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The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

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Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#71

Post by Koshkin »

zozbot234 wrote: post #65
vvanders wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If consoles were sold at a profit what you say may make sense. However building an open platform means you need to devote resources to it both from a capital perspective and opportunity cost. Driving demand towards the hardware, instead of software and licensing costs on a negative margin product is a pretty sure way to run a company out of business.

Why can't console hardware be sold at a profit? Make up for the increased sale price by bundling a rebate on the first X officially-published games the customer buys. Then everything after that is pure profit for the console vendor.

The more likely you are to buy the (cheap-ish) hardware, the more likely they are to sell you more games - at the regular price. Also, there is this balance which is unrelated to the cost of making the hardware, the balance between the buyer’s wanting to actually use the hardware, since it was bought not too cheaply, and not making the price of hardware too high and scare off the potential buyer.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#72

Post by lozaning »

walrus01 wrote: post #58
lozaning wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not running 7+ cards on a mining rig you're probably doing it wrong. The higher the number of cards you run in a rig the more you can distribute the cost of the non mining hardware (HD, mobo, cpu, memory) across cards. A mobo that supports 8 cards might be double the cost of a board that supports 4 cards, but it prevents you from having to buy a second cpu, a second hard drive, second psu, and more memory t…

The last time I spent 15 minutes doing a possible ROI calculation on a GPU based Ethereum mining system, about a year ago, I came to the conclusion that the upfront cost of buying the GPUs alone, plus the electricity (entirely ignoring the cost of a dedicated mining purpose motherboard and cpu/ram, power supply, etc) would not have a reasonable payback period. Even if the electricity was 1.5 cents a kWh, and cooling…

I should have paid more attention to my phrasing. If you were running less than 7 cards per rig you likely did it wrong. Now if you do it at all you're doing it wrong.

ROI is more or less impossible now. By the time you'd get close the reward will halve again. Also back then the diff kept rising increasingly quickly as well. I was doing this back in like 2016 with free power and cooling and made a grip of money.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#73

Post by Rotten194 »

zanny wrote: post #43
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play the devil's advocate, Sony is in the business of selling games, their cosnoles were just a means to that and since they were selling the hardware at a loss, selling more of it to people who will never buy games was bad for their business model.

To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers. The consoles that existed in…

Have you used a switch? There is no commodity tablet on the market with the attachable controller form factor & dockable with HDMI passthru that the Switch has, at the Switch pricepoint.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#74

Post by Koshkin »

scarface74 wrote: post #42
Gracana wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choosing not to buy products from a company you don't like seems pretty reasonable to me. It doesn't have to be a cunning plot to destroy the company.

True. But it’s like every single random submission about “Why I chose to leave $X”. In the grand scheme of things. No one cares.

Well, obviously, some do. There is always an agenda to be pursued, but you are right in that companies do not care. Even if they say they do.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#75

Post by hyperman1 »

grogenaut wrote: post #18
rvz wrote: post #8

This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those wit…

(I'm sure I'll lose karma for explaining Sonys side, since some people just want to be mad) Linux support was not removed due to Geohot. It was a driver and business priority issue. Geohot just sealed the deal. Having worked there during the kerfuffle, I can confirm their reason was valid for not supporting Linux going forward. It was a non trivial effort and they wanted those engineers to make it support the new har…

I am taken aback a bit by this characterisation:

    And then a bunch of the community responded as petulant children and
Sony supported linux in public, people bought their hardware for it, and then, without warning, sony janked the rug from under them. Of course people tried to take back their hardware, for which they paid. The blame here is 100% on Sony.

Sony has a massive internal conflict of interest by being both a content creator and a hardware provider. They sabotage their own products to the detriment of their customers again and again.

Sony worked with the community for a few years, and had the longest unhacked console to show for it. Then They slapped the community in the face and paid dearly for it, as the should. Sony should beg the community for another chance.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#76

Post by mr_toad »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #67
DCKing wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree any of them were underpowered. The PS1 and PS3 arguably produced the nicest graphics of their generations - the PS1 because its competition was compromised in their own way, and the PS3 due to sheer brute force. The PS2 for sure was less powerful than the more conventional architectures of the GameCube and Xbox, but it was released 18 months before either of them in a time when Moore's law was still extrem…

PS1 didn't hold back PC or other consoles so I bear it no ill will. PS2 dominated sixth gen sales. By being the winning console but releasing 18 months earlier it held back everyone. And since, like you said, Moore's law was very much alive this represented a significant reduction in overall quality for an entire generation. :( PS3 at it's peak was great. But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a ve…

> But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a very poor value proposition for developers.

It’s funny that this is always a criticism levelled at the CPU and not the developers.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#77

Post by znpy »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #3

> the PS4 can’t easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. “There’s nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, it’s just a regular old PC,” Khanna says. “We weren’t really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.” The article doesn’t really explain in detail the difference that made the ps3 an attractive buy for making super computers over regular PCs. Can someone elaborate?

> Just a regular old pc

It's literally there: the PS4 is amd based pc (bulldozer architecture iirc) packaged in a fancy case and with a nice gpu.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#78

Post by sandov »

zanny wrote: post #43
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play the devil's advocate, Sony is in the business of selling games, their cosnoles were just a means to that and since they were selling the hardware at a loss, selling more of it to people who will never buy games was bad for their business model.

To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers. The consoles that existed in…

I would have loved SteamOS to be a general purpose Linux OS with Steam preinstalled instead of the... thing it actually was.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#79

Post by nrp »

mr_toad wrote: post #76
forrestthewoods wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS1 didn't hold back PC or other consoles so I bear it no ill will. PS2 dominated sixth gen sales. By being the winning console but releasing 18 months earlier it held back everyone. And since, like you said, Moore's law was very much alive this represented a significant reduction in overall quality for an entire generation. :( PS3 at it's peak was great. But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a ve…

> But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a very poor value proposition for developers. It’s funny that this is always a criticism levelled at the CPU and not the developers.

It’s a financial decision. Building a competitive console game wasn’t cheap by that generation, and passion only goes so far. Publishers ultimately want to recoup their investment, which means developers targeting the common subset of functionality and using middleware wherever possible to support multiple platforms. Unless Sony was your publisher, it wouldn’t have made economic sense to deeply optimize for Cell. PS4 and Xbox One being so similar to each other is good for developers, which is good for games, which is good for gamers, even if it does mean fewer esoteric toys for passionate engineers to play with.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#80

Post by abtinf »

DCKing wrote: post #49

The Playstation 1, 2 and 3 are each in their own way Sony's take on an alternate history of computer graphics. It was Sony's intent with all three consoles to put the "special effects" (that in 2019 are performed using shaders) in the CPU , and not the GPU. As a result, the PS1, but especially the PS2 and PS3 were engineered to have amazing vector capabilities in the CPU. The PS2's Emotion Engine had extremely high p…

Why doesn’t Intel make a chip specialized for gaming? Something like a dual core CPU optimized for single threaded performance and a variable number of GPU cores (a guaranteed minimum up to a perfect maximum), binned by clock speed. Skip all the support for extra pcie lanes (except maybe for storage).

From your comment, it seems like Sony tried exactly this but failed. Is there an inherent flaw in such a design or just poor execution?

Edit: the biggest problem I see with such a design is RAM IO, but I would think that could be mitigated. Maybe even eliminate support for DDR, instead embedding 4 or 8 GB in the package.

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