Lista PS3 igara i SPE iskorišćenosti u njima [Arhiva]

donator99

17.1.2008, 2:32

Dakle, kao sto znate PS3 je pokrenut od strane svemocnog Cell procesora.Cell procesor se sastoji od jednog PPE-a(glavni deo Cella) i 7 SPE-a(ustvari 6 jer je jedan iskljucen da bi se poboljsao procenat ispravnih cipova).Dakle, svaka PS3 igra koristi PPE, ali mnoge uopste ne koriste tih 6 SPE-a, sto znaci da ni izbilza ne koriste svu moc PS-a 3.Evo male liste iz par komentara o PS3 igrama i iskoriscenosti SPE-ova u istim.
PS3 games list & SPE usages

According to IBM the bulk of the PS3's processing power is located in Cell's SPEs. Without using them games development is very similar to developing a game on a decent specced single processor PC or Mac (so not really difficult at all like some developers claim, funnily those who do not even use the SPEs in the porting process, it should then actually be pretty straight foward (with of course the advantage of being able to optimize for a single uniform configuration). PS3 exclusive devs who are using the SPEs claim it's not more difficult to develop for and that it's much easier to develop for than for the PS2. Considering more and more games start to utilize these SPEs I thought it would be interesting to list those games and possibly deduct those which don't.

Beyond3D Motorstorm interview: "Scott Kirkland: Cell’s SPUs provide a huge amount of processing power. Early adopters tended to bias usage towards either RSX or PPU support (we fall into the latter category). I’m confident that over the coming months, exploitation of this resource will become far more balanced."

PS3 games that are known to use the Cell's SPEs

1) Resistance:Fall of Man

"Animation and calculating collisions between objects are perfect fits, says Hastings. So those are the primary jobs Resistance doles out to the SPEs.."

Source: Spectrum online

2) Ratchet and Clank Future: TOD

"We were using the SPUs and that's a key to having a game that runs fast on the PS3, but there were a lot of things that we knew we could improve, and we have been improving them on Ratchet. And even with Ratchet, we're still seeing more and more things we can do; it's kind of like peeling off the layers of an onion."

Source: Gamedaily

"We are continuing to build our Insomniac Engine and have made many improvements to it since Resistance: Fall of Man. The one huge focus for us has been moving more of our processes over to the SPUs on the CELL processor. This has allowed us to get our physics and effects systems running roughly four times faster than it did in Resistance at nearly double the framerate, which is something you can see in weapons like the Tornado Launcher."

Source: The New Zealand Herald

3) Motorstorm

"SPU usage is a good example. The progressive development of corresponding debugging and profiling tools made thorough exploitation of this powerful resource quite challenging for the less technically biased members of the team. In the aftermath of MotorStorm, with mature tools at our disposal, we’ve been developing mechanisms to make the PPU and SPU’s power and parallelism far more accessible to our entire team, re-thinking data organization and algorithms in the process. MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we’re aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"

"Our SPU exploiting systems consist of:

i) Havok physics.
ii) Determination of object visibility.
iii) Concatenation of hierarchies.
iv) Billboard object culling and vertex buffer creation.
v) Updating of particles and vertex buffer creation.
vi) Updating of vehicle dynamics.
vii) Updating of vehicle suspension constraints.
viii) Audio (MultiStream).
ix) Video decoding."

Source: Beyond3D

4) Formula One Championship Edition

"We don't really use the concept of reserving certain SPUs for specific tasks. Instead we employ the concept of prioritized job lists that are executed by the SPUs whenever one is available. We use the SPUs for the following jobs: audio effects, particle system, physics (landscape collision, narrow phase and collision resolution), rain effects (rain droplets and rain splashes) and various render side jobs. The game logic is driven largely by the PPU. We use the SPUs together to collaborate on working through each frame that's displayed by the game. The SPUs are extremely versatile so they can be used to accelerate any in-game system."

The SPUs are heavily involved in the graphics pipeline and do an enormous amount of work to eliminate inefficiency before anything arrives at the PPU and RSX. For example, the SPUs are powerful enough to decompress and check every triangle [polygon] before passing it on to the RSX. Triangles that are facing away from the player, or that are not on the screen can be 'trimmed' away by the SPUs, which hugely reduces the amount of redundant work sent to the RSX. This in turn lets the RSX get on with what it does best--drawing stuff on screen.

The SPUs can also be used to augment the RSX vertex shaders, making far more vertex-heavy tasks possible which is very useful for character animation. Additionally, the SPUs can be used to implement behavior very similar to geometry shaders--F1 CE uses them in this way to render seamless interpolated levels of detail for some scene elements. So in answer to the question "Do the Cell and RSX work together?" the answer is a resounding "Yes," and I think this is one of the real strengths of Playstation 3 that we'll see increasingly exploited by development teams going forward.

donator99

17.1.2008, 2:33

6) Heavenly Sword

" In Heavenly Sword, the Cell enables incredible numbers of enemies to be on screen at one time. The trick is that Cell treats entire regiments as a single unit of artificial intelligence when they are at a distance; as they draw closer, Cell gradually divides the army into smaller and smaller groups, so they eventually become individual troops with unique fighting styles and tactics."

"Heavenly Sword is one of the first PS3 games to tap into Cell's true potential. Here are the highlights.

Artificial Intelligence To keep up with the hundreds of on-screen enemies, Cell treats distant armies as a singlular "hive mind." As they approach Nariko, Cell splits their intelligence across squads, and finally, individual troops.

Graphics Wind gusts swirl Nariko's hair and clothes, and bazooka blasts send out showers of dust and rubble. 1080p support is still a question mark, though.

Physics When firing a cannon, Nariko can influence the trajectory of the projectile using the Sixaxis. Ninja Theory claims it needs the Cell to handle these complex calculations."

Source: Gamepro

"Personally I really love the SPUs as they have exceeded our performance expectations and we've got a lot of them to play with."

Source: Eurogamer

7) Lair

"We have all of our animations running on the S.P.U.s of the Cell's chip because you couldn't draw armies or basically animate armies of that amount and size without it. And our physics are completely on there. We are also doing fluid dynamics for the first time in a game, as far as I know. Water is not basically a sheet of a base surface, but completely animated and sub-divided, and you actually can direct with it thanks to the Cell. We actually do part of our rendering on the Cell. Simply because it's so powerful, we spent months and months moving more and more systems onto the S.P.U.'s."

"Not a specific S.P.U. Our S.P.U. code works dynamically, so we are not locking up one S.P.U. and saying "OK, you are the A.I. S.P.U., but we instead say, "OK, here are these 15 things including A.I." We run them on the S.P.U., and the code automatically distributes them. And sometimes, yes, A.I. certainly can take up a full S.P.U."

Source: Gamepro

8) Killzone 2

"In this talk, we will discuss our approach to face this challenge and how we designed a deferred rendering engine that uses multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. We’ll show how we utilize PS3’s SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output."

Source: Killzoneunit

"We've created our own proprietary technology to drive the game, and this is using many of PS3's specific strengths.Large quantities of data can be streamed because we have a great deal of storage capacity. This allows for the level of detail you can see in the game.

It is not a luxury to have Blu-ray, but rather a necessity, as compression only gets you so far. I mean, the level that we showed at E3 and Leipzig topped out around 2GB! Also having the CELL and SPUs means we can offload all of our physics processing to an SPU, or process AI using the SPU's. All this processing power just means we can add more detail and create that Hollywood-type realism we're after."

Source: GamePro.com

I think the following article sheds more light on how the SPEs are currently used in Killzone 2, and addresses the advanced deferred rendering techniques Guerrilla Games already implemented for the game so far.
http://inlinethumb09.webshots.com/20168/2883708070095088590S425x425Q85.jpg
9) Final Fantasy XIII (uses SPE enabled White Engine)

"The White Engine reportedly uses four of the six developer-available synergistic processing elements (SPEs) of the Cell microprocessor to achieve near-pre-rendered CGI quality in realtime."

Source: Play UK through Wikipedia

10) Gran Turismo 5
11) Warhawk

"Although I would say it’s the sum-total of all of our natural phenomenon in the game. Our clouds, procedural water, atmospheric scattering, terrain, etc. All of this stuff runs in parallel on all 7 SPUs simultaneously every frame – I’m still not sure if the game community is giving enough credit to just how fast the SPUs really are."

donator99

17.1.2008, 2:34

12) Untold Legends
13) Uncharted: Drake’s fortune

"Like the PS2 the PS3 is a sophisticated and powerful piece of hardware. Our engineers are working very hard at making specific optimizations to take full advantage of the Cell and its SPU's. However, there is so much depth to this machine, that much like the PS2, you will continue to see developers squeeze more and more out of it over the course of what I am sure is going to be a lengthy life-cycle."

Source: IGN

"We are utilizing all SPUs in Uncharted for AI, animation and lots of other systems. We are however just starting to tap into the power of the Cell. In future games I can promise even more utilization of the Cell which will result in more of everything, including game play."

Source: Ars Technica

"As far as the Cell processor is concerned, we're actually using about a third to half of that right now, so there's still a bit of untapped potential there."

" I would say number one thing is animation, and the fact that the Cell processor has so much raw horse power that you could just throw more and more at it and it doesn't break a sweat. Our animation system is very complex, and we layer on dozens of frames of animation so you have that fluidity of movement where Nathan Drake can be running across a courtyard, stumbling over a rock as he's ducking under a hail of gunfire, reloading his weapon and rolling into cover, and all of these animations can happen simultaneously. "

Source: GameSpot

"The PlayStation 3 has a lot of power. When we started Uncharted we were really ambitious and had no idea what the PS3 would give us. Once we got the first devkits, we realized quickly that we could do everything we had planned to. The three main points for me are the Cell, Blu-Ray and the hard drive. We’ve been using the Cell for pretty much all our systems: rendering, particles, physics simulation, collision detection, animation, AI, decompression, water simulation, etc … and to give you an idea of the power of the PS3, we're using only 30 percent of the Cell processor.

In terms of Blu-Ray, we just couldn’t have made Uncharted without it; with Uncharted we have almost filled it (91 percent). We're also using the hard drive to pre-cache data from the Blu-Ray disc. That allows us to stream up to 12 streams for sound, load level data super fast and more importantly to stream textures constantly to guarantee high-res quality on the screen. "

Source: Ars Technica

"Basically, in Jak I we had somewhere in the vicinity of 300-350 animations for Jak and everyone was really happy with the fluidity of his movement and the response. In Uncharted, Drake has got more than 3500 animations and the difference is we're now taking the cell processor and we're taking say two dozen of those animations, like we've got his running animations, flinching animations, reloading animations, rolling animations, just dozens of animations all at once being layered on top of each other and then the cell processor recreates on the fly the single frame of animation that you need to be able to play the game at that moment and the fact we can just dump more and more work on that processor and its SPUs just means we can free up our CPU to do more general purpose tasks. "

Source: PALGN

14) Infamous

"For us, the most exciting part of the PS3 has been the cell processor, the SPUs specifically. In our highest density scenes right now, we are currently using about 30 percent of the SPUs' capabilities--with the SPUs doing lots of heavy lifting for us on rendering, visibility, particle systems, skinning, animation blending, and so on...this with scores of pedestrians, cars, fires, etc., all going on. And the best part? We've not made any significant attempts to even optimize the SPU code. I think it's reasonable to guess we could put 10 times as much stuff on the SPUs and still make our frame budgets. It's really pretty amazing."

Source: Gamespot

15) The Getaway 3 - Tech demo
16) Unreal Tournament 3 - Sony developers helping Epic.

17) Ninja Gaiden Sigma

"There are games that have thousands of enemies at once, and some of them don’t move or do much. For us it’s about making sure they have goals they are fulfilling and that they can work together with existing enemies. That’s really our philosophy. As far as A.I. goes people have played our game before will see that we’ve made some subtle improvements. A lot of it has to do with using all the Cell’s SPU processors."

"One important thing about the PS3 is the seven SPUs in addition to the main processor, and using those is what allows you to get the best graphic quality. So we have an entire section of programmers which is assigned to figure out how to get those SPUs working on graphics to the fullest. Now we're actually at the point where day-to-day you can see the graphic quality improve before your eyes, so to speak. So if you look at the screenshots we have for you today -- if you look at those compared to what we put out at TGS, there's a big difference in terms of the textures and the atmosphere. You can see the steps we've made since then."

Games that don't use SPEs:

1) Genji: Days of the Blade (Great visuals, mediocre game, confirmed by developer not to be using the SPEs)
2) Half-Life 2: Orange Box (Confirmed by developer)
3) Splinter Cell
4) The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Great game, looks better than on XBox 360 combined with reduced loading times, but this mainly due to harddrive caching, maybe includes some limited middleware SPE usage)
5) Fight Night Round 3 (overall still a good improvement over the XBox 360 version)
6) Full Auto 2: Battlelines (Mediocre, still an improvement over the original and 1080p)
7) Ridge Racer 7(OK game, overall a good improvement over RR6 and 1080p)
8) Madden NFL 07
9) Madden NFL 08
10) Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas (Nice game)
11) Enchanted Arms
12) F.E.A.R.
13) Sonic the Hedgehog
14) Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07

simakosmos

17.1.2008, 22:41

lepo sve to ali.... cinjenice su to valjda :p
ne bih da zvuchim kao nintendo fanboy :a_whistli , ali koga briga sta su developeri uradili, a sta nisu...
ovo sve mi zvuchi kao kad gledash snimanje nekog filma i onda se svi glumci ulizuju reditelju, scenaristi i ostalima a ti, kao gledaoc pomislish da ce biti odlican film...a ono nista.

nemoj da mislish da pocinjem flame ili hocu da zapocnem neki nextgen rat , ali ovo sto si "pejstovao" "sony propagandu" je sasvim suvisno, nepotrebno, a i na engleskom je.

mogao si da nam dash linkove ili sve da prevedesh.

donator99

17.1.2008, 23:06

Nije Sony propaganda :)
Kao sto sam vidis, vecina ovoga su intervjui sa 3rd party developerima, koji govore koliko njihove igre koriste moci Cell-a.Dakle, cak i prelepi Uncharted, koji je u ovom trenutku najlepsa igra za konzole na trzistu jedva koristi 30% snage SPE-a, sto znaci da cemo morati cekati God of War 3 kako bi videli realni domet PS-a 3(God of War 4 ce najverovatnjie iscediti 100% snage iz Cella).Cell je mnogo jaci procesor nego sto izgleda na papiru i za njegovu potpunu optimizaciju ce trebati dosta vremena :)
A, ako neko hoce ovo da prevede, moze, nije mi se dalo 18000 karaktera da prevodim...

che daboli guz

18.1.2008, 1:43

Odlican feljton samo nastavi,nekim firmama odgovara izazov nekim ne.
Nikakva tajna.Po textu se moze primjetiti da su neki povrsno dali svoje komentare ,pa ipak sve je chisto informativno o tome kako i sta radi po pitanju igara i hardwera.:tapsh:

:ciao:

donator99

26.1.2008, 16:37

Jos infoa o moci Cella:
It appears that Cell is a perfect match for procedural texturing and ray tracing, as witnessed with these ProFX middleware technology benchmarks. ProFX is now in some form, apart of PS3 middleware.

The Bayou benchmark below was completed in 10 seconds by the 360, 5 seconds by the 8800GTS and 1.2 seconds by the PS3.
Slike kao dokaz:
http://www.box.net/shared/static/99kv4xyosw.jpg
http://www.box.net/shared/static/vnn2eiicc8.jpg
http://www.box.net/shared/static/yzlyg66o8g.jpg

donator99

26.1.2008, 16:38

A evo i intervjua sa likom iz Allegorithmica :)
Graphics, Games, and Multi-core
Jonathan Erickson
The challenges for developers may not be just technical

Today's guest is Sebastien Deguy, president and founder of Allegorithmic.

DDJ: Sebastien, the Allegorithmic web site mentions "procedural textures." What does that mean?

SD: Procedural textures are textures defined according to an algorithm. Instead of painting (by hand) the texture pixel by pixel, you define the way these pixels have to be lit to produce the texture you want. It's basically like writing a program, and with that program comes all the power of algorithms over frozen (bitmap) data -- compactness, data amplification, parameterization, and the like.

When the procedural texture is defined, you launch an engine for actually generating the bitmap textures. These are called realizations of the procedural description, and it's a lot like the difference between a -- possibly random -- process and the realization of that process.

In the case of Allegorithmic's procedural textures, you'd define the procedures in a nice visual way using our product MaPZone, then use our other technology ProFX to rasterize the images, producing the final result to be displayed by a game engine or any renderer.

There are many advantages to using procedural textures instead of bitmap textures, one of them being that procedural texture files are typically 500-1000 smaller than bitmaps (making them ideal for online games).

DDJ: I'm familiar with 3D textures. But what are 4D textures?

SD: 4D here stands for 3D + Time. 4D textures means evolving textures, evolving environments and games. On our web site we showcase a demo around that idea, where a bathroom goes from a clean state to a dirty state in real-time.

Procedural textures, because they are driven by parameters, can be driven by time. And by letting time go by, the aspect of the textures can be changed, going for example from a clean state to a deprecated one.

Now imagine that applied to a game, where the whole environment and characters are changing, evolving, according to time but also to your actions within that environment. Actual PCs and consoles can handle this, and I must say I can't wait to see games using this as a feature.

DDJ: If I recall from your web site, a platform you will shortly be supporting is Playstation 3. What benefits and challenges do multi-core processors bring to the scene?

SD: Procedural techniques are demanding in terms of power, so the more power you can get, the better it is in that respect. Going multi-threaded is quite easy generally speaking for image-based work (you can divide the image in several pieces and work in parallel), and so the more cores you can get, again, the better it will be.

That said, programming the PS3's eight Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs) can be quite challenging from time to time, but there is definitely a lot to gain from the architecture, and ProFX on PS3 should run impressively fast. (We should get confirmation on that by the end of the year or so

A very cool side effect of the PS3's architecture is that ProFX should be able to continuously stream textures -- using one or two SPUs to compute the textures to be given to the GPU to be displayed, that's a huge bonus for adding rich content to games without having to stream that content from the BluRay or overloading the sole GPU of the machine.

You should see more graphically impressive games than ever with that kind of combination.

DDJ: We've seem to have made great strides in terms of texture mapping and other forms of 3D modeling. What's the next big challenge?

SD: There are many technical challenges that I could point out here. But I'd like to focus on one. Game developers now have a lot more content to produce, store, and distribute than ever before. MMORPGs are a good example here, filling up a BluRay of 50GB of content (instead of 5GB for a single layer DVD) is another one.

The question is then, for producing 10 times more content, do you want to grow your company by a factor of 10? Although I like the idea of allowing the industry to grow significantly, and although I love the idea of providing the maximum people with a cool job, I don't believe it's feasible that way.

Therefore game developers have to find new ways of not only producing that content, but also storing and delivering it.

I strongly believe procedural techniques for content creation are a major solution to that challenge:

* It's proven that, because defining procedural content is a highly non-linear process, you produce more content faster than with traditional techniques by reusing a lot of the base elements you've been producing along the line.
* Procedural content can be easily customized and created by gamers, and user-generated content is another key element for producing never-ending content.
* Procedural content files are typically parameters or code, which is usually extremely small compared to what it can produce. And that makes them ideal for the storage and furthermore the delivery of that content.

Of course, going from a traditional approach for content production to using generative techniques can be quite a challenge by itself, but it's worth the effort, and one of the only ways I see for raising the bar in terms of next-generation content creation.

DDJ: If readers want to find out more about these topics, can you suggest a web site? [okay to point to www.allegorithmic.com (http://www.allegorithmic.com/) - YES]

SD: First, I invite readers to take a look at the web site dedicated to ProFX, Allegorithmic's middleware for procedural texturing, where they can find a lot of information regarding procedural texturing for games:

They can also check the Wikipedia webpage about procedural generation as a whole, and see that it's quite a hot topic right now (waiting for Spore!

donator99

28.1.2008, 17:26

Likovi iz Naughty Doga pricaju o upotrebi Cell-a u Unchartedu:
One of our first goals when we started Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was to push what's been done in animation for video games. We developed a brand new animation system that took full advantage of the SPU's. Nathan Drake's final animation is made of different layers like running, breathing, reloading weapons, shooting, facial expression, etc; we end up decompressing and blending up to 30 animations every frame on the SPU's.
The main thing about the PlayStation 3 is the Cell processor and more specifically the SPU's. We are only using 30 percent of the power of the SPU's in Uncharted. We've been architecting a lot of our systems around this and we were able to take full advantage of that power. A big part of our systems is running on SPU's: scene bucketing, particles, physics, collision, animation, water simulation, mesh processing, path finding, etc. For our engine, the cool thing about having the SPU's is the fact we can minimize what we send to the RSX (the graphic chip), it allows us to reject unnecessary information and get the RSX to be very efficient.
We are constantly streaming animations, level data, textures, music and sounds. It would have been impossible to get this amount of data at that speed to memory without the hard drive. And of course on top of that we use the SPU's to decompress all this data on the fly.
I najjaca recenica o Cell-u:
Its like a black hole, we keep throwing stuff at it and it doesn't break a sweat.-US PlayStation Magazine

donator99

10.2.2008, 17:12

"In terms of graphics, we use the SPU as a form of object processor. So essentially everything up to and including the production of RSX's command stream probably has a module on SPU to help.
This includes,

1. A module that does a lot of object level clipping and culling both for the view frustum and ths shadow maps. Its job is per frame to calculate how big each shadow map should be in world space and what objects needs rendering in each map.
2. Animations, using ATGs (DeanA team) animation library, every animation is blended and bones updated.
3. Blend shapes, a custom module that handles facial animations
4. Skin matrices, even after animation there some work required to get them into the format used by the GPU vertex shader.
5. Flags, a simple verlet based simulation used for the flags in the game
6. Cloth & Hair, a constrained physics solver used for simple chains that are then rendered as Nariko's cloth and hair
7. Pushbuffer generation. This produces the commands used by RSX to actually render the scene. Has a number of optimisers to reduce redundent state changes.

Probably a few i've missed. Essentially a normal skinned or non-skinned character costs very little PPU time and virtually all processing is done on SPU and RSX. Its this that allows us to render the army scenes for example.

We do no per triangle work on the SPU, we let RSX do that, we however do try and prepare things on the SPU for RSX."-Heavenly Sword dev.
[source beyond3d]

"If by cooperative rendering you're referring to SPUs supporting the RSX, I strongly believe that this approach will become far more widespread. In addition to reducing the vertex load on the RSX through the use of culling and vertex pre-processing, this approach also provides an efficient mechanism to introduce procedural geometry.

Historically, CPUs have provided course grain scene culling using view frustums, occlusion planes, portal visibility and BSP-trees with GPUs left to perform fine grain rejection using guard band clipping, occlusion and backface culling. While such features improve fragment performance, they don't reduce vertex processing overhead.

The leap in performance provided by Cell gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data." -Motorstorm dev
[source beyond3d]

Cell (IBM QS20 Blade Serve) related article with interesting quotes:

"We demonstrate a 300x speed-up using the Gedae DE. The hardware platforms compared are an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor and an IBM QS20 Blade Server."

"While the performance is very good on system B, the Gedae/Cell/B.E. combination is 18x faster and 361x faster than the baseline implementation."
http://www.gedae.com/documents/MCBS%...0Benchmark.pdf (http://www.gedae.com/documents/MCBS%20Gedae%20Benchmark.pdf)
[preneseno sa Neogafa(http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=184843&page=16)] (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=184843&page=16%29%5D)

Full info za NBA 2K7:

"Speaking of taking advantage of the PS3's power, the team has been using the computational muscle of the system to enhance a large number of standard features. Cloth physics, for example, have been assigned to one SPU so that jerseys and shorts can move realistically without taking processing power away from the rest of the game. But 2K hopes to move that realism off the court as well. Instead of running cutscenes during timeout situations, 2K has created real-time AI that governs the cheerleaders, mascots, floor cleaners and even the crowd. For example, during a game between Dallas and Miami at the American Airlines Arena, we noticed Burnie (the Heat mascot) doing much more than simply dancing on the sidelines; he would run under Dallas' basket and actively try to distract shooters at the free throw line, and he had new dance sequences during timeouts.

Of course, we wanted to take a look at some of the exclusive PS3 features, and while we couldn't get every detail during this session, we did get a demonstration of how Visual Concepts is planning to use the system's tilt feature. Specifically, players will be able to shoot free throws by moving the controller back and then leaning it forward. While you can do it with minor movements, you can also hold and tilt the controller as if you were actually shooting with a basketball. Thanks to this new system, you'll need to know the particular shooting stroke of players on your team to be successful. So while Dwayne Wade's shooting was a bit easier to handle, Shaq's laborious attempts to balance the ball threw us off every time. Defenders also have a chance to throw-off free throw shots by shaking their controller, which shakes their opponent's screen. While the system still needed some tweaking, because free throws are a little hard to make and visiting teams have way too much influence on a home team's shots, it did demonstrate how creatively the team is approaching the PS3.

Visually, NBA 2K7 has been taken up a notch, particularly in how the game is rendered. According to Thomas, the way the PS3 renders pixels gives its overall look a richer appearance when compared to the 360 version. From a personal standpoint, it looks much more organic and lifelike -- and if you thought you were watching a realistic game on the 360, just wait until you see it on the PS3."

donator99

20.2.2008, 23:55

Nastavljam flood ovog threada podacima koji vecini posetioca ovog foruma ne znace bas nista :D

https://www.cmpevents.com/GD08/a.asp...11&SessID=6653 (https://www.cmpevents.com/GD08/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=6653)
PhyreEngine - The New Hotness Sponsored by Sony

Speaker: Richard Forster (Senior Engineer, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe)
Date/Time: Thursday (February 21, 2008) 4:00pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 2010, West Hall
Track: Programming
Experience Level: All

Session Description
Already used in several top selling multi-platform titles, PhyreEngine provides tools and technologies aimed at simplifying development on multi-core architectures whilst offering state of the art performance - and it's free. We will show how PhyreEngine components can enhance your games, and unveil some of our latest additions.
Recently, Sony announced a new tool set that will be free to all developers known as "PhyreEngine" that will offer highly optimized lightweight libraries for CELL SPUs. These libraries will provide code for animation, compression (expected to greatly improve loading times), and many more features. The package will also provide 'GCM Replay', a powerful RSX profiling tool to allow developers to gain the most out of the PlayStation 3's graphics chip.
Svaka cast ljudima iz Sony Computer Entertainment Europe dev timova.Stvarno su ljudi mnogo pomogli kreiranju alata i tehnologija za razvoj PS3 igara.

donator99

13.3.2008, 17:12

US Airforce(mozda) kupuje PS3 zbog Cell procesora:http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFR...SynopsisP.html (http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFRLRRS/FA8751-08-R-0016/SynopsisP.html)
The Air Force Research Laboratory is conducting a technology assessment of certain cell processors. The processors in the Sony PlayStation 3 are the only brand on the market that utilizes the specific cell processor characteristics needed for this program at an acceptable cost.

Astrofizicari koriste klaster PS3 konzola za racunanje gravitacionih talasa(lol):
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news..._supercomputer (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer)
As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.
Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.

"Basically, it's almost like a replacement," he says. "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing."
Jos infoa:
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html

PS3 klaster se koristi da prikaze model gravitacionih talasa nastalih kolizijom crnih rupa:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/02...ng_blackholes/ (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/02/28/ps3s_put_to_use_simulating_blackholes/)
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html

The 16 PS3s haven't been physically modified. They're networked together using an inexpensive Gigabit Ethernet switch.

"Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer," Khanna noted.

donator99

23.4.2008, 14:04

"Engine development is an artistic process" Mike Acton of Insomniac on PS3 and next-gen game development (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2008/04/21/engine_development_is_an_artistic_process_mike_act on_of_insomniac_on_ps3_and_nextgen_game_developmen t_.html)

In what ways has the engine evolved since Resistance 1? There was a lot of talk about streaming textures at the time... What elements have you added since that game and what have you learned?

The engine is constantly changing. It's continually being upgraded and simplified, while we add new features and remove less useful ones. A sign of any maturing technology is that it becomes simpler rather than more complex. And as we work on our third-generation PS3 title, this is what we're starting to see. We've tried several approaches for different features and we're now definitely seeing a convergence of the ideas that have worked out well. For example, the physics, animation, glass, inverse kinetics, effects, and geometry database systems (just to start with) are now less complicated, thus offering more and significantly faster features than the versions found in Resistance 1.

We've also solidified some design patterns that are simplifying things. Take SPU Shaders, for example, which we discuss in detail on our newly established R&D site. SPU Shaders helped to make the big systems and all the little changes that come along during development a lot more practical to implement. They've also helped shed some light on programming the SPUs. Just having the ability to start putting high-level logic and AI on the SPUs was a major milestone that validated a lot of our ideas on how to distribute that type of work. This isn't to say that we have fewer challenges with each new generation of game--we just have all-new, even better and more streamlined challenges! Have you had any moments of epiphany with the PS3 hardware - a moment where you've suddenly thought 'hey, I get it' and suddenly opened up a whole new avenue of power/possibility? Can you explain it in lots of technical detail ; )

As I said earlier, the more time you spend with a maturing technology, things only become simpler. In preparation for our GDC presentation this year, I asked some of our programmers what was the thing that really "clicked" for them as they've learned to work with the Cell. Off the top of my head, the main responses were:

Think in streams of data: Do similar things together.

Remember that local memory is really fast: Classically, you want to avoid algorithms that have heavy memory access. That's still true in general, just not on the SPUs themselves.

Forget about conventional Object-Oriented Programming: It's not so much that OOP is bad in and of itself, but the way it's taught and applied typically causes numerous and completely pointless difficulties when it comes to optimising data and code.***
H264 Real Time encoding on Cell/B.E.:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cell-h264/

3rd place in Region 2 here:
http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/uni...contests/cell/ (http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/university/students/contests/cell/)

Insomniac Games R&D:
http://insomniacgames.com/tech/techpage.php

***
Raytracing on CELL
Probajte Raytracing na svom PS-u 3. :)
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/irt

http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.p...5/cell-vs-g80/ (http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/2007/09/05/cell-vs-g80/)
http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.p...r-at-gdc-2007/ (http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/07/cell-power-at-gdc-2007/)
http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.p...r-irt-at-sc06/ (http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/2006/11/12/cell-interactive-ray-tracer-irt-at-sc06/)

Tech
http://www.gametomorrow.com/minor/barry/iRT-Sumary.pdf
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~benthin/cellrt06.pdf (http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/%7Ebenthin/cellrt06.pdf)
http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/635/lohr1.pdf (http://www.csee.umbc.edu/%7Eolano/635/lohr1.pdf)
http://eric_rollins.home.mindspring.com/ray/ray.html

Interactive raytracing on 3 x PS3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8

donator99

14.5.2008, 23:20

IBM today made formal the announcement of an HPC-targeted variant of the Cell B.E. processor, given the name PowerXCell 8i. Featuring re-engineered SPEs with enhanced dual-precision performance and improved memory addressability, the processor is capable of ~102 DP GFlops and support for up to 16GB of DDR2 memory at ~25GB/s. Originally described at the Cool Chips (http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/198) conference in April of 2007, the PowerXCell 8i is the processor IBM will use as the workhorse in a heterogeneous setup powering the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roadrunner supercomputer, expected to be the world's fastest when it debuts later this year. Having undergone cost/benefit trials since the original project announcement back in September 2006, by late last year Los Alamos scientists had succeeded in improving key algorithm performance (molecular dynamics, radiation transport, plasma behavior) by a six-fold average through the use of the Opteron/Cell compute nodes vs Opteron-based nodes alone. Following its successful test period with the Department of Energy, the PowerXCell 8i will become available commercially next month through IBM's newly announced BladeCenter QS22, a blade-based solution rated at 217 GFlops of DP performance in a single-slot form factor. With over fifty customers presently migrating code to the QS22, IBM sees an opportunity in a market niche it estimates is worth roughly $8-10 billion. The PowerXCell 8i will be aimed at seven industries where the architecture is particularly well suited for HPC performance gains, including: Aerospace/defense, Health care/life sciences, Petroleum exploration, Financial, Digital media, Electronics, and Government. In addition to the architectural refinements of the new Cell, IBM has continued work on the software and tools, allowing the QS22 to function in an increasingly transparent fashion inside of heterogeneous BladeCenter environments. Through the development of new API/library functionality, customers are able to take advantage of QS22-accelerated code vectorization on low-hanging fruit (such as Monte Carlo) without the need to make significant alterations to the original x86 or POWER code.
Developed as an offshoot of the Cell partnership with Sony and Toshiba, IBM has indicated that in the future, high-volume/performance-intensive applications such as game systems are likely to continue as the point of origination for new high-performance architectures. It can be expected that to some extent the eventual STI Cell '2' will reflect IBM's design gambit in a post-Larrabee/GPGPU computing world, the massively parallel space in which Cell v1.0 itself was an early player.
Izvor (http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/640).

Meni se sve cini da ce sledeci Playstation koristiti verziju Cella koja bude dostupna u to vreme.
Sony, ocigledno, ne odustaje od razvoja Cella, sto ce se visestruko isplatiti kada izadje sledeci PS(pod uslovom da ce koristiti Cell procesor), posto ce Sony imati spremne i optimizovane alate za pravljenje igara, pa nece morati da pocinje sve od nule, kao sto je to uradio sa Playstationom 3, sto ce smanjiti troskove pravljenja tih alata i smanjiti vreme koje ce programerima biti potrebno da bi optimizovali igru za Playstation konzolu i njene hardverske resurse.

zdravkelja

14.5.2008, 23:55

Taj Cell jos samo da poleti :D

voodoo_

15.5.2008, 0:00

http://i26.tinypic.com/rm4f1g.jpg

RUSuper

15.5.2008, 6:41

Sony je odlicno sve smislio sto se piraterije tie.Bukvalno je nemoguce napraviti pirata za PS3

NjegovaWisost

15.5.2008, 10:38

Sony je odlicno sve smislio sto se piraterije tie.Bukvalno je nemoguce napraviti pirata za PS3

Misliš? Jedino što sprečava pojavu pirata je nepostojane BR diskova na tržištu u tolikom broju.... Čekaj da par milijardi ljudi dobije BR rezače i diskove, pa će se uvijek naći neka budala koja će to da kopira ;)

SirDuck

15.5.2008, 10:49

US Airforce(mozda) kupuje PS3 zbog Cell procesora:http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFR...SynopsisP.html (http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFRLRRS/FA8751-08-R-0016/SynopsisP.html)

Moram da se nasmejem ovome :D
Pa imaju jače kompjutere u avionima, baš im treba neka tamo konzola, igračka, da ima "pomogne pri radu" :D

donator99

15.5.2008, 11:28

@NjegovaWisost
Nema to veze sa BluRay medijima.Sony se potrudio oko zastite protiv pokretanja nepotpisanog koda i jos gomile stvari.Cak je i jedan deo procesora rezervisan iskljucivo za program koji se zove Hypervisor, koji stalno radi sa ulogom da spreci pokretanje nepotpisanog koda i jos nekih stvari.
Kada bude napravljen loader, bice moguce igrati backupe.Dotle nista.
Nije problem u medijima.To se lako zameni eksternim hard diskom.Problem je u nepostojanju loadera.

donator99

15.5.2008, 12:54

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/s...leID=207602892 (http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207602892)
EE Times: Latest News

IBM shifts Cell to 65nm
Server chip aims at "supercomputing for the masses"

Rick Merritt
EE Times
(05/13/2008 12:01 HM EDT)

SAN JOSE, Calif. — IBM Corp. officially announces today (May 13) a next-generation version of its Cell processor, the first specifically geared for computer servers.

The PowerXCell 8i will drive the Road Runner system now under test at Los Alamos National Labs to see if it can become the world's first supercomputer to deliver sustained petaflops performance. Besides cracking the petaflops barrier, IBM hopes hundreds of users will decide to plug into their IBM servers a two-socket board housing the new Cell chips to deliver what IBM calls "supercomputing for the masses."

The new chip uses 65nm process technology to reduce the power consumption of the previous 90nm chip while maintaining the same 3.2 GHz frequency. That allows IBM to get two of the chips on to a single board while keeping board-level power consumption under 250 W required by IBM's BladeCenter servers.

The new design now supports mainstream DDR-2 memory rather than the Rambus XDR memories used in the original Cell. It has also expanded total memory capacity of the chip from 2 to 32 Gbytes to support large data sets required in many high-end technical computing applications.

IBM also expanded support for double precision floating point on the eight specialty cores used on Cell. The chip now delivers up to 190 GFlops of double precision floating point performance, five times its previous level, said Jim Comfort, vice president of workload optimized systems in IBM's Systems and Technology Group.

PDF o Roadrunneru:
http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/hpc/roadrun...7%20(LAUR).pdf (http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/hpc/roadrunner/rrinfo/RR%20webPDFs/Roadrunner%20System%20Overview%20Oct%2017,%202007% 20%28LAUR%29.pdf)

Jos infoa o Roadrunneru:

Named after the fleet-of-foot New Mexico state bird, the Roadrunner supercomputer is a hybrid, containing not one type of microprocessor but two.

Its main structure is a standard cluster of microprocessors (in this case AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors). Nothing new here except that each chip has two compute cores instead of one. The hybrid element enters the picture when each Opteron core is internally attached to another type of chip, the enhanced Cell (the PowerXCell 8i), which has been designed specially for Roadrunner. The enhanced Cell can act like a turbocharger, potentially boosting the performance up to 25 times over that of an Opteron compute core alone.

In the end, each code achieved a substantial speedup when run on a Cell-accelerated Opteron compute node in comparison with execution on a single Opteron compute core, without the Cell. The VPIC code, which simulates plasmas in magnetic fields, is a prime example. It ran 6 times faster on the Opteron-Cell node than on the Opteron alone. That increase will allow researchers to tackle some scientific grand-challenge problems.

Successfully accelerating the Monte Carlo code called Milagro took many months, several false starts, and modification of 10 to 30 percent of the code. Monte Carlo codes, which simulate radiation transport, are very expensive computationally. As the October decision time drew near, Milagro was also executing 6 times faster with the Cell than without, a crucial achievement for the acceptance of Roadrunner.

Los Alamos scientists are now confident that Roadrunner will become the world's fastest supercomputer. It will be a tremendous asset to the computer simulations performed at the Laboratory for the nuclear weapons program as well as for scientific grand challenges. Important codes are expected to run at 200 to 500 teraflop/s. Roadrunner will also be the first computer to run the universally recognized code used to test supercomputer performance—LINPACK—at over 1 petaflop/s.

http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/f...00805/id/13277 (http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/1663.article/d/200805/id/13277)

Da pojasnim malo, novi Cell ima oko 4 puta vece performanse od najjaceg dostupnog Quad Core procesora. :)

voodoo_

15.5.2008, 14:54

Sony je odlicno sve smislio sto se piraterije tie.Bukvalno je nemoguce napraviti pirata za PS3
Moguće je napraviti pirata, gomila igara već ima da se skine na internetu.
Nemoguće ih je pokrenuti, to je problem.

zdravkelja

15.5.2008, 15:01

Verujem da ce do kraja godine naci resenje da ih konacno pokrenu.

M.C.

15.5.2008, 22:00

I da to uspe tu su Blu-Ray diskovi... Pitam li se koliko bi kostale piratske igre, pravo malo bogatstvo.

zdravkelja

15.5.2008, 22:07

Ali u svakom slucaj manje nego original. Ali zato postoji internet. Samo sto skidanje dugo traje.

A cena originala je kriminal, vala sto je mnogo, mnogo je. Stvarno preteruju :mad:

M.C.

15.5.2008, 22:13

Xex, zamisli da treba da skidas Dual-Layer BD igru... cirka 50-ak GB. Naravno podrazumeva se da imas BD rezac. :) Mada secam se da je slicna situacija bila i sa DVD igrama na pocetku PS2 ere.

voodoo_

15.5.2008, 22:32

Jeste, ali PS3 igre ni približno ne popunjavaju ceo disk.
Evo ti primeri direktno sa newzbina:
- FIFA Street 3: 2.9 GB
- Gran Turismo 5 Prologue: 3.1 GB
- Sega Superstar Tennis: 3.5 GB
- Burnout Paradise: 3.7 GB
- Unreal Tournament 3: 4.9 GB
- Virtua Tennis 3: 4.9 GB
- Rock Band: 5.2 GB
- Ratatouille: 6.4 GB
- Turok: 6.5 GB
- Condemned 2 Bloodshot: 7.4 GB
- Devil May Cry 4: 8.6 GB
- Lost Planet Extreme Condition: 8.8 GB
- Assassin's Creed: 9.2 GB
- Kane & Lynch: 11 GB
- Folklore: 15.9 GB
- The Orange Box: 19 GB
- Uncharted: 24 GB
- Lair: 26 GB

Igre koje će popuniti ceo DL disk su Metal Gear Solid 4 i slične hardkor PS3 ekskluzive, ali je njihov broj znatno manji u odnosu na multiplatformske igre. Drugo, cilj svog truda PS3 hakera je da se igre prvo pokrenu sa hard diska konzole, a narezani diskovi ako nekad budu isplatljivi, biće.

zdravkelja

15.5.2008, 22:35

:icon_scra Mislio sam da te igre mnogo vise zauzimaju.

donator99

15.5.2008, 23:05

Multiplatform igre ne zauzimaju mnogo.
Ekskluzive sa druge strane(selling point PS konzola)...
Pa, ko ce sa srpskim broadbandom skidati 50GB?
A tek kasnije kada dodju igre na 100 i 200GB BluRay diskovima...
Sta da radim, odem na letnji raspust i ostavim PC da skida non-stop?
Pa, vise me ispadne struja nego igra... :D

djapens

16.5.2008, 7:48

donator99

16.5.2008, 9:50

Nisi ti dobro shvatio.
Ova lista koju je voodoo postavio je lista rippovanih imagea, koje su nastale kada su igre dumpovane pod Linuxom.
To su cele igre, koje, kada se bude napravio funkcionalni loader, ce sluziti za loadovanje u taj isti loader(kao sto npr. loadujes igre u Alchohol na kompu).
To nisu instalacije igara.
Instalacije igara na Playstationu zauzimaju od par stotina MB do 4-5GB.Ne odlucujes ti sam koliki deo igre ces instalirati na hard disk, to odlucuje dev tim te igre.
Neke igre(Burnout npr.) se uopste ne instaliraju,

donator99

17.5.2008, 16:50

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/s...leID=202101163 (http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202101163)
http://www.power.org/devcon/07

Playstation3 helps robots see

Rick Merritt EE Times (09/24/2007 7:59 HÅ’ EDT)

AUSTIN, Texas â€” Robots took a tiny step closer to seeing the same way humans do thanks to a team of university researchers who ported to the Cell processor new vision algorithms derived from brain research. The team from Dartmouth and the University of California at Irvine were able to get three networked Playstation3 devices to recognize a given object in one second using their software.

...

"We aim to put all the speech and vision recognition into a working robot, so we need real-time performance," said Felch. "DARPA wants to see people create robots that can actually drive a vehicle without harming anyone in the process," he added.

...

The team spent about eight months on the project first implementing the algorithm on a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Dupo processor. Using the PC, the team showed machine vision that could recognize in three minutes a bar stool in an image of an office setting.

Using a network of three Playstation3 consoles linked to a PC, the tem was able to speed the recognition rate up to just one second. "A one-second delay is essentially real time object recognition, and that is just what humans do," said Felch.

Thanks to its on-board accelerators, the Cell processor in the consoles was able to handle key computations in three cycles that the Intel chip had to compute sequentially in 15 cycles. Overall the three consoles handled the work at rates up to 140 times the speed of the single PC processor, Felch said.

The underlying algorithm breaks objects down into a hierarchy of key shapes and objects called line triplets. Those primitives are then compared to similar shapes in a new image. The research effort was focused on speeding up the process of making those comparisons.

Latency is significantly less important for the brain algorithm. Synapses typically have latency delays of one millisecond, Felch said. That's more than an order of magnitude higher than the latencies in today's fastest computers, he added.

3 Cell-a@3,2GHz=140 Core 2 Duo@2,0GHz(u odredjenim kalkulacijama). :)
[radi se o starom Cellu, a ne o PowerXCell 8i]

SirDuck

17.5.2008, 18:07

Al si uzeo poređenje, 3.2 na 2 :D

donator99

9.6.2008, 12:25

SAN FRANCISCO: An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

"This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world's fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

"Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade," said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for cmmputer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics."

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system's hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

"We've proved some skeptics wrong," said Michael Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before."

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.

"If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you're driving will benefit from this," said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Texas.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

5char

donator99

9.6.2008, 12:26

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world's fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by IBM reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

"It's a sign that we are maintaining our position," said Peter Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that "the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines."

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, IBM is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. "You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader," said Nicholas Donofrio, an IBM executive vice president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States' supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.Izvor. (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/...ops.php?page=1)

Eto, prvi super kompjuter koji je probio magicnu granicu od jednog PF-a nosi nalepnicu Powered by Cell Broadband Engine. :D

EDIT:
Svaki triblade(bazna jedinica Roadrunnera, tj. Roadrunner kao celina je skup tribladeova) se sastoji od 2 Dual core Opteron procesora i 4 Cell procesora, sto znaci da Roadrunner raspolaze sa ukupno 6480 Opteron i 12960 Cell procesora, mada, glavnu snagu ovom sistemu daju upravu Cell cipovi koji se koriste kao takozvani turbo-chargeri koji dramaticno ubrzavaju procesiranje odredjenih matematickih kalklacija. :)