I was going to make a similar point in my post. That whatever the 'GPU' is in the PS4, by that time, we'll probably be wondering about how the GPU can be leveraged in non-graphics processing in the same way we wonder now about how Cell can be leveraged in graphics processing. There'll be much more overlap between the two sides..like two processors you can use for anything, but one of them has a bias for graphics work. Perhaps there'll even be a software framework that will let you write code once and run it on either chip (perhaps with greater or lesser efficiency)..so you can view these two chips as one big block of processing power that you can divvy up as you see fit.

I've wondered about a merging of the CPU and GPU so the whole system is homogenous from a processing point of view, but I'm not sure if we'll be at that point or not with PS4. It's a tempting idea though. Suddenly both processors can be leveraged equally for anything. But there may be performance/efficiency costs..hard to say.

 

[Color me Dan]

I wonder if they'd use a ps3 cell in there for backwardscompatibility and also as a co-cpu for whatever a dev would like to do, sort of how the ps1 processor serves as a sound chip in a ps2. granted that's kinda far fetched by i'm sure it would be a cool thing.

I'd like to see more connectivity to the PS4 then we have tot he PS3 right now. A form of simplified OS of some kind to organize videos and home photos and making them streamable to other parts of the household. I remember a Sony showing of photos on the PS3 that looked sort of like Polaroids on a table, very nifty stuff that'd i'd wish they expand upon to make the next playstation a more general purpose machine. This would have two ups, the machine could be sold as a family entertainment system and thusly bring in more income. It could then be argued (by the gamers who live at home with mom and dad) that it serves more of a purpose and that would offset the price somewhat. More in one package so to speak.

Off course this relies on Sony making a small OS which is EASY to use, i cannot stress this point enough because hardware with such functionality should be designed for everyone and not just technophiles. My stepmom still hasn't gotten around the dvd recorder yet and we've had it for two years.

How much power do we need in the future to create graphics? this is an important factor as well. I'll assume that 1080p will be the standard by the time PS4 is introduced. Sony consoles from PS1 to PS3 have been needed to draw in higher and higher resolutions, so some of that power is... how do i put it, not all being put to use for content. With the next gen Playstation none of that power will have to be used for higher resolutions then we currently have with the PS3. So what kind of power is needed to drive a game that looks near photorealistic with techniques like raytracing and deffered rendering at that point in time?

 

[borowki]

Poor Sega Saturn, never gets any recognition

Poorer Atari Jaguar