Just read In-Tech today, major coverage and pictures of next-gen consoles. According to the report, Nintendo Revolution CAN'T read DVD out of the box, but needs additional adapter.

Straight from the horse's mouth:IBM Cell project page


Furthermore, each SPE has 256K of "Local Storage", which is effectively a Von Neumann style L1 cache.

Aww you gave it away, i wanted him to verify the truth of his facts on his own

One thing about PS3 and XBOX360....both DOESN'T have any dedicated sound chip like their predecessor. I guess they're losing hair to cut cost everywhere. Still both machine touted supporting Dobly Digital, DTS etc etc.

So one of the core in the machines shall be used to handle the sound/music processing i guess.

Are you sure they both don't have any dedicated sound processors? Maybe the details have just not been revealed yet. In any case, they both should have plenty of processing power to handle audio even if it is purely software.

I would have quoted from the same place. I don't see why you need to do this. You should discuss about the topic at hand knowing full well that the source is valid/invalid instead of having someone quote something that you've already read somewhere. You could have provided the link instead. Shame on you.

Please don't patronize.

EDIT: By the way, nothing is carved in stone currently. The thread comment reads speculative discussion, this is what it is, speculative. So please stop the "your source is wrong and my source is correct" argument unless you work for MS, Sony or PS3 next gen. console or have irrefutable prove that your source is correct. Or just leave it at that, speculative and enjoy the rebuttal.

This post has been edited by ray_: May 26 2005, 10:14 AM

Thanks for the link.

I'm not sure you could qualify the "Local Storage" as L1 cache yet. I would think that L1 cache access should be synchronized at core's frequency. We'll need to see if "Local Storage" is running at core frequency or other slower bus frequencies.

But you got one thing right. The SPE does indeed have DMA. There are no description however on whether the SMFs are DMAs. It would be nice to know if they have a dedicated DMA channel for each SPU or virtual DMA channels supported by a few physical DMAs.

the local storage is on die, therefore it is almost certain that it is running at core frequency. Especially since the SPEs are so data hungry, it would be practically a design flaw if they didn't have such fast cache. And i don't think we have seen any recent CPU with a L1/L2 cache running slower than core freq.

my dc pumps better sounds than my ps2 or xbox....i think because yamaha provided dc the audio card

You'll need to think SoC (System-On-Chip). With SoC, every friggin' peripherals are now on a die. But I do agree with your argument as I've made similar comment earlier, I don't see how this would work without L1 cache. But again I stress, until we see some clock distribution diagram, this is all speculative.

By the way, L2 cache does not necessarily run at core frequency. There are L2 cache that runs at lower frequencies such as that of the FSB. But L1 cache always runs at core frequency.

EDIT: I've read that you said recently. So yes, most recent L2 cache runs at core speed. But the question is, is the L2 cache in PS3 doing the same?

This post has been edited by ray_: May 26 2005, 12:37 PM

Wow... intelligent conversation in the console forum...

Anyway, Ars Technica has some juicy bits about Xbox 360 for techies here. Thanks to Evil Avatar for the link.

In other news, rumour has it that the revolutionary feature of the Revolution is a tactile touchscreen... In essence its something like a force feedback screen.

I am 99% certain that it runs at the same speed as the core. There really is no reason for it not to. I don't think it's even a big design challenge anymore to get cache memory cells to work at those frequencies.

tech specs aside, hideo kojima makes a dinner analogy about the new gen systems. also, he talks mgs4 if anyone is interested (OT i know).

http://www.hellogamer.com/2005/05/25/kojim...l-gear-solid-4/

I'm an ignorant fool. Exactly what frequency is the PS3 core capable of?

3.2 ghz but at the lab its reported to go up to 6 ghz

The cell is theoretically capable of achieving about 4GHz with an 80W power dissipation. According to IBM, they have tested it to reach up to 5.6GHz and dissipate 180W, but that is clearly not practical. Cache is typically much easy to design and produce than logic, because it is nicely uniform (which allows it to be densely packed) and not very complex compared to logic hardware. If you notice, one of the 1st things intel builds/tests on its new manufacturing processes is cache cells.

microsoft say 360 will be able to play xbox games, but not all.

Haaa! Haaaaa! DC pumps better sound than XBOX?? Haaaa! haaaaa!

Cmon-ler, I've a DC once also. It has good sound, but nowhere near the quality of Dobly Digital 5.1 of the XBOX. But the DC sound is about equivalent with the PS2.

But of course, if you're still using the TV stereo speakers. You probably can't hear any difference.

This post has been edited by Matrix: May 26 2005, 03:59 PM

Only the "best selling games". I imagine they're having a nightmare trying to work on an emulator that works within such short timeframe. Imagine...all the PC emulators take years to stabilize and even then it won't run 100% correctly.

They've < 1 year to get a working emulator..Even if it works for a few games, it'll be a mighty achievement already!

The PS3 is a different story. The PS2 has built-in PS1 chip, so i guess the PS3 will have a stripped PS2&PS1 chip built in??

PS2 is capable of doing 5.1 during CG and DVD..
so its not exactly equivalent to DC. sorry..