More Info. on The Cell

[Ironlungz]

I read this article on CNN....I thought you guyz maybe interested.......


Sony, IBM partner for digital media workstations

Tuesday, May 11, 2004 Posted: 5:38 PM EDT (2138 GMT)

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- Sony Corp. and IBM Corp. on Tuesday said they would work together to develop computer workstations for creating advanced digital content like movies and video games, running the secretive "Cell" processor that they have jointly designed.

In a press conference at the annual E3 video game industry trade show, Sony said "Cell"-based systems would be the main tool developers would use to make video games for its next generation of hardware.

Sony also said the first prototype stations using the "Cell" chip would be built in the fourth quarter of 2004. The machines themselves will be developed by IBM, with software and development tools from Sony.

Relatively little is known about "Cell," on which Toshiba Corp is also a partner, other than it is intended to use cutting-edge production techniques and to be more powerful than rival products on the market today.

Most have speculated that "Cell" would power the PlayStation 3, Sony's next game console, expected to launch in 2006. Sony's PS2 has a commanding share of the global game hardware marketplace.

Jim Kahle, a fellow in IBM's microelectronics division in Austin, Texas, and one of the company's chief architects of processor technology, told Reuters the workstations reflected the fact that the company was well along the way on its design of "Cell."

"We've done a lot of work in the design center for proof of concept," he said. "I think the original 'Cell' vision was not (for) any one product."

Kahle said it was too soon to talk about some of the production specifics of "Cell," like the manufacturing process that would be used to make the chip or how soon it will be coming off production lines in volume.

But he said the chip would address many of the problems inherent in chip-making today, such as the difficulty of producing processors with smaller and smaller features, while keeping down their power requirements and heat output.

He also said he was spending 20 percent to 30 percent of his time thinking about products to follow up on "Cell," which is built to be reconfigured easily and without extensive redesign of the hardware itself.

"We're being fairly general purpose about it," he said.

[JadeDragon]

*cough* stop giving us crumbs and give us the damn bread STI!!
The waiting is so unforgiving :cry:

[Omega Blue]

Ps3 SDK Hardware and Software in Q4 04, KICKASS!!!

my guess is they will every now and then upgrade the hardware SDK to allow more and more of the Ps3 power to be used probly 2 or 3 times a year.

[julps31]

It sounds like Sony learned from their mistakes. Good job Sony. Now we just have to wait and see what come of this.

[Omega Blue]

heres a similiar article at gamespot.com

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/05...s_6097277.html

IBM ia making the Workstation OS and Ps3 OS, im 99.9% sure it will be Linux based. Microsoft, put that in your pipe and smoke it B!TCH!

[Scott R. Mraz]

So everyone understands, these "grahics workstations" are solely intended for CG rendering and related developement, it is not intended to be used as a personal computer.

[Omega Blue]

i hope no one thought that. these are specifically being developed for Game development and Hollywood movie CGI development. i dont think these would be afforable to the common consumer.

[Ironlungz]

I'm adding another article about the cell presentation that combines some of the ideas of the front page and Omega's link on gamespot. This article is from 1up.com and it fills in on some extra details...

SCE CTO Talks PS3 At E3

May 11, 2004
By David Smith

Although the focus of Sony's E3 press conference was on near future developments, specifically the PSP handheld, Sony Computer Entertainment chief technology officer Masa Chatani concluded the conference with a series of cryptic, but intriguing comments on Sony's plans for its next game console.

Sony's alliance with Toshiba and IBM to design the much-ballyhooed Cell processor will bear its first practical fruit in the fourth quarter of this year. It's then that Sony, its Sony Computer Entertainment division, and IBM plan to debut the first prototype of a powerful workstation based on the Cell. That workstation will prefigure the eventual arrival of a Cell-based development tool for Sony's next game console.

The new workstation, Chatani explained, will use a new development environment created by a collaboration between Sony and IBM. It will share that same development environment with the game-specific development tool, incorporating rendering, modeling, visual effects, facial expressions, physics, AI behavior, testing and analysis, and many other tasks of content creation and game development into one environment. Sony will handle the applications, tools, and middleware for the new platform, while IBM will develop the operating systems and hardware.

While the workstation will precede the dedicated development tool, Chatani said it will still play a key role in the development of games, taking care of intensive tasks like physics simulation and movie rendering. It's also not limited to game applications -- Sony and IBM plan to market it for use in digital content creation for movies and other media.

From these nuts and bolts, Chatani then launched into some rather grand predictions for the future of Sony's game console efforts. Movies, games, and other entertainment, he said, will eventually share a common delivery medium, reaching the user through a network created by numerous broadband-connected Cell-powered consoles. He called this network the "Cyber World," claiming that users will one day "jack in" and "seamlessly navigate" a networked virtual world acquiring whatever entertainment they choose to look for.

Grand plans indeed, but still very far off in the future. We'll continue to follow Sony's hints of things to come, though, and update with more details when they arrive.

[redpresleigh]

Here is the link to the 1up site.
Has some pictures too!

http://www.1up.com/article2/0,2053,1590669,00.asp

[Makaveli_786]

Yeah thats good news, he did loosely say what he wanted and expected from the cell in a slideshow, these workstations are usually designed to make CGI(etc etc) but this one may be designed to work with games raises an eyebrow :?

[megadrive]

Movie studios could then use it to create assets like special effects or rendered scenes for films, then those exact same assets could be used by game developers?the goal is to make games look as good as movies."

yes probably true, but that goal won't be realized fully until at least PS5

the PS3 and PS4 will be large steps in the right direction, though.

[High Lander]

Movie studios could then use it to create assets like special effects or rendered scenes for films, then those exact same assets could be used by game developers?the goal is to make games look as good as movies."

yes probably true, but that goal won't be realized fully until at least PS5

the PS3 and PS4 will be large steps in the right direction, though.

No,

PS3 2nd gen games will look 95% like FFTSW (that is far from "movie like").
But PS4, 300 to 1000 faster than PS3, could render MANY, dozens of "movies like" scenes in real time.

PS5 will render more than 1 thousand movies in real time. may be hundreds of thousands of FFTSW in real time.

[Omega Blue]

Movie studios could then use it to create assets like special effects or rendered scenes for films, then those exact same assets could be used by game developers?the goal is to make games look as good as movies."

yes probably true, but that goal won't be realized fully until at least PS5

the PS3 and PS4 will be large steps in the right direction, though.

No,

PS3 2nd gen games will look 95% like FFTSW (that is far from "movie like").
But PS4, 300 to 1000 faster than PS3, could render MANY, dozens of "movies like" scenes in real time.

PS5 will render more than 1 thousand movies in real time. may be hundreds of thousands of FFTSW in real time.

...no...

[Domination]

Man,this thing is a beast from hell.SDKs that would do movie CGI? :shock: Gol-ly!!! It's like every time you think Sony has come to a halt,they throw something else out there.If this thing meets Sony's expectations,this could turn into a bigger leap than the Game Cube to the Xbox.

[Ironlungz]

I think that Sony could be changing the game on the industry....

I'm going to say this to put it out there....Instead of following graphic languages like DirectX or OpenGL for games. Sony maybe having game developers use some form of Hybrid Game/Movie tools. I'm thinking along the lines of something "LIKE" REYES Renderman for PS3 tools set. We could be at a cross road for innovation (SONY Imagineworks).

[Domination]

I think that Sony could be changing the game on the industry....

I'm going to say this to put it out there....Instead of following graphic languages like DirectX or OpenGL for games. Sony maybe having game developers use some form of Hybrid Game/Movie tools. I'm thinking along the lines of something "LIKE" REYES Renderman for PS3 tools set. We could be at a cross road for innovation (SONY Imagineworks).

One thing I'm not getting,though,is if this workstation will be able to transfer movie CGI over to a gaming console,how will this affect the memory or speed in the console?Wouldn't that,too,have to be up-graded every year or two in order to keep up with this workstation?

[Ironlungz]

"One thing I'm not getting,though,is if this workstation will be able to transfer movie CGI over to a gaming console,how will this affect the memory or speed in the console?Wouldn't that,too,have to be up-graded every year or two in order to keep up with this workstation?"

Maybe not complete CGI per se... but both will use a common software environment (effects, character modeling,etc..). Also, given Cells can be joined/farmed this will allow to add more power (you can also add 45nm Cells to that equation)...plus the ability that they can be easily programed (general purpose) allows for flexibility and scalability.[/quote]

[Makaveli_786]

Yesh Sony are really starting to talk about movies a lot, especially when it comes to talk about games, I think they may have something up their sleeves, Kaz at E3 talked about games being fused with movies and said stuff about movie like graphics and things like that.

[stanDarsh]

While we are on the topic, I found this article at Gamesindustry.biz:

Sony and IBM take on digital content creation with Cell workstation

Rob Fahey 10:42 13/05/2004

Serious shot across the bows of Microsoft and Intel

One of the least-reported announcements of E3 to date is also one of the most worrying for Microsoft - with Sony and IBM announcing co-development on a Cell-based workstation which is aimed at the content creation market.

The workstation, which will ship before the end of the year, will feature an architecture based on the parallel processing Cell chip, and will be designed to power digital content creation for movies, television and videogames.

Cell is the next-generation microprocessor created jointly by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, and it is expected to power a whole range of both consumer and high-end appliances in the future - including the PlayStation 3 game console.

IBM will be building the Cell workstations, with Sony providing the architecture, algorithms, middleware and data structure for digital content creation tools on the platform.

The Cell technology, which has a major focus on working in parallel across high-speed networks, is considered to be ideally suited for jobs such as special effects rendering or content creation for movies or next-generation videogames.

The news of the joint plan will come as a shot across the bows of both Intel - which has recently been enjoying dominance of this market - and Microsoft, which now faces the prospect of high end content creation being done on the same non-Windows platform that will eventually become the development tool for PlayStation 3.

"Microsoft should be really worried by this," one developer told us today. "They've been touting Xbox 2 to their partners and talking about the kind of content they want to see created on the platform - more polygons, higher resolutions, more effects - and our response has been that the tools to create this stuff for games don't really exist yet. Now Sony has effectively created those tools."

The Sony solution is certain to integrate tightly with the PlayStation 3 development system, whereas developers working on Xbox 2 will probably still be tied to Windows - making the task of putting digital content from the Cell workstations (whose proposed role reminds us of the market position occupied by Silicon Graphics workstations in the early nineties, before their performance was overtaken by x86 PC systems and PowerPC Macintosh systems) into Xbox 2 titles much more difficult than the equivalent task on PS3.

The announcement of the workstation also fills in a further piece of the jigsaw in Sony boss Nobuyuki Idei's plan for the company - adding the tools to create digital content to a business model which already includes the publishers of digital content, and the manufacture of the playback devices for that content.

[Makaveli_786]

The Cell technology, which has a major focus on working in parallel across high-speed networks, is considered to be ideally suited for jobs such as special effects rendering or content creation for movies or next-generation videogames.

Thats exactly what Kaz was saying, in essense theyr using the same graphics workstation that they use to make movies to make PS3 games.