Xbox 360 jah nasceu morto - PS3 vai dominar o mundo !!!

[Mantrhax]

Holy Chip!

IBM's radical Cell processor, to debut in Sony's PlayStation 3, could reshape entertainment and spark the next high-tech boom.
Later this year millions of homes will get a new supercomputer for the living room. Or maybe the playroom. Sony's long-awaited PlayStation 3 game console, a slender yet muscular machine the size of a DVD player, performs a mind-boggling 2 trillion calculations per second. This kind of power, once reserved for seismic exploration and nuclear-weapons design, will let programmers create videogames that look as realistic as film.

Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM (with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five years. The Cell chip, based on a design inspired by supercomputers, runs at least ten times as fast as Intel's most powerful Pentium. More important, Cell boasts a staggering fiftyfold advantage in handling graphics-intensive applications that will define the next generation of visual entertainment--blindingly fast and seductively immersive games, virtual-reality romps, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive TV shows with multiple endings and a panoply of new services yet to be dreamed up.

IBM reckons Cell, potent and versatile, can do a lot more than just play games. It sees a role for it in mobile phones, handheld video players, high-definition televisions, car design and more. Scientists at Stanford University are building a Cell-based supercomputer. Toshiba plans to use the superchip in TV sets, which one day could let fans watch a football game from multiple camera angles they control. Raytheon is set to use Cell in missile systems, artillery shells and radar. Other companies envision new high-definition medical imaging. "Cell is the next step in the evolution of the microprocessor. It's a peek into the future," says Craig Lund, chief technology officer at Mercury Computer Systems, which makes medical and military systems and is taking orders for Cell servers.

IBM is already at work on beefier versions of Cell, and it has launched an allout campaign to woo a new generation of code-crunchers and game boys to write software for its futuristic chip. In an extraordinary move IBM disclosed hundreds of Cell's design secrets on the Internet, releasing a developer's guide that 10,000 programmers have since downloaded. IBM, with annual sales of $94 billion, says Cell could power hundreds of new apps, create a new video-processing industry and fuel a multibillion-dollar buildout of tech hardware over ten years.

"We think this is going to spawn the next generation of growth in the industry," says James Kahle, 45, the renowned chip designer and IBM Fellow who oversaw the creation of Cell. "This chip will give you performance that is not achievable with any other architecture." Adds H. Peter Hofstee, an IBM scientist and the chief architect of a key part of the Cell chip: "We're talking about everything from making TVs to shooting things up into space to building huge supercomputers." He and Kahle spend much of their time on the road, running mind-blowing demos and proselytizing prospective licensees and geek groupies.

But IBM will have to clear some high hurdles to deliver on Cell's prodigious promise. Myriad competitors, including hotshot Silicon Valley startups ClearSpeed and Stream Processors, are in pursuit of next-gen chips. High tech is littered with the remains of chips that boasted remarkable abilities in the lab but failed in the marketplace, starved by reluctant programmers and recalcitrant customers and strangled by their own makers' miscues. A quarter of a century ago Gene Amdahl, the famed architect of the IBM 360 computer family, had an ambitious scheme to pack supercomputer power onto a chip but was too far ahead of his time, and his Trilogy Ltd. went down in flames. In the early 1980s the chip in the Amiga home computer far outraced those in the Intel line, but Intel conquered the market anyway. In the early 1990s Digital Equipment Corp. made the first 64-bit processor. It was an engineering tour de force and a commercial flop.

If anything stops Cell's commercial success, it is likely to be the chip's very power. It is, to put it politely, a challenging platform for software creators. "The programming model is a nightmare," says Marc Tremblay of Sun, chief architect of a rival chip called Niagara, which uses a more traditional approach. He argues Cell's balky design will snag widespread adoption beyond gaming.

Even the hard-sell salesmen at IBM are quick to say Cell poses no threat to Intel, the world's leading chipmaker. Intel's processors do a great job on the basic business applications for desktops, laptops and servers. In this mature and mundane market Cell, specially geared to spin out intricate images at very high speeds, offers no real advantage. But the Intel architecture, 25 years old and constrained by having to be compatible with predecessor chips, is ill suited to next-gen imaging. Thus the world must move up to Cell, IBM argues. "We are going into a new era," Kahle declares. "The world is changing."

An IBM demo shows the contrast. A terrain rendering program lets you fly over Mount Rainier at 1,300mph. Cell crunches through millions of lines of topographical and photographic data per second to paint topographically accurate, photo-quality pictures at a movie-quality 30 frames per second. On a similar program a Pentium takes more than two minutes to sketch a single frame.

CELL'S GENESIS FIVE YEARS AGO BEGAN WITH AN AUDAcious challenge. Sony's new PlayStation 2 had just debuted, and Sony videogame chief Ken Kutaragi was already looking ahead to the next version. He told IBM he wanted a thousandfold increase in power. IBMers took up the dare, one so bold that it challenged them to think beyond current chip designs. "We knew we could never make the existing stuff go a thousand times faster," says Hofstee.

[Mantrhax]

In early 2000 Sony, Toshiba and IBM set up the STI Design Center, housing it at an IBM site in Austin, Tex. James Kahle was put in charge. Armed with only a bachelor's degree from Rice University, Kahle, born in Venezuela and raised in New York, had joined IBM out of school in 1983 to write software for designing next-generation chips. His low-key, nice-guy style masks his intensity as a chip designer--his work shows up in the Apple G3, G4 and G5 computers, the Nintendo GameCube and IBM's biggest Unix servers; he calls some chips "my grandchildren."

The project employed 450 engineers, mostly from IBM. They worked a lot, socialized a little (group dinners, a few ski trips) and struggled with the barriers of technology and physics--and of language and culture. Weekly English classes were held for Japanese staffers. In brainstorming sessions some Sony and Toshiba engineers had a penchant for diplomacy and mulling every option; they found it jarring when their IBM counterparts relied on instinct and blunt, bare-knuckled debate.

Cell's creators needed to strike a balance between raw power and the versatility to do more than just play games. Special graphics chips are superspeedy, but for only one task. General-purpose chips like those made by Intel devote a lot of muscle to the ability to handle a wide variety of jobs, but they aren't superfast at any one of them. For two decades Intel boosted performance by cramming more transistors onto a chip, but now chips draw so much power and generate so much heat that they can't be cranked up much more. Intel and others boost performance by lashing together two or more thinking elements on a single chip. Intel makes dual-core chips. Sun's Niagara boasts eight cores. For Microsoft's Xbox 360, IBM linked three Power cores. But even these multicore chips will not be powerful enough to drive the next wave, Kahle argues. Cell needed an entirely new design.

Cell uses a single, central processing core that routes work to eight tiny (but powerful) offspring called synergistic processing engines, or SPEs. A year into development the engineers had a design ready but then felt compelled to revise it because it would be too difficult for developers outside the game business. "Game developers don't mind working with a difficult chip, but we wanted to reach a wider audience," says Michael Day, an IBM software engineer.

Months later they devised a new approach that drives Cell today. But more hurdles arose. Engineers grappled with a highly complex memory-management system that controls how bits of data are fed in and out of the SPEs. For 16 weeks Kahle's staff would meet every morning at 9 a.m. to hash out the problem. "We came up with one design after another and kept throwing them out and coming up with new designs. We sat there for three or four hours a day. Sometimes we never got out," Hofstee says.

By April 2004 the first working chip came off the line at IBM's silicon factory in East Fishkill, N.Y. The new Cell didn't deliver the 1,000X gain that Sony wanted--but it did deliver 50X. Cell cranks out 200 billion floating-point operations per second (200 gigaflops). That is akin to a full-fledged supercomputer in the late 1990s. Add an Nvidia-designed graphics chip and PlayStation 3 runs 2 trillion instructions per second.

By early last year Sony was sending out Cell prototypes and software tools to get developers started on writing new games for PlayStation 3. "We're seeing stuff that goes dramatically beyond what we can do with the current generation [of games]," says Andrew Goldman, chief executive of Pandemic Studios, a Los Angeles outfit that wrote a series of popular Star Wars games for PlayStation 2. "And what you will see over time is going to be even more amazing." He says it will take years to fully exploit Cell's capabilities.

Last year IBM began its own evangelizing. Instead of revealing design details to only a small number of potential partners sworn to secrecy, IBM trumpeted Cell's secrets on the Internet, releasing 700 pages of documents describing the new architecture and a 1,100-page development kit, free for Internet download. "We've opened up the architecture and provided all the details," Kahle says. "We want to see this architecture proliferate in the marketplace."

The wooing is necessary, for Cell's "asymmetric" design (its eight co-processors have a different architecture than the main core), though key to the chip's superior performance, is also what makes writing software for it so difficult. In the mainstream chip world designers use an array of tool kits and high-level programming languages (such as C++) to easily convert instructions into a form the chip can comprehend. Such tools exist for Cell, but the chip's design is so complex and so utterly different from anything before it that code-crunchers do some of the work "down on the metal," cranking out basic assembly code, which can take five times as long.

The good news: Some designers say creating games for Cell is far less complicated than writing for PlayStation 2. "Anyone who worked on the PlayStation 2 is jumping for joy," says Jeremy Gordon, chief executive of Secret Level, a gamemaker in San Francisco that is remaking a classic 1980s Sega videogame for the new Sony box.

[Mantrhax]

Selling Cell, Hofstee last year gave eight speeches at technical conferences. He and Kahle have visited more than 50 companies, enduring abundant skepticism from jaded industry veterans--until they ran their speedy Cell demos. "It's just amazing to go meet with people who have been in the industry for 25 years and just see their jaws drop," Kahle says. When a famous chip designer, a veteran of Motorola and Apple, visited Austin for a demo in 2004, Kahle showed him images from the Mount Rainier flyover, eliciting stunned silence. "He just got really quiet," as he realized "what this is going to do to the industry," Kahle says.

Toshiba demos a Cell-based "Magic Mirror" that turns an LCD screen into a virtual mirror by combining feeds from several cameras. Look left, look right and your "reflection" mimics you on screen, thanks to that tiny Cell chip zipping away. In the next generation of TV sets Toshiba hopes to lay the foundation for interactive viewing. One day you might watch a football game from the quarterback's perspective and shift to a seat up high on the 50-yard line, then zoom up to watch from the blimp overhead, backflips that videogame players take in stride.

Masakazu Suzuoki, Sony's lead designer on Cell, says Sony aims to use this power to create movies that are interactive and changeable, with multiple story lines, so people will watch the same flick more than once. Another idea Sony is kicking around: placing ads in the background of movies and TV shows and customizing them to suit the viewer, with Cell processors keeping track of who sees what.

Breakthrough chips easily inspire such big ideas, but Cell enjoys a running start that previous chips didn't have. It is likely to end up in millions upon millions of homes around the world as the PlayStation 3 rolls out. Once these Cells throb away in game consoles, TV sets and set-top boxes, they can be fed digital fare by new networks of Cell-based servers. "As the clients become very powerful, then the servers will have to become very powerful, too," Kahle says.

The PlayStation hook inspires confidence at Raytheon, the Waltham, Mass. defense contractor, which has studied Cell for 15 months and plans to use it in scores of next-generation systems. "Sonar, infrared sensors--there are hundreds of products that Raytheon designs that could use this type of technology," says Peter Pao, chief technology officer. "Current chips are going to run out of steam. We always look to the future."

At Mercury Computer Systems in Chelmsford, Mass. engineers are working on a Cell system called Turismo, which is due later this year and will pack up to 128 Cell chips into a 6-foot-high rack, producing up to 25 trillion calculations per second. Mercury, which sells modules for medical gear made by General Electric, Philips and Siemens, says Turismo could make a CT scanner so fast that it will be able to paint a 3-D image in four seconds versus five minutes on an Intel Pentium. Mercury is even pushing Cell to firms that create computer-generated special effects for movies. "This chip is opening doors for us," says Joel Radford, a Mercury vice president.

Back in Austin Kahle talks about "immersive interaction," 3-D virtual worlds modeled with such detail that you can see, from your screen, exactly what it looks like when you're standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street in Manhattan. "This is going to open a whole new realm of how people interact with computers and each other, where we'll mix reality with virtual reality," he says. For his entire career Kahle has been driven to create a chip that could change the world; now, he says, it has arrived. "This project is the culmination of that desire."

[Mantrhax]

AHH faltou a fonte :

Forbes Magazine

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/

[-=HeLL_KiNG=-]

morto eu não digo, perder a batalha é provavel

caras ligados a estudios de grandes medalhoes ja disseram q a primeira leva d games do PS3, terá qualidade semelhante com a primeira do 360 e os jogos p/tirarem mais proveito das maquinas irao demorar, afinal mais qualidade= maior custo, equipe e retorno ninguém garante, fora o fato q o custo pede q grandes jogos, tipo Bio Hazard 5 sejam multi-plataforma

vamo v, mais é dificil a M$ superar a Sony, mas tbm vamo ve qual será a proposta online da Sony pq nesse aspecto a M$ dominou

[Di Doido]

eu axo..
q no japao o ps3 vai humilha o x360 ( q nem foi ps2 e xbox )
nos eua o ps3 vai vende mais.. mais coisa de 10% a mais..

e nos paises de 3 mundo ( nois ) depende se tiver pirataria... se o ps3 nao tiver pirataria ESQUECE... no brasil vai vender minusculas unidades...

[F0rbIz0n]

eu axo..
q no japao o ps3 vai humilha o x360 ( q nem foi ps2 e xbox )
nos eua o ps3 vai vende mais.. mais coisa de 10% a mais..

e nos paises de 3 mundo ( nois ) depende se tiver pirataria... se o ps3 nao tiver pirataria ESQUECE... no brasil vai vender minusculas unidades...

Aqui 90% dos "gamers" de console nunca ouviram falar em xbox, só em "play 1" e "play 2". Isso é fato...

[Snap]

vcs esqueceram o revolution???... vcs falam só d 360 e PS3....

[-=HeLL_KiNG=-]

vcs esqueceram o revolution???... vcs falam só d 360 e PS3....

pois é, mas isso é por causa da propria Nintendo msm

ficam fazendo misteriozinho e frescurinhas, ninguém tem informacoes concretas sobre o aparelho p/comentar algo, só sabemos q terá o hardware mais fraco dentre os 3 e o controle mais bizarro de todos os tempos eheheh


em todo caso, o Revo. será o grande "?" dessa geracao, ninguém sabe do q ele será capaz

[Incendiário]

A unica coisa que a gente sabe (ainda mais ou menos pq disseram que pode muda ) eh o controle (que parece leglzinho...), dizem que nem o nome eh Oficial (mas eu odeio esse negocio de muda de nome tipo o pop3 kindred blades )

Mas o ps3 to com medo do preço msm...Que ele vai ser muito loko eh verdade.... mas soh pra quem vai joga..
E realmente hj em dia poucas pessoas conhecem o xbox1

E eu to com medo da Dominaçao do mundo mesmo eh da IBM! SE nao me engano eh ela que faz o chipset dos tres principais consoles (claro, nao se esqueçam do phantom AUhUAHuAHuAHuAH)

[Darkcity]

agora traduz ae mantra

[Onichi]

Aqui 90% dos "gamers" de console nunca ouviram falar em xbox, só em "play 1" e "play 2". Isso é fato...

AEWLZ MANO OJE VOU NA LOCADORA LÁ JOGAR UM PREI DOIS HAHAHAE

Não conheço nenhum individuo que saiba o que é um XBox, porque ao menos aqui não tem em lugar algum. Até nos camelos é dificil achar algo de X

Mas com o PS3 sendo muito mais caro e o X360 tendo mais facilidade pra piratear, ele vai se popularizar rapidinho, não há duvida.
Embora eu ainda ache que o PS2 vai dominar por aqui até meados de 2008 =p

[DR X]

agora traduz ae mantra

TRADUZ!!!!!!!

[bugal]

Morto nada... Quem vai ter grana pra bancar PS3? No japão vai vender, porque lá eles curtem gastar os tufos de dinheiro, nos estados unidos não boto fé.. o xbox teve uma aceitação bacaninha já, o 360 já tá espalhando, qd lançar o ps3, que ele chegar nos eua com -aquele- preço, não boto fé que seja um lançamento maior que o do 360. Mesmo sendo o do 360 a josta que foi
Aqui no Brasil, comprar um play2 ou xbox já é caro calcula o play3... Depois que a Sony falou que o ps3 seria pra poucos e bonados, larguei mão geral, sonho de consumo==360
A nintendo que tá dando uma de come quieto neh...

[NeoRSC]

concordo com o q o bugal disse... fora q msm q consigam piratear games no PS3 eles continuarão a ser caros, serão games com 15-20gb pra se pegar da net, a midia será cara pakas ($50,00 em media) fora q gravador de BlueRay quem tiver grana pra comprar um pode comprar os games originais auehauehauhe mas claro q com o passar do tempo, muito tempo hehehe os preços podem cair e ai sim compensará comprar PS3... pq pagar R$2500,00 num console e mais 250 conto em cada game original eh foda

[bugal]

fora que quando o ps3 estiver barato, já vai rolar um xbox1080
Hoje, o primeiro playstation tá baratinho, mas qq pc sem vergonha emula ele. O ps2 agora que tá ficando de boa pra comprar

[Mantrhax]

aheuaheuauh Caraca, nem so tao fan do Psx, mas porra, esse Chip Cell é o cão,,, nao vejo a hora de montar uma máquina com esses chips..vsf

por baixo, sem explorar todas as capacidades do Chip, ele eh 10x mais rapido que o mais rapido dos intels, deve ser algo como 9x mais rapido que o mais rapido dos Amds.... imagina isso ...... a um preço razoável........... meu sonho de consumo.....ainda mais que ele trabalha em network pra aumentar o poder de processamento..nussa... vo ter um superComputer em casa......

[black ninja]

O meu sonho era ter um play 2...a gora eh o 3 !!!hehehe...vixi..jah vo me preparando psicologicamente pra vender um rim meu pq certeza q esse play 3 vai fude cum tudu q eh grana q eu tiveh...Vo fica q nem drogado, vo comecar a vender som, tv, sofa , microondas pra sustentah o vicio.!!!huauahuhauaHuaHa to de brincadera...mas tp Concordo com o mastered. qualque um conhece o Preisteichiom dois, e o mais foda eh q no camelo da vida , mesmo o Xbox sendo mais caro os kara incentiva as mulekada a levar o playstation 2, eh soh eles falarem "metal gear3" e "gran turismo 4" que as mulekada num queh nem sabe oque eh xbox...

[Mantrhax]

[Bolovo]

Meu deus, mudem esse joy tosco do PS3, ou coloquem o do PS2 de volta ahhuauhauhuaehuiAEUIAE