The Sony PlayStation dynasty has ruled the console market since the introduction of the original PlayStation in 1994. There are 13,000 video game titles available worldwide for PlayStation products, and more are released monthly. Sony plans to continue its market dominance with the latest version of its successful console, the PlayStation 3.
Officially unveiled at the 2005 E3 Expo in Los Angeles, CA, the PlayStation 3 is set to hit shelves sometime in early 2006.
In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at the PlayStation 3. We’ll learn about the ground-breaking new microprocessor at the heart of the PS3, the powerful graphics processor that supports hi-def graphics at unprecedented resolutions and the console’s controller makeover, among other things.
Sony designed the PlayStation 3 to be more than just a video game console. It supports all kinds of digital entertainment.
At the May 16 press conference, Sony released the official specifications for the PlayStation 3. Below is the list of specs as they appeared in the official Sony press release.
Now let’s take a good look at some of these specs.
The Cell
The PlayStation 3 is basically a home-entertainment computer. This computer sports a specially designed CPU called the Cell processor. Sony, Toshiba and IBM worked together to develop the Cell processor. It’s their answer to the growing trend toward multi-core processing, in which manufacturers place as many processors as possible onto one chip. The Cell processor is scalable for different performance needs. The one used in the PlayStation 3 crams 234 million transistors onto a single die. For comparison, one of the most powerful desktop PC CPUs available in 2005, the $1,000, dual-core Pentium Processor Extreme Edition, just barely breaks the 200-million-transistor mark.
The setup of the Cell processor is like having a team of processors all working together on one chip to handle the large computational workload needed to run next-generation video games. In order to understand how the Cell processor works, it helps to look at each of the major parts that comprise this processor. Let’s start with the “Processing Element.”
Processing Element
The “Processing Element” of the Cell is a 3.2-GHz PowerPC core equipped with 512 KB of L2 cache. The PowerPC core is a type of microprocessor similar to the one you would find running the Apple G5. It’s a powerful processor on its own and could easily run a computer by itself; but in the Cell, the PowerPC core is not the sole processor. Instead, it’s more of a “managing processor.” It delegates processing to the eight other processors on the chip, the Synergistic Processing Elements.
The computational workload comes in through the PowerPC core. The core then assesses the work that needs to be done, looks at what the SPEs are currently processing and decides how to best dole out the workload to achieve maximum efficiency.
Now let’s find out how the SPEs handle the workload.
Synergistic Processing Elements
The SPEs used in the Cell processor are each SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data), 128-bit vector processors. Vector processors are designed to quickly process several pieces of data at once. They were commonly used in the 1980s in large, powerful, scientific supercomputers and were created as a faster alternative to the more common scalar processor. Scalar processors can only work one data element at a time. Despite this limitation, advances in scalar design and performance have made the use of vector processors very rare these days in most computers. However, because of the vector processor’s ability to handle several data elements at once, IBM resurrected this design for the Cell. There are eight SPEs on the chip, but only seven of them handle processing. The eighth SPE is built in as redundancy in case one of the other seven fails.
The SPEs each come loaded with 256 KB SRAM. This high-speed memory helps each SPE crunch numbers quickly. The SPE memory is also visible to the main Processing Element. This allows the PowerPC Core to utilize the resources of each SPE in the most efficient way possible. All of this amounts to unprecedented power for a piece of consumer electronics.
The Reality Synthesizer
Because graphics are so important to computers (and especially computers designed to play video games), there are microprocessors dedicated only to creating and displaying computer graphics. This processor is called the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). One of the most anticipated aspects of the PlayStation 3 is new GPU that was created for it — the RSX “Reality Synthesizer.”
Sony designed the RSX with graphics-card manufacturer Nvidia. The RSX is based on Nvidia’s GeForce graphics technology. It’s a 550-MHz, 300-million-transistor graphics chip. To put that in perspective, according to this Nvidia press release, the number of transistors on the RSX is “more than the total number of transistors in both the central processing units and the graphics processing units of the three leading current-generation systems, combined.”
Unlike the GPU in the Xbox 360, the RSX is built on the traditional independent vertex/pixel shader architecture. Shaders are computer programs that determine the final look of what you see on the screen when you’re looking at computer animation. To learn about shaders, see What are Gouraud shading and texture mapping in 3-D video games?
All of this translates to a level of graphic detail never before seen on a video-game console. The PlayStation 3 outputs 1080p HD signals at a resolution of 1920×1080. It can also send HD signals via two separate HDMI outputs, allowing for dual-HDTV video-game displays. The PS3 also supports 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i. To learn about HDTV and hi-definition output, see How HDTV Works.
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the only thing bad about the playstation is that it’s made by sony…….
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