Paul said:
Hold up meaning will it be enough for a system as powerfull as PS3 and will there be problems like ps2 had with it's 4mb of vram.
Also, do you see a HDD being in ps3? And how big, im guessing something made by sony, 60GB.
And could a part of the HDD kinda be used as vram? or just for storing textures like main memory.
And I guess the whole ps3's transfering power over the internet thing was bogus right? And what sony really meant by distributed computing was really several cpu's in one.
HDD and Blu-Ray can hold up textures, you have to have your memory hierarchy ( from fastest to slowest, everything can buffer data from one level to the other )... I personally would not miss an HDD as a Re-writable Blu-Ray "lite" would fit PlayStation 3 much better than a simply fast DVD and an HDD...
As far as memory being the bottleneck... well with decent Texture Compression we will see much less crying over the VRAM space as between streaming ( something that Cell provides is bandwidth
) and Texture Compression that 54.33 will be quite enough
Of course developers could go crazy and try to stuff up HUGE 3D textures in the VRAM and try to avoid streaming... well maybe that way they won't reach the maximum potential, but they are still going to be able to produce a graphical quality that is nicely higher than several PlayStation 2 titles and the same will be true for Xbox 2 and GCN 2 if they are similar jumps from their predecessors as PlayStation 3 is being developed to be ( and I think that performance wise they will be at least comparable if not slightly better or slower, which won't matter that much... ).
As far as the "internet" thing... well it is true and untrue...
The architecture, Cell, CAN do that... if you read the patent you will read that software Cells ( also known as apulets ) can migrate over to another chip in the same device or onto another device connected to that network or even across different networks... Software Cells have in their headers a Source ID, Destination ID and Previous Cell ID IIRC... Each of these IDs has an IP address ( there is space for it )...
Will they do it in PlayStation 3 ? Only internally maybe ( that is how Broadband Engine and Visualizer might also work together ) and the first external steps would not be sharing power for real-time 3D rendering, but the ease of migration of software Cells, the uniform APU ISA and the fact that accordingly Cell can scale from PDAs to consoles and big servers will make it easier and faster for all these Cell based devices to inter-operate, communicate and share data...
When the technologycal barrier that prevents to do real-time 3D rendering with the help of big fat Sony servers over the internet ( latency and network bandwidth constraints... also reliability of connections would be an issue ) this could move forward...
Sharing Cycles with other users' PlayStation 3 is the MOST farfetched thing, but the Cell architecture is not the one stoopping us here... it is our common sense and the fact there are too many issues with the concept ( again networks are too slow and unpredictable and balancing the load across Cell devices acfross a nation would be a painful and messy undertaking... )
