Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

[Valkysas]

I think this was pretty cool of them to do. You would think video game companies would just do a really simple reply or ignore it completely.

"The PS3 is 128 bit, but it is more 128 bit than the others. The number of bits isn't really a very good measure anymore. To be honest, it hasn't been a good measure since PS1 days. That said...

Most single pieces of data fit in 32 or 64 bits. The benefit of 128 bits is that you can operate on 4 pieces of 32-bit data at the same time, which is called SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). This is only useful for data that needs the same operation on all 4 pieces, which is common in games for things such as 3D graphical transformations, physical simulation, collision detection, etc. 128-bits is the "sweet spot" of price and performance, so that is what everyone seems to have settled upon.

To get more power, people have instead now been moving to more processor cores. (PS3 has 8, Xbox 360 has 3, Wii has 1, PS2 had 1 + 2 special-purpose, Xbox had 1, etc).

For graphics, it is even trickier to explain. The biggest difference is that in the past, graphics chips were "fixed-function". Now, they are programmable. But people don't really talk about it in terms of bits; instead, they usually measure in terms of flops."

http://www.insertcredit.com/archives/001618.html

Thanks Sony. I was curious about that, and I'm sure others were too.

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

Hey, I heard the bit question being argued at...gamepro, I think! According to this, they were wrong. party.

[Misty]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

Wow, some of the stuff I thought I knew about bits (being the dummy I am about it) was wrong. At any rate, this is interesting info.

[The Toecutter]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

I wonder how many here even know what flops are.

[Crustyrailgun]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

Hey, I heard the bit question being argued at...gamepro, I think! According to this, they were wrong. party.

[Cheap sarcasm]Gamepro... being wrong about something? NO WAY![/Cheap sarcasm]

As for the topic at hand, it does explain the whole thing to me, Thanks Sony... you finally did something right... except that it had nothing to do with the PS3 in general.

[jvrlopez]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

To get more power, people have instead now been moving to more processor cores. (PS3 has 8, Xbox 360 has 3, Wii has 1, PS2 had 1 + 2 special-purpose, Xbox had 1, etc).

Geez they always have to gloat don't they?

[thetruecoolness]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

I wonder how many here even know what flops are.

Floating Point Operations Per Second . Basically the amount of simple operations a GPU or CPU can do using floating point number per second. Floating point operations have and always will be likely (until maybe quantum computing) slower than integer operations, and operations on powers of 2 will always be the fastest.

But yeah basically all that measures is the bandwidth of the processor and not necessarily the throughput. I bet what a lot of people also don't realize is that clock speed doesn't mean anything really. What's important is the ratio of clock speed to CPI (clock cycles per instruction). Since a processor could be twice as fast on the clock rate, but because of that have to move it's operations to 2 CPI instead of 1, which would mean it would perform at the same speed. The main reason AMD names their processors like they do, to let consumers know that their chip is just as fast as an Intel CPU even though it may have a slower clock speed.

Hurray for hardware classes.

Oh and to take the wind out of Sonys sails a bit on the core thing, Sonys CPU is one large core and 7 smaller ones, so calling it 8 core is a bit erroneous. Mainly because most dual-core processors have 2 equal power processors, which is not the case with Sony's PS3 chip. So while this is a boost for AI and other parallel operations (ones that can happen simultaneously with no shared data) for operations that have to go in order and wait on the previous task this offers no speed up. Plus companies actually have to take advantage of this as traditionally Games have been written as a single threaded program which will not take advantage of multiprocessing. So more does not always mean better, and is not linear in the speed up of a program. So even 8 equal size cores does not have a 8 times advantage over a single core, it's likely around 8/3 or something smaller (given most tasks cannot be completely parallelised). Plus having the cores having to work together and keep consistent caches also adds a small amount of overhead. So while Sony's processor is likely better than the 360's for gaming, for general PC use I'm not so sure (assuming the 360's Cores are equal in power). Of course until the PS3 gets more than 360 ports no one will notice a difference.

Oh and to further explain the difference between a bigger bandwidth (bits) and multi-core is that multi-core can be utilized to perform multiple parallel operations up to the amount of processors available, so core 1-2 could do the update, cores 3-7 could do an individual enemies movement, and core 8 could process sound, all at the same time, where as more bandwidth would only allow more inputs to one function. And the main reason 128 is the sweet spot is that it is the best for XYZW coordinate calculations, since it can hold 4 numbers. This coordinate system is used in all movement, physics and graphics calculations, meaning most used in a game. So having anymore space would only allow you better precision, since most calculations do not involves bigger than a 4 coordinate vector. But to get twice the precision you would have to double the bus (and all the internal gates), which would be very costly. And normally a 32bit float is good enough, and a 64bit double is not needed.

[Misty]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

Wow, thetruecoolness is just a beacon of information! No wonder we call him the "help desk"

[thetruecoolness]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

Just the myriad of things you pick up getting a Computer Science degree, and general interest in computers, though really I usually focus more on software (programming) than hardware. Though of course when programming it helps to have a general idea what your hardware is doing.

[The Toecutter]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

You deserve a cookie. I took a course in microprocessors, hardware/software, and have sat in on lectures in computer architecture. But I'm not a CS major. I [particularly enjoyed programming in assembly language and even wrote a game with it for the Motorola 68KMB. I'm glad that others here are aware of what these terms mean and even how they work. When someone from sony talks about this stuff, even to your hardcore gamers, my first impression is that it will go right over their heads. I know I certainly wouldn't have understood the article had I not worked with these things.

[Alzar]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

I'm a CS major too, but I didn't pay any attention to hardware.

So I would suck balls at PS3 programming, with all its stupid cores 'n ****.

i r smrt

[Czechs Mex]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

"The PS3 is 128 bit, but it is more 128 bit than the others. The number of bits isn't really a very good measure anymore. To be honest, it hasn't been a good measure since PS1 days. That said...

Most single pieces of data fit in 32 or 64 bits. The benefit of 128 bits is that you can operate on 4 pieces of 32-bit data at the same time, which is called SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). This is only useful for data that needs the same operation on all 4 pieces, which is common in games for things such as 3D graphical transformations, physical simulation, collision detection, etc. 128-bits is the "sweet spot" of price and performance, so that is what everyone seems to have settled upon.

To get more power, people have instead now been moving to more processor cores. (PS3 has 8, Xbox 360 has 3, Wii has 1, PS2 had 1 + 2 special-purpose, Xbox had 1, etc).

For graphics, it is even trickier to explain. The biggest difference is that in the past, graphics chips were "fixed-function". Now, they are programmable. But people don't really talk about it in terms of bits; instead, they usually measure in terms of flops."

OMG TYPICAL SONY RESPONSE. I hate them so much.

[DarkwingChuck]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

Just the myriad of things you pick up getting a Computer Science degree, and general interest in computers, though really I usually focus more on software (programming) than hardware. Though of course when programming it helps to have a general idea what your hardware is doing.

I'm one semester away from my Associate's in Computer Technology and I don't feel like I know anything. I get great grades but I still don't feel like I really KNOW anything. Half the other people in the class seem to know all this stuff about other programming languages and stuff from before they started at this school and I don't know anything but what's been taught. Makes me feel stupid even though I'm getting better grades than them. I don't think I want to pursue programming anymore anyway but I'm determined to finish the degree.

[Valkysas]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

Posts deleted, infractions given. This isnt a "bash sony" topic, and anyone who tries to turn it into one will be punished.

as for the other processing cores in the PS3 not being as good as the main one, it's probably for the best. I wouldnt want to see it's price if they were equally powerful.

[jvrlopez]

Re: Sony explains "bits" for current gen systems

I'm one semester away from my Associate's in Computer Technology and I don't feel like I know anything. I get great grades but I still don't feel like I really KNOW anything. Half the other people in the class seem to know all this stuff about other programming languages and stuff from before they started at this school and I don't know anything but what's been taught. Makes me feel stupid even though I'm getting better grades than them. I don't think I want to pursue programming anymore anyway but I'm determined to finish the degree.

It's only an associates degree