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March 5th, 2003, 07:57 PM
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/5311288.htm
Highlights:
Besides the PlayStation 3 game console, Sony and its partners, IBM and Toshiba, hope to use the same basic chip design -- which organizes small groups of microprocessors to work together like bees in a hive -- for a range of computing devices, from tiny handheld personal digital assistants to the largest corporate servers.
Game industry insiders became aware of Sony's patent in the past few weeks, and the technology is expected to be a hot topic at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose this week. Since it can take a couple of years to write a game for a new system, developers will be pressing Sony and its rivals for technical details of their upcoming boxes, which are scheduled to debut in 2005.
With the PS 3, Sony will apparently put 72 processors on a single chip: eight PowerPC microprocessors, each of which controls eight auxiliary processors.
Using sophisticated software to manage the workload, the PowerPC processors will divide complicated problems into smaller tasks and tap as many of the auxiliary processors as necessary to tackle them.
As soon as each processor or team finishes its job, it will be immediately redeployed to do something else.
Such complex, on-the-fly coordination is a technical challenge, and not just for Sony. Game developers warn that the cell chips do so many things at once that it could be a nightmare writing programs for them -- the same complaint they originally had about the PlayStation 2, Sony's current game console.
Tim Sweeney, chief executive of Epic Games in Raleigh, N.C., said that programming games for the PS 3 will be far more complicated than for the PS 2 because the programmer will have to keep track of all the tasks being performed by dozens of processors.
``I can't imagine how you will actually program it,'' he said. ``You do all these tasks in parallel, but the results of one task may affect the results of another task.''
But Sony and its partners believe that if they can coordinate those processors at maximum efficiency, the PS 3 will be able to process a trillion math operations per second -- the equivalent of 100 Intel Pentium 4 chips and 1,000 times faster than processing power of the PS 2.
That kind of power would likely enable the PS 3 to simultaneously handle a wide range of electronic tasks in the home. For example, the kids might be able to race each other in a Grand Prix video game while Dad records an episode of ``The Simpsons.''
Sony officials said that one key feature of the cell design is that if a device doesn't have enough processing power itself to handle everything, it can reach out to unused processors across the Internet and tap them for help.
Peter Glaskowsky, editor of the Microprocessor Report, said Sony is ``being too ambitious'' with the networked aspect of the cell design because even the fastest Internet connections are usually way too slow to coordinate tasks efficiently.
The cell chips are due to begin production in 2004, and the PS 3 console is expected to be ready at the same time that Nintendo and Microsoft launch their next-generation-game consoles in 2005.
Nintendo will likely focus on making a pure game box, but Microsoft, like Sony, envisions its next game console as a universal digital box.
Highlights:
Besides the PlayStation 3 game console, Sony and its partners, IBM and Toshiba, hope to use the same basic chip design -- which organizes small groups of microprocessors to work together like bees in a hive -- for a range of computing devices, from tiny handheld personal digital assistants to the largest corporate servers.
Game industry insiders became aware of Sony's patent in the past few weeks, and the technology is expected to be a hot topic at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose this week. Since it can take a couple of years to write a game for a new system, developers will be pressing Sony and its rivals for technical details of their upcoming boxes, which are scheduled to debut in 2005.
With the PS 3, Sony will apparently put 72 processors on a single chip: eight PowerPC microprocessors, each of which controls eight auxiliary processors.
Using sophisticated software to manage the workload, the PowerPC processors will divide complicated problems into smaller tasks and tap as many of the auxiliary processors as necessary to tackle them.
As soon as each processor or team finishes its job, it will be immediately redeployed to do something else.
Such complex, on-the-fly coordination is a technical challenge, and not just for Sony. Game developers warn that the cell chips do so many things at once that it could be a nightmare writing programs for them -- the same complaint they originally had about the PlayStation 2, Sony's current game console.
Tim Sweeney, chief executive of Epic Games in Raleigh, N.C., said that programming games for the PS 3 will be far more complicated than for the PS 2 because the programmer will have to keep track of all the tasks being performed by dozens of processors.
``I can't imagine how you will actually program it,'' he said. ``You do all these tasks in parallel, but the results of one task may affect the results of another task.''
But Sony and its partners believe that if they can coordinate those processors at maximum efficiency, the PS 3 will be able to process a trillion math operations per second -- the equivalent of 100 Intel Pentium 4 chips and 1,000 times faster than processing power of the PS 2.
That kind of power would likely enable the PS 3 to simultaneously handle a wide range of electronic tasks in the home. For example, the kids might be able to race each other in a Grand Prix video game while Dad records an episode of ``The Simpsons.''
Sony officials said that one key feature of the cell design is that if a device doesn't have enough processing power itself to handle everything, it can reach out to unused processors across the Internet and tap them for help.
Peter Glaskowsky, editor of the Microprocessor Report, said Sony is ``being too ambitious'' with the networked aspect of the cell design because even the fastest Internet connections are usually way too slow to coordinate tasks efficiently.
The cell chips are due to begin production in 2004, and the PS 3 console is expected to be ready at the same time that Nintendo and Microsoft launch their next-generation-game consoles in 2005.
Nintendo will likely focus on making a pure game box, but Microsoft, like Sony, envisions its next game console as a universal digital box.