PS3 To Sell For $399 [Archive] - ForumsHQ

[iNViSiGOD]

PS3 To Sell For $399:

So the bean counters in Japan have calculated that Sony’s PS3 will cost $494 just to make and sell for 399$ (http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/28/news_6128295.html) a full $100 more than the Xbox360. Ouch.





Given that Sony's PS3 will face stiff competition from Microsoft's Xbox 360, the chances that Sony will release its console at its production cost is slim. Under the assumption that the Xbox 360 is expected to sell at around $299, Merrill Lynch Japan predicts that Sony will sell each PS3 at the price of 44,800 yen ($410) in Japan and $399 in America. That would mean Sony would suffer a loss of more than 130 billion yen ($1.18 billion) during the first year of the PS3's release.

[zan]

Who ever buys a first run console? You can wait 6 months and itll drop about 50 bucks on average plus you usually get a game or another controller with it.

[Speed]

It totally depends on launch titles

[Platinum]

ps3 isnt going to drop in 6 months..chances are, it's not going to drop for about a year and a half or so...when ps2 came out, it cost what..300? for about 2 years...considering the amount of money they're losing per sale, I wouldn't get my hopes up about prices lowering.



I'll be buying a ps3 on release, w/ games or without, extra controllers or not. I'd pay 600 for a ps3 if that's how much it cost..



Have you seen the specs on a ps3? Just so you know..everyone on mmb could combine their computers and a ps3 would STILL BLOW IT AWAY. It's going to be an amazing machine, higher cost or not, XBOX is going down.

[Speed]

Well, if all you're looking at is specs, then yeah, PS3 is gonna be better. Gamecube have some pretty damn good games, and is half of what Xbox and PS2's specs are. I think Xbox and PS3 are going to be battling it out in terms of money and users when it comes to third party developers and games, not hardware. The Xbox 360 is looking like its gonna be a pretty nice christmas present this year though.



Next Gen consoles are gonna be so sweet. The Xbox360 is lookin at three 3.2ghz processors with 100x the computing performance of the Xbox. Plus 512 ram and HD 720p/1080i *standard*! All I can say is hells yes. Sony's gonna top that by many times, but hey, that's a long wait.



To me, it doesn't really matter, cause I'm going to end up owning all three of them anyway. Probably in the order that they are released.

[Drago]

I get game consoles based off of games they have that I want.. meh.

[Speed]

yeah, I end up liking games on all platforms, so I need to get them all. Gotta have Xbox for Halo, PS2 for Final Fantasy, Gamecube for Zelda/Mario Kart/party games.

[AdmiralAcid]

What goes on when they release updated consoles?



I was looking into modding my ps2 and there's like 8 versisons of it.. How do they differ? Is the newest ps2 out now better then the very first ps2?



on topic: Should one consider waiting for the 2nd or 3rd release of a console?

[syntax53]

I was looking into modding my ps2 and there's like 8 versisons of it.. How do they differ? Is the newest ps2 out now better then the very first ps2?they differ in amount of wires needed to solder, what types of media they can boot with or without a swap disc, and other miscellaneous features.



on topic: Should one consider waiting for the 2nd or 3rd release of a console?the first versions usually end up being the easiest to mod because it is before the mfg finds out how people are able to hack them and then make modifications. though sometimes the hardware is updated like that in the xbox. the first versions had really bad dvd-roms and eventually they got better. same with the ps2 dvd-roms.

[syntax53]

Have you seen the specs on a ps3? Just so you know..everyone on mmb could combine their computers and a ps3 would STILL BLOW IT AWAY. It's going to be an amazing machine, higher cost or not, XBOX is going down.



Next Gen consoles are gonna be so sweet. The Xbox360 is lookin at three 3.2ghz processors with 100x the computing performance of the Xbox. Plus 512 ram and HD 720p/1080i *standard*! All I can say is hells yes. Sony's gonna top that by many times, but hey, that's a long wait.

don't get so excited by the numbers and all the big hype. the games aren't going to be all that much better then they are now. There WAS an article on anandtech dissecting the real world performance of the new console CPUs. I went to find it to link to you and was shocked that it was since been taken down. However I remembered some keywords and found a copy of it, quoted below. Here is an article that is a lot less critical but also mentions the fact that developers are going to need to be willing to spend a lot of extra time writing multi-threaded code to make full use of these processors: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2453. one thing that is unanimous though is the video cards will definately be a nice upgrade.





http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2461



Microsoft's Xbox 360 & Sony's PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU

Performance



Date: June 29th, 2005

Author: Anand Lal Shimpi



"In our last article we had a fairly open-ended discussion about many of the

challenges facing both of the recently announced next-generation game

consoles. We discussed misconceptions about the Cell processor and its

ability to accelerate physics calculations, as well as touched on the GPUs

of both platforms. In the end, both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are

much closer competitors than you would think based on first impressions.



The Xbox 360's Xenon CPU features more general purpose cores than the

PlayStation 3 (3 vs. 1), however game developers will most likely only be

using one of those cores for the majority of their calculations, leveling

the playing field considerably.



The Cell processor derives much of its power from its array of 7 SPEs

(Synergistic Processing Elements), however as we discovered in our last

article, their purpose is far more specialized than we had thought.

Speaking with Epic Games' head developer, Tim Sweeney, he provided a much

more balanced view of what sorts of tasks could take advantage of the Cell's

SPE array.



The GPUs of the next-generation platforms also proved to be quite

interesting. In Part I we speculated as to the true nature of NVIDIA's RSX

in the PS3, concluding that it's quite likely little more than a higher

clocked G70 GPU. We will expand on that discussion a bit more in this

article. We also looked at Xenos, the Xbox 360's GPU and characterized it

as equivalent to a very flexible 24-pipe R420. Despite the inclusion of the

10MB of embedded DRAM, Xenos and RSX ended up being quite similar in our

expectations for performance; and that pretty much summarized all of our

findings - the two consoles, although implementing very different

architectures, ended up being so very similar.



So we've concluded that the two platforms will probably end up performing

very similarly, but there was one very important element excluded from the

first article: a comparison to present-day PC architectures. The reason a

comparison to PC architectures is important is because it provides an

evaluation point to gauge the expected performance of these next-generation

consoles. We've heard countless times that these new consoles would offer

better gaming performance than anything we've had on the PC, or anything we

would have for a matter of years. Now it's time to actually put those

claims to the test, and that's exactly what we did.



Speaking under conditions of anonymity with real world game developers who

have had first hand experience writing code for both the Xbox 360 and

PlayStation 3 hardware (and dev kits where applicable), we asked them for

nothing more than their brutal honesty. What did they think of these new

consoles? Are they really outfitted with the PC-eclipsing performance we've

been lead to believe they have? The answer is actually quite frequently

found in history; as with anything, you get what you pay for.















Learning from Generation X

The original Xbox console marked a very important step in the evolution of

gaming consoles - it was the first console that was little more than a

Windows PC.











It featured a 733MHz Pentium III processor with a 128KB L2 cache, paired up

with a modified version of NVIDIA's nForce chipset (modified to support

Intel's Pentium III bus instead of the Athlon XP it was designed for). The

nForce chipset featured an integrated GPU, codenamed the NV2A, offering

performance very similar to that of a GeForce3. The system had a 5X PC DVD

drive and an 8GB IDE hard drive, and all of the controllers interfaced to

the console using USB cables with a proprietary connector.



For the most part, game developers were quite pleased with the original

Xbox. It offered them a much more powerful CPU, GPU and overall platform

than anything had before. But as time went on, there were definitely

limitations that developers ran into with the first Xbox.



One of the biggest limitations ended up being the meager 64MB of memory that

the system shipped with. Developers had asked for 128MB and the motherboard

even had positions silk screened for an additional 64MB, but in an attempt

to control costs the final console only shipped with 64MB of memory.















The next problem is that the NV2A GPU ended up not having the fill rate and

memory bandwidth necessary to drive high resolutions, which kept the Xbox

from being used as a HD console.



Although Intel outfitted the original Xbox with a Pentium III/Celeron hybrid

in order to improve performance yet maintain its low cost, at 733MHz that

quickly became a performance bottleneck for more complex games after the

console's introduction.



The combination of GPU and CPU limitations made 30 fps a frame rate target

for many games, while simpler titles were able to run at 60 fps. Split

screen play on Halo would even stutter below 30 fps depending on what was

happening on screen, and that was just a first-generation title. More

experience with the Xbox brought creative solutions to the limitations of

the console, but clearly most game developers had a wish list of things they

would have liked to have seen in the Xbox successor. Similar complaints

were levied against the PlayStation 2, but in some cases they were more

extreme (e.g. its 4MB frame buffer).



Given that consoles are generally evolutionary, taking lessons learned in

previous generations and delivering what the game developers want in order

to create the next-generation of titles, it isn't a surprise to see that a

number of these problems are fixed in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.



One of the most important changes with the new consoles is that system

memory has been bumped from 64MB on the original Xbox to a whopping 512MB on

both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. For the Xbox, that's a factor of 8

increase, and over 12x the total memory present on the PlayStation 2.



The other important improvement with the next-generation of consoles is that

the GPUs have been improved tremendously. With 6 - 12 month product cycles,

it's no surprise that in the past 4 years GPUs have become much more

powerful. By far the biggest upgrade these new consoles will offer, from a

graphics standpoint, is the ability to support HD resolutions.



There are obviously other, less-performance oriented improvements such as

wireless controllers and more ubiquitous multi-channel sound support. And

with Sony's PlayStation 3, disc capacity goes up thanks to their embracing

the Blu-ray standard.







But then we come to the issue of the CPUs in these next-generation

consoles, and the level of improvement they offer. Both the Xbox 360 and

the PlayStation 3 offer multi-core CPUs to supposedly usher in a new era of

improved game physics and reality. Unfortunately, as we have found out, the

desire to bring multi-core CPUs to these consoles was made a reality at the

expense of performance in a very big way.











Problems with the Architecture

At the heart of both the Xenon and Cell processors is IBM's custom PowerPC

based core. We've discussed this core in our previous articles, but it is

best characterized as being quite simple. The core itself is a very narrow

2-issue in-order execution core, featuring a 64KB L1 cache (32K

instruction/32K data) and either a 1MB or 512KB L2 cache (for Xenon or Cell,

respectively). Supporting SMT, the core can execute two threads

simultaneously similar to a Hyper Threading enabled Pentium 4. The Xenon

CPU is made up of three of these cores, while Cell features just one.



Each individual core is extremely small, making the 3-core Xenon CPU in the

Xbox 360 smaller than a single core 90nm Pentium 4. While we don't have

exact die sizes, we've heard that the number is around 1/2 the size of the

90nm Prescott die.











IBM's pitch to Microsoft was based on the peak theoretical floating point

performance-per-dollar that the Xenon CPU would offer, and given Microsoft's

focus on cost savings with the Xbox 360, they took the bait.



While Microsoft and Sony have been childishly playing this flops-war,

comparing the 1 TFLOPs processing power of the Xenon CPU to the 2 TFLOPs

processing power of the Cell, the real-world performance war has already

been lost.



Right now, from what we've heard, the real-world performance of the Xenon

CPU is about twice that of the 733MHz processor in the first Xbox.

Considering that this CPU is supposed to power the Xbox 360 for the next 4 -

5 years, it's nothing short of disappointing. To put it in perspective,

floating point multiplies are apparently 1/3 as fast on Xenon as on a

Pentium 4.



The reason for the poor performance? The very narrow 2-issue in-order core

also happens to be very deeply pipelined, apparently with a branch predictor

that's not the best in the business. In the end, you get what you pay for,

and with such a small core, it's no surprise that performance isn't anywhere

near the Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 class.



The Cell processor doesn't get off the hook just because it only uses a

single one of these horribly slow cores; the SPE array ends up being fairly

useless in the majority of situations, making it little more than a waste of

die space.



We mentioned before that collision detection is able to be accelerated on

the SPEs of Cell, despite being fairly branch heavy. The lack of a branch

predictor in the SPEs apparently isn't that big of a deal, since most

collision detection branches are basically random and can't be predicted

even with the best branch predictor. So not having a branch predictor

doesn't

hurt, what does hurt however is the very small amount of local memory

available to each SPE. In order to access main memory, the SPE places a DMA

request on the bus (or the PPE can initiate the DMA request) and waits for

it to be fulfilled. From those that have had experience with the PS3

development kits, this access takes far too long to be used in many real

world scenarios. It is the small amount of local memory that each SPE has

access to that limits the SPEs from being able to work on more than a

handful of tasks. While physics acceleration is an important one, there are

many more tasks that can't be accelerated by the SPEs because of the memory

limitation.



The other point that has been made is that even if you can offload some of

the physics calculations to the SPE array, the Cell's PPE ends up being a

pretty big bottleneck thanks to its overall lackluster performance. It's

akin to having an extremely fast GPU but without a fast CPU to pair it up

with.











What About Multithreading?

We of course asked the obvious question: would game developers rather have 3

slow general purpose cores, or one of those cores paired with an array of

specialized SPEs? The response was unanimous, everyone we have spoken to

would rather take the general purpose core approach.



Citing everything from ease of programming to the limitations of the SPEs we

mentioned previously, the Xbox 360 appears to be the more developer-friendly

of the two platforms according to the cross-platform developers we've spoken

to. Despite being more developer-friendly, the Xenon CPU is still not what

developers wanted.



The most ironic bit of it all is that according to developers, if either

manufacturer had decided to use an Athlon 64 or a Pentium D in their

next-gen console, they would be significantly ahead of the competition in

terms of CPU performance.



While the developers we've spoken to agree that heavily multithreaded game

engines are the future, that future won't really take form for another 3 - 5

years. Even Microsoft admitted to us that all developers are focusing on

having, at most, one or two threads of execution for the game engine

itself - not the four or six threads that the Xbox 360 was designed for.



Even when games become more aggressive with their multithreading, targeting

2 - 4 threads, most of the work will still be done in a single thread. It

won't be until the next step in multithreaded architectures where that

single thread gets broken down even further, and by that time we'll be

talking about Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4. In the end, the more

multithreaded nature of these new console CPUs doesn't help paint much of a

brighter performance picture - multithreaded or not, game developers are not

pleased with the performance of these CPUs.



What about all those Flops?

The one statement that we heard over and over again was that Microsoft was

sold on the peak theoretical performance of the Xenon CPU. Ever since the

announcement of the Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware, people have been set on

comparing Microsoft's figure of 1 trillion floating point operations per

second to Sony's figure of 2 trillion floating point operations per second

(TFLOPs). Any AnandTech reader should know for a fact that these numbers

are meaningless, but just in case you need some reasoning for why, let's

look at the facts.



First and foremost, a floating point operation can be anything; it can be

adding two floating point numbers together, or it can be performing a dot

product on two floating point numbers, it can even be just calculating the

complement of a fp number. Anything that is executed on a FPU is fair game

to be called a floating point operation.



Secondly, both floating point power numbers refer to the whole system, CPU

and GPU. Obviously a GPU's floating point processing power doesn't mean

anything if you're trying to run general purpose code on it and vice versa.

As we've seen from the graphics market, characterizing GPU performance in

terms of generic floating point operations per second is far from the full

performance story.



Third, when a manufacturer is talking about peak floating point performance

there are a few things that they aren't taking into account. Being able to

process billions of operations per second depends on actually being able to

have that many floating point operations to work on. That means that you

have to have enough bandwidth to keep the FPUs fed, no mispredicted

branches, no cache misses and the right structure of code to make sure that

all of the FPUs can be fed at all times so they can execute at their peak

rates. We already know that's not the case as game developers have already

told us that the Xenon CPU isn't even in the same realm of performance as

the Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. Not to mention that the requirements for

hitting peak theoretical performance are always ridiculous; caches are only

so big and thus there will come a time where a request to main memory is

needed, and you can expect that request to be fulfilled in a few hundred

clock cycles, where no floating point operations will be happening at all.



So while there may be some extreme cases where the Xenon CPU can hit its

peak performance, it sure isn't happening in any real world code.



The Cell processor is no different; given that its PPE is identical to one

of the PowerPC cores in Xenon, it must derive its floating point performance

superiority from its array of SPEs. So what's the issue with 218 GFLOPs

number (2 TFLOPs for the whole system)? Well, from what we've heard, game

developers are finding that they can't use the SPEs for a lot of tasks. So

in the end, it doesn't matter what peak theoretical performance of Cell's

SPE array is, if those SPEs aren't being used all the time.







Another way to look at this comparison of flops is to look at integer add

latencies on the Pentium 4 vs. the Athlon 64. The Pentium 4 has two double

pumped ALUs, each capable of performing two add operations per clock, that's

a total of 4 add operations per clock; so we could say that a 3.8GHz Pentium

4 can perform 15.2 billion operations per second. The Athlon 64 has three

ALUs each capable of executing an add every clock; so a 2.8GHz Athlon 64

can perform 8.4 billion operations per second. By this silly console

marketing logic, the Pentium 4 would be almost twice as fast as the Athlon

64, and a multi-core Pentium 4 would be faster than a multi-core Athlon 64.

Any AnandTech reader should know that's hardly the case. No code is

composed entirely of add instructions, and even if it were, eventually the

Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 will have to go out to main memory for data, and

when they do, the Athlon 64 has a much lower latency access to memory than

the P4. In the end, despite what these horribly concocted numbers may lead

you to believe, they say absolutely nothing about performance. The exact

same situation exists with the CPUs of the next-generation consoles; don't

fall for it.











Why did Sony/MS do it?

For Sony, it doesn't take much to see that the Cell processor is eerily

similar to the Emotion Engine in the PlayStation 2, at least conceptually.

Sony clearly has an idea of what direction they would like to go in, and it

doesn't happen to be one that's aligned with much of the rest of the

industry. Sony's past successes have really come, not because of the

hardware, but because of the developers and their PSX/PS2 exclusive titles.

A single hot title can ship hundreds of millions of consoles, and by our

count, Sony has had many more of those than Microsoft had with the first

Xbox.



Sony shipped around 4 times as many PlayStation 2 consoles as Microsoft did

Xboxes, regardless of the hardware platform, a game developer won't turn

down working with the PS2 - the install base is just that attractive. So

for Sony, the Cell processor may be strange and even undesirable for game

developers, but the developers will come regardless.



The real surprise was Microsoft; with the first Xbox, Microsoft listened

very closely to the wants and desires of game developers. This time around,

despite what has been said publicly, the Xbox 360's CPU architecture wasn't

what game developers had asked for.



They wanted a multi-core CPU, but not such a significant step back in single

threaded performance. When AMD and Intel moved to multi-core designs, they

did so at the expense of a few hundred MHz in clock speed, not by taking a

step back in architecture.



We suspect that a big part of Microsoft's decision to go with the Xenon core

was because of its extremely small size. A smaller die means lower system

costs, and if Microsoft indeed launches the Xbox 360 at $299 the Xenon CPU

will be a big reason why that was made possible.



Another contributing factor may be the fact that Microsoft wanted to own the

IP of the silicon that went into the Xbox 360. We seriously doubt that

either AMD or Intel would be willing to grant them the right to make Pentium

4 or Athlon 64 CPUs, so it may have been that IBM was the only partner

willing to work with Microsoft's terms and only with this one specific core.



Regardless of the reasoning, not a single developer we've spoken to thinks

that it was the right decision.











The Saving Grace: The GPUs

Although both manufacturers royally scr**ed up their CPUs, all developers

have agreed that they are quite pleased with the GPU power of the

next-generation consoles.



First, let's talk about NVIDIA's RSX in the PlayStation 3. We discussed the

possibility of RSX offloading vertex processing onto the Cell processor, but

more and more it seems that isn't the case. It looks like the RSX will

basically be a 90nm G70 with Turbo Cache running at 550MHz, and the

performance will be quite good.



One option we didn't discuss in the last article, was that the G70 GPU may

feature a number of disabled shader pipes already to improve yield. The

move to 90nm may allow for those pipes to be enabled and thus allowing for

another scenario where the RSX offers higher performance at the same

transistor count as the present-day G70. Sony may be hesitant to reveal the

actual number of pixel and vertex pipes in the RSX because honestly they

won't know until a few months before mass production what their final yields

will be.



Despite strong performance and support for 1080p, a large number of

developers are targeting 720p for their PS3 titles and won't support 1080p.

Those that are simply porting current-generation games over will have no

problems running at 1080p, but anyone working on a truly next-generation

title won't have the fill rate necessary to render at 1080p.



Another interesting point is that despite its lack of "free 4X AA" like the

Xbox 360, in some cases it won't matter. Titles that use longer pixel

shader programs end up being bound by pixel shader performance rather than

memory bandwidth, so the performance difference between no AA and 2X/4X AA

may end up being quite small. Not all titles will push the RSX to the

limits however, and those titles will definitely see a performance drop with

AA enabled. In the end, whether the RSX's lack of embedded DRAM matters

will be entirely dependent on the game engine being developed for the

platform. Games that make more extensive use of long pixel shaders will see

less of an impact with AA enabled than those that are more texture bound.

Game developers are all over the map on this one, so it wouldn't be fair to

characterize all of the games as falling into one category or another.



ATI's Xenos GPU is also looking pretty good and most are expecting

performance to be very similar to the RSX, but real world support for this

won't be ready for another couple of months. Developers have just recently

received more final Xbox 360 hardware, and gauging performance of the actual

Xenos GPU compared to the R420 based solutions in the G5 development kits

will take some time. Since the original dev kits offered significantly

lower performance, developers will need a bit of time to figure out what

realistic limits the Xenos GPU will have.











Final Words

Just because these CPUs and GPUs are in a console doesn't mean that we

should throw away years of knowledge from the PC industry - performance

doesn't come out of thin air, and peak performance is almost never achieved.

Clever marketing however, will always try to fool the consumer.



And that's what we have here today, with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Both consoles are marketed to be much more powerful than they actually are,

and from talking to numerous game developers it seems that the real world

performance of these platforms isn't anywhere near what it was supposed to

be.



It looks like significant advancements in game physics won't happen on

consoles for another 4 or 5 years, although it may happen with PC games much

before that.



It's not all bad news however; the good news is that both GPUs are quite

possibly the most promising part of the new consoles. With the performance

that we have seen from NVIDIA's G70, we have very high expectations for the

360 and PS3. The ability to finally run at HD resolutions in all games will

bring a much needed element to console gaming.



And let's not forget all of the other improvements to these next-generation

game consoles. The CPUs, despite being relatively lackluster, will still be

faster than their predecessors and increased system memory will give

developers more breathing room. Then there are other improvements such as

wireless controllers, better online play and updated game engines that will

contribute to an overall better gaming experience.



In the end, performance could be better, the consoles aren't what they could

have been had the powers at be made some different decisions. While they

will bring better quality games to market and will be better than their

predecessors, it doesn't look like they will be the end of PC gaming any

more than the Xbox and PS2 were when they were launched. The two markets

will continue to coexist, with consoles being much easier to deal with, and

PCs offering some performance-derived advantages.



With much more powerful CPUs and, in the near future, more powerful GPUs,

the PC paired with the right developers should be able to bring about that

revolution in game physics and graphics we've been hoping for. Consoles

will help accelerate the transition to multithreaded gaming, but it looks

like it will take PC developers to bring about real change in things like

game physics, AI and other non-visual elements of gaming. "