PS3 was so far ahead of its time it's just crazy when you think about it The fact that this thing had support for multiple memory solutions including CF, SD and Memory Duo Pro. The fact that they crammed the actual PS2 hardware in this thing. The fact that it had out of the box support for Linux.
>support for LoonixAny other neat and useless features?
>>108357796The PS3 felt like alien space technology. The price tag filtered a lot of people and it was the last era where consoles felt unique. Now they’re just very efficient PCs.
>>108357796>The fact that this thing had support for multiple memory solutions including CF, SD and Memory Duo Pro.That's fucking nothing, just storage.>The fact that it had out of the box support for Linux.They removed that, all it took was letting people use some storage and direct access to the hardware. Even the PS2 had a linux distro.The PS3 was an underpowered, haphazardly constructed abomination.
whatever chance consoles had of a revival was killed when vulkan became good.
>>108357796>PS3 was so far ahead of its time it's just crazy when you think about itNot really when you realize that the vision was essentially build a family PC with a UI for gaming was the focus. It certainly was looking to the future but really should have focused on being a game console first and foremost
>>108357922Care to elaborate on that?
>>108357796sex with ps3
>>108357796>>108357941It's a lot less impressive when you notice the original xbox could have easily been an PC since it had a pin compatible desktop x86 cpu and nvidia gpu.
Am I wrong and a turbo brainlet in assuming that the 1 core+ 7/8 vector cores (SPEs or whatever the fuck they were called) was an early attempt at something like CUDA where you would try to have the CPU do it all but farm of the really intense fp number crunching to the vector cores?
>>108357796The model pictured did not have PS2 hardware.
>>108359281it was basically trying to do multithreading at a time when multithreading was still in its infancy. if you can get everything working in parallel then it provides massive speed ups. but most of the time devs couldn't get this to work so the pipeline stalls or gets underutilized.
>>108357796And guess what? They ripped all that shit out of it only a year after it came out because they were losing money on every model, that was just to entice early sales. Only one model had the PS2 disc support by the way and it was the rarest model of them all.
>>108359281yes, Sony's retarded take was for the PS3 to have dual Cell's and leverage the whole 3d processing to them instead of an actual GPU. But devs protested because that's essentially software rendering which will be a pain to develop for, thus Sony went to get the first nvidia gpu they could.If you come to think about it, a modern GPU is just a parallel vector processor with bundled libraries for 3d processing and rendering
Dont forget it could also play super audio cds
>>108359281Not exactly. CUDA cores are really dumbed down and can do very simple operations really fast on a lot of data in a large shared memory. SPEs are more like fully featured processors albeit heavily optimized for SIMD operations on wide registers (like Intel AVX) and they each have 256KB of local memory that is the only memory they can access. In both cases the CPU has to manage moving the data to and from the large shared memory or the many local memories used by the SPEs. An SPE core is more powerful than a CUDA core but there are way more CUDA cores.
>>108357796>The fact that this thing had support for multiple memory solutions including CF, SD and Memory Duo Pro.Not very novel. You could buy USB dongles with support for all those at the time and that was likely how they implemented it.
>>108359650>it was basically trying to do multithreading at a time when multithreading was still in its infancyPS2 was ahead of it in that regard.
meanwhile x360 with whopping 3 full cores
>>108359715>In both cases the CPU has to manage moving the data to and from the large shared memory or the many local memories used by the SPEsThe SPEs can request data by DMA themselves, they don't have to be completely shepherded by the PPE.But you have to write that into the program that will be running on the SPE.
>>108359715I see. So the SPEs are this sort of weird middle ground between being a CPU and GPU core but being ever more CPU like because latency would matter here more than throughput?
>>108359825Throughput actually matters more. The Cell had a weird ring structure for transferring data between SPEs so if you wanted to maximize performance you had to keep the data flowing between SPEs.
>>108359715>>108359816>>108359825>>108359873One other interesting feature of the SPEs was they had SMT which is hardware-based multi-threading (like Intel hyper-threading), so each SPE was running two threads in parallel. CUDA core obviously don’t have that.
>>108359887Not so much the SPEs.They had two pipelines so could issue up to two instructions per cycle, but the two pilelines had different instructions available to them so you'd have to pair up a load instruction with an arithmetic instruction, for example.If you didn't have an instruction for a pipeline that cycle you'd just nop it.
>>108357815your mouth
>>108357854>Now they’re just very cost-efficient PCs.ftfy
>>108357796>The fact that this thing had support for multiple memory solutions including CF, SD and Memory Duo ProOnly the early 60GB models and the very first 80GB one. Then all the card readers were removed along with two of the USB ports. The launch version of the PS3 was fascinating in terms of just how stupidly overbuilt it was, which even Sony quickly realized and started slashing away features to cut costs. Sadly, they're also extremely unreliable and cook themselves to death over time through normal usage.
The PowerPC arch of the Cell was superior and I'm actually sad we didn't move away from GPUs towards more and more SPEs as an industry. Gaming would have been way more physics based by now.
>>108357796PS2 was so far ahead of its time it's just crazy when you think about it The fact that this thing had support for multiple memory solutions including USB, HDD, and Memory Card. The fact that they crammed the actual PS1 hardware in this thing. The fact that it had out of the box support for Linux.
>>108359687the main issue is that they (IBM) struggled hard to make the cell chips, the design had to be scaled back and even then the yields were so low that ps3's ship with an SPE disabledtwo cells as they were originally envisioned would have been sickoh yea another reason was that while the cell design/production dragged on, pc gpus got gud real quick, and so the advantage of cell diminished as well to the point it just made more sense to slap a pc gpu in instead
>>108359281pretty much. then amd came up with the unified shader architecture very soon after. nvidia had to play catch up. this is how you know the whole spiel of nvidia predicting the AI boom is total bullshit
>>108360808you and him are both correct
>>108358319consoles only ever had an edge based on how developers could access hardware very closely without the OS getting in the wayvulkan was the solution to that, gives PC developers almost direct access to hardware in a similar way to what console devs were used to
>>108360885that's the point
>>108357796>PS3 was so far ahead of its timeTo be honest, consumer electronics (especially Japanese stuff) was so maximalist back then. That level of connectivity was just kinda expected to be honest. Still, pretty impressive that they'd tack all that on when the original PS2 only had USB and hard drive expansion.>tfw Sony abandoned XMB>turn on my slick black triple just to nostalgiatrip every once in a while>every time I turn it on, I feel like I'm risking a YLOD>so expensive to Frankenstein itIt hurts so much bros...
>>108361004Just put it in the oven to slowly bring up the temperature before powering it on. Should help keep the balls from cracking.
>>108361004>the original PS2 only had USB and hard drive expansion.the hdd expansion slot was actually pcmcia, like what laptops used for expansion. the early japanese models actually had a more typical pcmcia slot, though even in the later models it's the same thing just with a different connector.don't forget the expansion slot was also used to add a modem and/or ethernet interfaceyou also forgot about the i-link/firewire port
>>108357796No it is not. You can't even install games on the drive without custom firmware. The excessive memory solutions is just poor technical marketing. The SD card slot is useful if you want a smaller alternative to a USB stick but everything else you did not need especially the Linux support. You can't even run modern Linux distros on it because of its obsolete hardware. The PS2 support was cool but instead they should have built the PS3 on top of the PS2 like the Xbox Series S/X did with the Xbox One. If they had done that we would have had native PS2 support on all PS3 models without emulation or recompilation. This is coming from a man who grew up with the PS3.
>>108361279>You can't even run modern Linux distros on it because of its obsolete hardware.That's just an issue of people maintaining the code, though.
>>108361279Essentially the PS2 was built on top of the PS1 (MIPS with similar graphics system underneath) but they still just included the PS1 CPU in the PS2 to handle the backwards compatibility (and IO for the PS2 parts).It's not exactly a bad solution to just put the GS+EE in the PS3 to run the backwards compatibility, the only problem is that they took it out in later revisions.
>>108357796I'd agree if we had that stuff nowBut nobody uses it If anything it was a relic of the old ways, how things used to be done when you shoved in as much tech as possible If PS3 was ahead of its time it would have had to be-SSD -online only-no disc drive-downloadable games-no or limited local multiplayer-no security on PSN, well they got that right It was very very ill thought out
>>108360878Uhh, Anon, AMD/ATI had unified shaders first.
>>108362568not him but read his post and the post he responded to a bit more carefully
>>108357815Useless? It was one of the only ways to rip blu ray. It also enabled folding@home which won a Nobel Prize. Guess I shouldn't expect /g/tards to know anything about actual computing, thougheverbeitasitmay
>>108361407the ps2 was somewhere in between the ps1 and ps3. no shit amirite? but really, the ps2 was more an early version of what the ps3 was originally meant to be, the ps2 also had a unique "cpu" which was a combination general purpose cpu core (a mips core) coupled with in it's case 2 vector co-processors, next to a simple-but-fast fixed-function graphics processorbasically, it's graphics effects capabilities were software-defined, pretty forward thinking for the time (remember it came out early 2000, so it was practically 1999 hardware), if not for that i bet the ps2 would have gone the way of the dreamcast, just another not-quite-6th gen console. i'm sure some proponents of the xbox/gamecube might argue that it was the significantly weaker console, but at that point in time being a couple years apart made all the difference, just look at the dreamcast, it's hardly any older that the ps2, but it was dead before the 6th gen had even really begun, not because it was bad, it was absolutely the most powerful console when it came out, but it had no future-proofing, it didn't do anything special that kept it in the game
>>108357796The PS3 was a disastrous mess.
>>108357796xbox 360 was better
>>108359687I don't think that is a correct. My understanding is the plan was to do something similar to the PS2. That being there would be a GPU, but it would be rasterization only. But apparently they could not get the GPU to work. So they briefly considered trying to use a second cell for rasterization.
>>108361279>they should have built the PS3 on top of the PS2It'd be impossible. I read a lot of PS2 docs and I can say that the architecture was too esoteric and outdated (even then, e.g. Xbox original had pixel shaders around that time) to evolve into something that could compete with 7th gen consoles. It is essentially a mips CPU with two vector cores and a fixed pipeline rasterizer (similar to that of early gpus). Plus PS2 had a fuckton of coprocessors like iop and apu, you'd have to account for them all in your new chip in order to keep compatibility.
The CELL was so complex and powerful even the most skilled developers could only manage to use 10% of its power. It's essentially a "solved" computer chip. Who knows what the world will be like when we finally unlock its full potential.
>>108363084It's a meme, cell was very cost effective for highly parallel workloads because GPGPU wasn't around yet but it wasn't some kind of perfect design or something
>>108359770some devs couldn't extract the power out of ps2 either. sonic heroes and shadow the hedgehog and crash bandicoot were the worst on ps2 but better on gamecube & xbox
>>108359650ThisIt was an innovative and also clearly poorly understood design with many pipeline limitations that devs struggled to optimize for which lead to the SPEs frequently being underutilized. The actual cpu core wasn't great either. The need for in-order execution and bad branch prediction outweighed the benefits of the high clocks and gave it poor power efficiency. The entire industry gave up on the architecture and it cemented the dominance of x86 for the next 20 years.
phew lad, you've just had this folder sitting there nearly 20 years ready to go, huh?
>>108364265nta, but it's a nice trip down memory lane.
PS3 MLAA is cool. Last of Us uses it to full effect.
>>108364307i will say it's crazy to think the ps3 turns 20 this year
>>108363839Looking back the wii was the best of the three (PC obviously trumps them but that's largely because of emulation and the absurd backlog)
>>108363061I kinda disagree.I think they wanted the PS3 to be an evolution of the PS2 architecture but I think at that time MIPS wasn't offering something that was performant enough which is why they switched to IBM.But you end up with something very familiar to PS2 developers. Even down to the way that single precision floating point works on the SPEs, basically the same differences from the IEEE standard as on the PS2.
>>108364265yes
>>108357796And yet most of the ports that ran really well on the Xbox 360 ran like shit on it, because nobody knew how to take advantage of the hardware. Sad.I like the PS3, I still have one that I picked up in 2017 for $10. It has some really nice exclusives for it. But it's frustrating to see such good hardware not be utilized to it's potential more widely.
>>108357796>PS3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R98qC0fd_1w
Never thought I'd miss old /v/Looks like it's raining inside my house
ps3 would be $1000 today if adjusted for inflation
>>108366159
>>108359281>>108359687The idea was to have the cell PPE be the main core, and the SPE act like the PS2 VU0/VU1 - run its own microcode and do complex vertex transforms, same as vertex shaders but more flexible, so a bit like CUDA like you said. This was to be paired up with a super fast rasterizer called RS, that would presort the SPE vertex output into the correct order for drawing, and then draw everything in parallel. Essentially it would be a souped up PS2 same way as PS2 was a souped up PS1.The RS was too large and Toshiba couldn't fab it, so they tried using a 2nd Cell to do software rendering but this was stupid slow. They had no choice but to go with a nVidia chip, otherwise they would not have been able to launch at all. It's why the GPU in the PS3 makes no sense architecturally, the GPU is completely different from the rest of the hardware and it looks bolted on in the middle of the Cell bus. It's not even on the motherboard, it's on its own interposer, which is then soldered to the motherboard. And you have dumb ass restrictions like few megabyte/s transfer speeds for one of the chips to the other but 22GB/s the other way around. And the split RAM/VRAM pools.And the reason it cost $599 (in 2006 dollars, so like $1200 today) is because nVidia knew that Sony was stuck and they could ask any price whatsoever from them.Adding all the extra shit like the SD card reader was just to justify the machine as a luxury console. They removed all the extra features in later revisions including the PS2 compatibility.
>>108366244>It's not even on the motherboard, it's on its own interposer, which is then soldered to the motherboard.https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/File:COK-001_TOP.JPGI'm not seeing it. If anything you'd be able to say that about the CELL which is on a substrate that is soldered to the motherboard.Looking at delids, it looks basically the same situation as the CELL, chips on substrate, substrate soldered to the motherboard.Isn't that part of the whole flip-chip issue? Ending up with the cracking solder balls.
I never got the no games meme, it literally has the same xbox 360 games plus a few exclusives
>>108366319At that time platform exclusives were a big topic, so not having a good catalog of exclusive games means there's no point to buying the console.
'member running Folding@Home thinking you were gonna cure cancer
>>108366311>I'm not seeing it.it's under the heat spreader.>If anything you'd be able to say that about the CELL which is on a substrate that is soldered to the motherboard.Cell is just on its own substrate, to ease routing on the pcb. RSX is on a completely independent interposer with its own memory subsystem.
>>108357796this game looked fucking amazing on a 1080p screen
>>108357796it was indeed impressive for the time period.Shame that the FAT model of it had the yellow light of death.No fucking wonder why people always said to not purchase consoles on release.Because it is now a power beast after it's life-span
>>108366375>Cell is just on its own substrate, to ease routing on the pcb. RSX is on a completely independent interposer with its own memory subsystem.They're both on substrates. RSX having RAM in there doesn't change that.
>>108365147nah, not really. I was a nintyfag growing up from NES onward. Loved the shit out of the gamecube, and I didn't even consider buying anything besides the Wii. But after getting that and going through dryspell after dryspell with nothing but casual garbage and begging for tablescraps, while at the same time there were tons of great multiplats coming out on PC/PS3/360, that's what finally made me jump shark. That's when I built my first gaming PC, and also picked up a PS3 in 2010 after it started getting exclusives, a price cut, and softmodsAre there good games on the Wii? Yeah, sure. But the sheer quantity of stuff you missed out on made it terrible to actual experience in real time back in the mid/late 2000s
>>108366319Back in the early days of 7th gen, PS3 really didn't have much going for it at all. The exclusives it got ranged from trash to middling. MGS4 was supposed to be a big draw but ended up being a far too self-indulgent movie game. At the time, a lot of the big multiplat titles also only released on 360/PC, with PS3 versions either not coming at all, or releasing years later. And those early 7th gem multiplats on PS3 also tended to run notoriously bad. The "PS3 has no games" meme was 100% accurate up through like 2009. After that, Sony got their heads out their asses. Totally rebranded, good exclusives started coming out, multiplats started having better support, etc. And at the same time, xbox 360 really dropped the ball in the 2nd half of the gen. That's when they STOPPED putting out worthwhile exclusives and went all-in on kinect shovelware. And that's the reason why the PS3 ended up beating 360 in sales figures by the end of the gen, because dominance between the two had a hard flip halfway through.
>>108359650>multithreading was still in its infancy>in 2006No
>>108357796>The fact that this thing had support for multiple memory solutions including CF, SD and Memory Duo Pro. The fact that they crammed the actual PS2 hardware in this thing. The fact that it had out of the box support for Linux.it was more consumer friendly back then. I think I left consoles behind because it was so closed down.
>>108367040for consoles they were. Sony's cell was a single-core CPU
