Blue ray winning the format war will more than get SONy more money it is needed in the next gen. Lots of money will get thrown at the next gen the way things are going. R&D will cost way more as all the big boys will move to real multi core systems. Then you have the added cost of artist making all of those nice normal polygon counts. Another thing sony is doing is increasing their first party development presents... you may not really see it in the next coming years but I'd say in the last days of the PS3 you will. I think the big players realize why nintendo has always out sold them software wise.

So basically SONY can loose this round and be sitting pretty nice. You get some cool games and you also get to help out sony's next r&d bill. Really if you are a SONy fan this is needed. The direct x 10 stuff is what the futures is. Maybe some thing will come along and use the brute force way less but it will still have shaders, it's sorta like having a 2d drawing app and no layers ya know.

SONY will be fine, most hardware buffs know about the issues and really the people screaming they need blue ray are the people that SONY needs to cater to. They better get some compression going so you can have a movie and a video game on the same disk. That right there is the key to making people upgrade.

Runna

I think you are on to something about the PS3's longterm goal. As unorganized as they were at E3 05, 06 it seems they scurried to get a console together fearing the competition moving in on market share. The PS2's life is as strong as ever, and Sony knew this. I wouldn't doubt that Sony would have never released the PS3 yet had MS and Nintendo had no plans for consoles to be released when they were. They could have held on to the PS2. It sickens me the plan of them including the BluRay player tho, because its totally obvious their intentions there are just to win over their first movie format. But, I know saying that is flamebait so I won't eleborate.

Please don't flame people.. its just a harmless theory that probably isn't true, but does make sense. Keep it friendly :)

Cellien

[www.next-gen.biz]

Runna

Really all that more powerful stuff sucked you guys right in there. Hey you still gets some cool games and epic trying to fix there engine because of a half way realized idea for a chip. Put simply SONY could not afford to make the real cell CPU. Only IBM and Intel have that type of money and if you think IBM is stupid enough to give them real power 5 or 6 tech with out major cash then you are crazy. The cell was IBM way of playing with GPU tech to increase FP performance once GPU started to get dropped into multi CPU cores. Like I said before GPUs are the real cell tech... it is already scalable ranging from 320 - 70 cores if you want to count them.

Like I told you before had SONY did a nintendo* and waited...LOL they would still be number one! Hell they could have just stuck two PS2s together and been done with it as it is still selling better than the PS3...LOL

*(By nintendo simply upgrade there tech while keeping the ps2 base and expanding it)

Some times I feel like SONY did not make the PS3 to win this round. Thats why they keep talking about the 10 year thing. By that time blue ray will be a standard and that will be a huge win for them. They have like 2 to 3 more years with the PS2 before it dies... yet really they may have longer than that. The SONY fans will be there no prob they are not going any where. Some companies love SONY and are still scared of the money printing nintendo cats...LOL

Seriously GPU tech and CPU tech will be ridiculous come the next gen. So much will be affordable then. Talk about a level playing field...

Runna

@Jarol: The Cell isn't even x86 based so you wouldn't be able to use it for anything but certain Linux distributions. The chip doesn't support out of order execution or branch prediction, so it wouldn't do much good in the PC world.

Heyyou27

Cellien

-

Max; if you check the Folding@home statistics you will see than the GPU client, designed to run on DX9 graphics cards is about on par with the PS3 client in terms of performance. The nVidia G80 GPU (8800 cards) is a heap faster in Floating Point than the currently compatible ATI gpu's, but unfortunately nVidia haven't provided a compatible driver yet to the Folding@home team.

The Cell's only impressive feature is its Theoratical Floating Point Performance, and even that has been beaten by PC GPU's about a year ago. Sony is very clever in only picking FPU intensive tasks to show off the power of Cell, but for a PC you will needs more than that; you will need out-of-order, complex CPU designs (preferably with multiple identical cores, and large amounts of cache memory)...Something CELL cannot provide...

Kwyjibo77

8800 is only optimised (sort of) for game graphics, not scientific computing. I guess folding@home shows that CELL is quite good at it. But, of course, it all comes down to software/drivers you use, and nvidia is still struggling to perfect the 8800 performance in games, so they can't be arsed to bother with other stuff. At least not until 9800 comes out this november.

MaxS

If this is the case, IBM has been selling Cell-based blade servers since September of last year.

topaz420

SniperZoz

Seriously, call me back when the technology is available for PC enthusiasts to take advantage of as this is not going to help the consumer in the end at this rate.

Jarol

The difference er it's now on a single chip. I wonder if it comes with the PS3 operating system so that it can play PS3 games. Naw that would actually make the PS3 redundant wouldn't it.

@Heyyou27:

I checked and yep you are right. A single 8800 apparently outclasses the cell by a huge margin. I think that qualifies as an ouch moment for all of the Sony fanboys out there. Sorry guys you've been outclassed by a graphics card.

penhalion

tinnitus

Heyyou27

tinnitus

Consolcwby

stennex

tinnitus

cactaur

I have wondered for some time whether Sony or some 3rd party would make a computer based on the cell processor. But, if they did, it would be a very short period of time before someone figured out how to get PS3 images running off of its hard-drive, effectively killing the inherhent advantage of the PS3. Why buy a very limited (in terms of upgradability) game console when you could create a true PC that could run PS3 games?

bornonce

Spartan1308™

LOLOLlolLOlolL1!!!

I kid of course. Can't wait to get me some Heavenly Sword.

Car2oon

If not for game then what is it for? Boffins of course!

Runna

Lyme

TOCATL

Black-Dog-Howls

firelogic

xaosoax

hero76