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Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

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Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#251

Post by aahhahahaaa »

foxfired wrote: post #79
zbrozek wrote: post #45

Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Massive kudos to the manufacturing engineers who managed to pull that off.

There is a interview of Elon Musk with MKBHD. He was precisely referring to this as being one of the issues when they were trying to automate the pipeline. The machines just couldn't plug a loose tube in its place. Maybe they should have consulted with Sony.

I imagine there are certain times where you end up redesigning the tube instead!

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#252

Post by mxcrossb »

wallacoloo wrote: post #238
vmception wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha just a few years ahead of its time! Some of the first bitcoin faucets had captchas to “reduce spam”, as in prevent humans from getting too much free bitcoin, but really the captcha was a real captcha that a bot was stuck on, and was just paying humans to solve them to access some greater bounty

Morally ambiguous, but I actually implemented exactly what you’re describing back when bitcoin was at $50-100. I found some service that would pay me $1 for every 1000 captchas I solved, and then I scraped that and built a BTC faucet site (I think I called it captchacoin.com, or captchabit.com) that would essentially pay the user $0.50 in BTC for each captcha they solved. It went from 0 captchas per day to 10000 capt…

It seems like there should be some way to cut out the middle man and build an entire currency based on solving captchas.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#253

Post by rodgerd »

actuator wrote: post #51

This looks so amazing and I wasn't aware that Playstations are still manufactured in Sony's home country itself. I guess automation helps in keeping the manufacturing cost low. Now I am intrigued about what high selling electronic devices are manufactured in their home country itself and not by the ODMs/CMs in countries with cheap labour like China.

Cameras. There's a split within (the dwindling pool of) camera manufacturers about what they'll build in Japan/Germany and what they'll outsource, and where they'll outsource it to.

So you have, say, Olympus designing some lenses, software, and bodies, outsourcing some lens design (probably to Sigma - it's something of a closely guarded secret, although it seems all the major camera companies outsource at least some of their lens designs), outsource some of their manufacturing to other countries, while some remains in Japan.

As to why, check out Yongnou's EF-mount 50/1.8 and 35/2 lenses and you'll see why Japanese manufacturers want to keep their designs as far away from China as they can.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#254

Post by wyldfire »

Konohamaru wrote: post #237
zbrozek wrote: post #45

Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Massive kudos to the manufacturing engineers who managed to pull that off.

This is only tangentially related, but the dictionary isn't helping me distinguish between these two concepts. In networking what is the difference between bandwidth and throughput, if there is a difference?

The other comment regarding latency/throughput is a good place to start because those can often be in contention.

But bandwidth is not quite the same as throughput either, so I'll answer your question genuinely. Bandwidth typically refers to the actual channel capacity for a single link. Maybe that's your PCIe lane, your wifi channel or your HDRadio channel. The bandwidth is often measured as the spectral width of the channel in frequency. But those channels include some coding for error detection or compression.

Ultimately what matters most is what kind of throughput the channel can deliver. This is the metric that is often measured in bytes or bits per second. A one gigabit Ethernet card is intended to deliver one gigabit/sec of throughput with the Ethernet channel coding. So if you hooked up a test device to your NIC it should be able to drive frames through an otherwise unoccupied channel at one gigabit/sec. But to keep the example interesting, end-users would generally measure throughput with all the added layers of coding and protocol provided by a network stack. The term "bandwidth" is much more nebulous when someone uses it to describe traffic spanning various buses and network media. I'd take context clues and assume that this usage of the term is somewhat like throughput. Though perhaps you could consider the independent physical channels as a single logical one and extrapolate some kind of conceptual bandwidth?

Sorry, starting to ramble a bit at the end there but I think you may get the gist.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#255

Post by actuator »

rodgerd wrote: post #253
actuator wrote: post #51

This looks so amazing and I wasn't aware that Playstations are still manufactured in Sony's home country itself. I guess automation helps in keeping the manufacturing cost low. Now I am intrigued about what high selling electronic devices are manufactured in their home country itself and not by the ODMs/CMs in countries with cheap labour like China.

Cameras. There's a split within (the dwindling pool of) camera manufacturers about what they'll build in Japan/Germany and what they'll outsource, and where they'll outsource it to. So you have, say, Olympus designing some lenses, software, and bodies, outsourcing some lens design (probably to Sigma - it's something of a closely guarded secret, although it seems all the major camera companies outsource at least some…

This seems interesting. I checked and it seems Sigma makes everything in Japan. Amusingly enough all the well selling digital camera manufacturers(Fujifilm, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Olympus) are Japanese.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#256

Post by Konohamaru »

zbrozek wrote: post #240
Konohamaru wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only tangentially related, but the dictionary isn't helping me distinguish between these two concepts. In networking what is the difference between bandwidth and throughput, if there is a difference?

Did you misread latency and throughput?

No. I went to look up throughput in the dictionary and couldn't understand how it was different from bandwidth.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#257

Post by forgingahead »

easytiger wrote: post #32
rusk wrote: post #11

God I love my PS4 - it has to be the peak of this class of machine. I can't imagine how it could be improved upon without going beyond the "box under the telly format". Incredible piece of machinery. I can't imagine the PS5 will be much more than an upgrade. In my opinion the second best console is the PS2. I love Nintendo but they're more like toys than hard core gaming and entertainment machines. PS2 up until PS4 w…

> it has to be the peak of this class of machine. I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM When i enter the notification quick tab it takes 30-40 seconds to show the message I've received, then another 10-15 to accept it. Currently one single game, COD:MW consumes the entirety of the space on the device. From launch it wasn't ever going to be enough. You need to keep space free because…

To be fair, Call of Duty games are notorious for their poor coding and design. I never have the issues with any other games that happens with COD. Not sure if it's an odd dev team, or if they really trying to wrangle performance out of the hardware that makes them do all these kooky things.

There's a very common complaint that COD requires double the game size free space to download updates, regardless of the update size itself. This is ridiculous and not something that is common to other games.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#258

Post by kalleboo »

phatfish wrote: post #166
rusk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! This is what I was driving at. Looping history back to the days of the C64, Amiga, Spectrum etc. where home tinkerers could make a massive contribution to the ecosystem. These were the gaming consoles of their day. Yes there were the NES and Atari 2600 but the popularity of something like the C64 is something that modern console vendors (especially at the PS4 price-point) should be falling over themselves for.

The PS3 ran Linux at the beginning. That went nowhere for Sony apart from a lawsuit when it got patched out and consoles getting racked for cheap compute at the beginning. I don't remember the specifics apart from the GPU being inaccessible which just made it a PowerPC server. But i suspect that experience killed off the idea internally for quite a while. Maybe it would be a last resort if the Playstation does lose o…

Sony also released Linux for the PS2 before that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2

And there was an official home-brew kit for the PS1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#260

Post by voltagex_ »

vmception wrote: post #247
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have an upvote for the story, but don't pretend it was "morally ambiguous". That was plain evil with one level of detachment, and helped enable spammers and scammers.

cryptocurrency needed faucets and it helped adoption

Cryptocurrency is the biggest backwards step for the climate since CFCs.
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