Gathering of Dreamers

Japan gets Devil May Cry 4 - PS3 Bundle

2007-12-22T21:46:00.000-05:00

What sells in Japan? That's right. Hardware bundles. So come January 31, Japan will be getting another hardware bundle, this one pairing Devil May Cry 4 with the 40GB PS3. Oh, you'll also get a Blu-Ray full of what sounds like (hey, Ash is on holidays, I'm doing my best) Devil May Cry 4 gameplay footage, cut together to form a story reel. It'll sell for ¥47,800 (USD$422), and you can get the PS3 in both colours (black, ceramic white)

Alienware's Area-51 ALX CF the first to use 45nm processors

2007-11-12T19:31:00.000-05:00

Well, that didn't take long -- just a few hours after Intel confirmed that those hot new 45nm Penryn processors are shipping, Alienware blasted out a press release announcing the Area-51 ALX CF, the first machine to use the new chips.

The QX9650-equipped machines can be ordered overclocked up to 4.0GHz, and Alienware also bumped the graphics to dual CrossFire ATI Radeon HD 3870 cards. All that power won't come cheap, though -- the CF line starts at $5499.

Japan to get a 160GB PS3

2007-10-08T09:32:00.000-04:00

Rumors have surfaced stating that Sony may have yet another PS3 SKU on the way. Sony has registered a new model labeled CECHG06 (160GB PS3), similar to the 40GB PS3's CECHG01.

Insiders have claimed that the new SKU's specs come straight from Sony Computer Entertainment International's Japan offices.

Here are the rumored specs:

* Code: CECHG06 (SPECIFICATION)
* Sony PlayStation 3
* 160GB 2.5 SATA 5400rpm HDD
* CELL Broadband Engine (65nm process) @ 3.2ghz
* PPU x1, SPE x8
* RSX GPU (65nm process) @ 550mhz
* Blu-ray Optical Disc Drive @ 2x
* Memory Card Reader- Memory Stick Duo, Compact Flash, Secure Digital
* 6x USB 2.0 ports
* 2x HDMI 1.3 ports
* 3x Gigabit ethernet ports
* DUALSHOCK 3 controller

However, please remember that until official confirmation from Sony, this is just whispers in the wind. Stay tuned for more information!

Metal Gear Solid 4: Integrated Site

2007-09-29T11:11:00.000-04:00

Enjoy!

TGS 07 Sony Cocktail Party Pictures

2007-09-19T20:17:00.000-04:00

TGS 07 Sony Cocktail Party

Where else would Sony host their pre-TGS cocktail party but at their Corporate Headquarters in Shinagawa? Sony opened their doors to the non-Japanese media today for the first time and we got to see what their lavishly over the top interior designers have done with the place. The room was full of journalists (see Adam Sessler from G4), Sony executives (from both sides of the pond - SCEI were surprisingly absent) and more food and drink than you could shake a stick at. Trust us, we tried.

Check out the gallery below to see the huge screens that showed off Sony's multiple first party trailers as well as the smaller screens which allowed us another wee glimpse into those upcoming 2007 games (for the upteenth time). There were people there too, apparently.

Metal Gear Solid 4: TGS 07 Cam Trailer

2007-09-19T18:22:00.000-04:00

It's a Cam trailer...

Enjoy!

Microsoft's Gala UK H3 Launch Party in London

2007-09-18T19:24:00.000-04:00

London, 18th September 2007: US music superstar Pharrell Williams will fly to the UK next week to host a very special party for the launch of Halo 3, Microsoft reveals today.

As anticipation for the game reaches fever pitch, the music icon and self-confessed gaming fanatic will head to London's BFI IMAX cinema on September 25 to host the 'Halo 3 Premiere' which will see him taking on members of the public at the game, and other major celebrities around Europe via Xbox LIVE.

The red carpet affair, which will be attended by VIPs, celebrities and lucky competition winners is just one of a number of similar events happening around Europe as the world's biggest ever video game is released to the masses. The premiere events, which are taking place in London, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam and Milan, will be linked via Xbox LIVE as the stars in each country take on each other for this one-off night where gaming meets partying. For consumers and competition winners, it provides a chance to be amongst the very first to see the game, experience content never seen before and play the most hotly anticipated game ever against their celebrity idols.

Following the London Premiere, at midnight, more than 1,000 retail stores across the UK will throw open their doors giving eager fans the chance to be amongst the first to get their hands on the third installment of the legendary series.

The "Halo" franchise is among the biggest worldwide entertainment properties in history and continues to change the way we think about interactive entertainment.

Avalanche Engine 2.0 will debuts at TGS 2007

2007-09-18T19:20:00.000-04:00

Swedish developer Avalanche Studios powered their free-roaming action title Just Cause with their own Avalanche Engine, and now they're taking it to the next level with aptly named Avalanche Engine 2.0. The newly completed engine features support for truly huge environments without seams,as well as advanced character rendering systems for animation, facial rendering, and emotional modeling to simulate human behavior. Well it certainly renders some killer rocks. Perhaps they'll show something a little meatier at the Tokyo Game Show this weekend, where Avalanche 2.0 will make its worldwide debut.

PS3 vs. High End Video Processors: Impresses In Video Processing Face Off

2007-09-18T13:35:00.000-04:00

Video processing has come a long way since FiringSquad first began to cover multimedia technology. The fact that we’re even comparing a PlayStation 3 against NVIDIA and AMD flagship products tells you just how accessible high-performance video is.

FiringSquad included the Sony PlayStation 3. Although the Xbox 360 offers a wider selection of games than the PS3, Sony’s console is in a completely different class when it comes to home theatre and hi-fi performance.

When it comes to DVD upsampling, it’s hard not to be impressed by the PlayStation 3. FiringSquad thinks that it provides a superior output to NVIDIA and AMD’s technology and it even holds its own against the flagship HQV technology from Silicon Optix and Teranex.

Soul Calibur IV - New Images

2007-09-17T21:49:00.000-04:00

Namco has released the 7 new images showing off more of Soul Calibur IV. Delivering new gameplay modes, characters and enhanced features with unprecedented 3D modeling and animation, Soul Calibur IV aims to be a definitive fighting game experience. The unrelenting pursuit of two legendary swords continues when Soul Calibur IV is released in 2008.

Nvidia 8900GTX and 8950GX2 tagged

2007-09-16T19:05:00.001-04:00

According to insiders at a Taiwanese production plant, new information about Nvidia’s holiday lineup of graphics cards has come up . According to the source, the top-tiered GeForce 8950GX2 will cost $599 (with two GPUs, similar to 7960 GX2), which isn’t too surprising knowing that it will be the best card around for approximately twelve seconds. As for the 8900GTX, set to replace the current card of choice, the 8800GTX, will be a bit cheaper at $549. A chart of a comparison is available, but this is of course pure speculation, as Nvidia is being secretive right up to the holiday season, as usual.

Heavenly Sword: Why It's the greatest rental title of all time for now but we should all buy this game nevertheless

2007-09-16T15:29:00.000-04:00

The bottom line is this: if you want the best-looking game on the PS3, arguably the best-acted game of all time, or a game that reminds you why playing games are fun in the first place, get Heavenly Sword. GamerNode can't (and won't) try to convince you to purchase it, because despite how much they love it, they really can't justify spending 60 bucks on a game with little replay value and such a short length. They will, however, ask that you at least rent this. Heavenly Sword is the best game available on the PS3, and easily the greatest rental title of all time.

'Mass Effect' will give you a severe case of 'The Itch'

2007-09-16T15:23:00.000-04:00

After test-driving hotly anticipated game, we find its release date can't come soon enough.

Bleary after an evening of media-coddling sirloin and house red that ended only when the game-making professionals had to return to work for "a few more hours," I squirm in my straight-backed chair in BioWare Corp.'s Edmonton office, craving coffee and water – and Mass Effect. Just the title screen of BioWare's upcoming sci-fi role-playing game, the shimmering "START NEW CAREER" on the plasma screen, is giving me "The Itch" in my hands.

Warner's Blu-ray/HD DVD hybrid disc on indefinite hold

2007-09-16T10:16:00.000-04:00

The story's in the search results with this one -- after continually delaying its Total HD hybrid Blu-ray / HD DVD discs, Warner president Ron Sanders told TWICE that the format is "on hold for now," because the company fears being the only publisher of such discs could "be hard to make it go." Furthermore, while the studio is still planning on putting out both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, but its talking to both sides about exclusives and "it's kind of crazy right now." Indeed. Too bad all that craziness is terrible for the consumer, eh, Ron?

Metal Gear Solid 4 playable at Tokyo Games Show

2007-09-14T11:34:00.000-04:00

We have been reliably informed (by Ryan Payton of Kojima Productions) in the latest Kojima Productions podcast that Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metal Gear Online will be playable at Tokyo Game Show. While not necessarily "news" in itself (not for those of you who won't be able to make it to TGS, at least), it means we'll be able to get you some hands on impressions while we're there. It will be interesting to see how the game plays when one of the game's producers isn't handling the controller.

There will also be a new trailer shown which promises to be a bit spoilerific, so those of you who are saving yourselves for the actual game will have to sit out for a few months while those that care less about the game will know more about the story than you do. How hellish that will be.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune will be released on 20th November in the US

2007-09-12T08:13:00.000-04:00

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune will be released on 20th November in the US and is still down for release this Christmas in Europe.

That's according to game director Amy Hennig, addressing the world (well, Ellie) earlier today in Croatia, and confirms the date carried by US retailers.

Uncharted, which is developed by the Jak & Daxter scribes at Naughty Dog, puts players on the path of the fabled treasure of El Dorado.

Christian Balle as Solid Snake

2007-09-12T08:06:00.000-04:00

In the latest edition of Nuts magazine ( UK ) there is an interview with Christian Bale, in which he states he`s in the running to play Solid Snake in the 2009 movie Metal Gear Solid. I think he would be a great choice if he gets the part, but who would you like to see play Snake in the movie?

Ninja Gaiden 2 for the Xbox360

2007-09-12T07:58:00.001-04:00

Ninja Gaiden 2 has been built on a completely new engine that promises to maximize the 360's capabilities. Ninja Gaiden 2 creator Tomonobu Itagaki stated during the demo that there were "10 or 20 features we weren't able to implement" in the Xbox version of Ninja Gaiden. With the 360, many of these mystery features are being added to Ninja Gaiden 2.

PlayStation 3 Unwrapped

2006-10-24T20:11:00.000-04:00

Just over a week ago Sony brought a prototype PlayStation 3 by IGN UK's offices in London so we could drool over the machine and play around with the latest version of MotorStorm.

Now we've gone one further by getting our grubby mitts on a boxed prototype PS3 and we're going to let you watch as we undress the big beauty.

Technology Used in Lair

2006-10-24T20:03:00.000-04:00

Technology Used in Lair

Factor 5 is designing Lair to take advantage of many of today's most technologically advanced graphics and physics techniques. The techniques are as follows:

-Progessive Mesh
Progressive Mesh is a technique rendered by the Cell microprocessor, which allows for an intensive amount of detail to be placed upon vast amount of objects, both up-close and far away.

-High-Dynamic Range Lighting
All of the lights, shadows, reflections, and highlights in Lair are in HDR, and are rendered in real-time by the Cell and RSX, thus allowing the lighting scheme to completely change, just like the time of day does in-game, however, due to the advanced programming of the lighting system, it will be ever-changing, and rarely, if ever the same twice, as opposed to current-generation games.

-Real-time Dynamic Physics
Every second of gameplay, Lair renders hundreds of physics effects on everything from your dragon, down to the cloak on an enemy soldier. All enemies and allies have their own physics-driven animations, and have individually programmed ragdolls. As a matter of fact, the dragon which you control has more physics effects integrated into its movement than there were physics effects in all of the Rogue Squadron games, combined!

-Real-time Fluid Dynamics
All of the water effects in Lair, such as waves, are run by real-time fluid dynamics on the Cell.

-Parallax Shaders
Parallax shaders are used on almost every single object in Lair, including fire and clouds.

-Real-Time Renderings/Volumetric Effects
The fire in Lair is rendered in real-time, and has its own physics. All of the clouds, smoke effects, and even fog effects are volumetric. Lava, rain, wind, fur, and even more are also rendered in real-time.

Between Real-Life and the CRYSIS Engine

2006-06-12T21:43:00.000-04:00

Its amazing how much gaming has evolved in just 12 short years of 3D technology. The picture compares real life and the CRYSIS Engine. At this moment CRYSIS is only confirmed for PC, but it was recently reported that Crytek Studios are also considering to use their engine on the Playstation 3.

Heavy Rain Screenshots

2006-05-22T08:49:00.000-04:00

Quantic Dream recently released some screenshots of their PS3 game Heavy Rain. The screenshots looks very impressive and demonstrates the power of their new game engine, so if you haven’t seen these yet you can check them out here.

Enjoy this link!

PS3 Coming next november

2006-05-22T08:45:00.000-04:00

PS3 is the most advanced computer system that serves as a platform to enjoy next generation computer entertainment contents in the home, realized through the combination of Cell and RSX processors, in addition to the playability of a vast catalog of PlayStation and PlayStation 2 software titles.

Having Giga-bit Ethernet and a pre-installed hard disk drive (HDD) as standard in PS3, users will be able to download a variety of contents as well as access on-line games and services over the network.

Equipped with basic input/output ports, PS3 supports a broad range of displays from conventional NTSC/PAL standard TVs to the latest full HD (1080i/1080p) flat panel displays, offering the joy of the most advanced computer entertainment contents to homes around the world. For use in living rooms, maximum heat and noise reduction has been achieved with a noise level equivalent to that of the current slim-line PlayStation 2.

With the overwhelming computational power of the Cell processor, PS3 is capable of playing back content from Blu-ray (BD) disc at a bit rate of multiplex 48Mbps with ease, the maximum bit rate defined in BD standards.

The new controller for PS3 has been created by refining and improving the world’s most popular PlayStation controller which has shipped more than several hundred million units worldwide. The controller for PS3 employs a high-precision, highly sensitive six-axis sensing system that is capable of processing all parameters within the controller itself, thereby eliminating the need for any additional settings on the display system. By applying this technology, it will become possible to freely control the PS3 system over the network.

TDK: 200GB recordable Blu-Ray Ready!

2006-05-01T18:51:00.000-04:00

That was fast. It took 'em years to develop recordable DVDs, then another couple more for the dual layer variety, but now but a few weeks after TDK announced their hard workin' intentions to develop 8-layer 200GB recordable Blu-ray discs, they've got it bagged. Balls to the fact that we still don't have the players; the interesting thing about these discs, however, is that the data isn't stored on thin layers of dye, no no. Apparently when each layer of bismuth peroxide and germanium oxide is heated to 690K by laser, microscopic air bubbles form and create the bits we've come to know and obsess over. Oh sure, these discs are probably going to be horrendously expensive in the beginning, but isn't it nice to know we're already good to go on capacities large enough to archive years of home movies?

Sony set prices on Blu-ray Disc titles

2006-02-08T18:54:00.000-05:00

Sony is the first major studio to announce their pricing model for the upcoming release of their Blu-ray Disc titles. BD films fresh from the theaters should hit the shelves for $23.45 while catalog titles will drop for $17.95, wholesale. Yeah, that's a 15-20% premium over what new-release DVDs cost back at their '97 release but, according to Sony, it's meant to "accommodate the sell-through and rental markets" which DVDs initially avoided since the world was beset by video rentals at the time. But you won't see a Sony MSRP slapped to the back of their BDs. Instead they will allow retailers to set their own margin of profit (like Amazon who lists catalog BDs for $22.49) allowing for the invisible hand to sort it all out. Sony also plans to bundle in DVD and/or UMD formats (not for free, dig?) with some BD releases as a key component of their marketing strategy. While this allows you to watch your new flick on multiple devices, it doesn't mean they've given up on managed copy. That's something they (and a few notable others) are "still working on."

Samsung SH-B022 Blu-ray burner

2006-01-26T13:10:00.000-05:00

It's not every day you get to play with a pre-production Blu-ray burner, but the team at Germany's CT Magazine were able to get their hands on a Samsung SH-B022, and liked what they saw. The burner, which doesn't have AACS copy-protection, was able to burn a 25GB disc in about 43 minutes, and had no trouble playing a range of CDs and DVDs. The reviewers also found that the drive didn't generate as much heat as some other models they've tested; it reached a manageable 107 degrees after a burn. The final model is due out in April for about $500, and will include copy protection, along with the ability to write double-layer 50GB discs.

HideoBlog!

2006-01-23T20:14:00.000-05:00

The 21st century isn't about "selling good things" or "good games finding success."
It's about finding a hit business for everybody, be it movies, music, or publications.
However, lucky hits have no face (GENE). This era (SCENE) has no memory.
Even if a product makes a profit, no memories (MEME) are left behind.
With games, before there was business, there was a culture.
Are games simply products that help you gleefully kill time?
Are games just a tool for big corporations to make profit?
Kojima Productions is a group of creators. We want to send out "products
with faces" to the world.
We want to sponser quality products that are worth spending
your precious time on.
An era of "selling great products" is something we aim to usher in
-- it's our mission as Kojima Productions. It's our mission.
-- Hideo Kojima (Game Designer)

http://www.blog.konami.jp/

Johansen talks briefly on AACS

2006-01-13T14:57:00.000-05:00

For those not paying extremely close attention to the ridiculous cloud of minutiae surrounding the two competing next-gen optical disc formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray, both formats have (over)duly and dutifully replaced DVD's aging copy "protection" technology, CSS, with a number of anti-piracy countermeasures, AACS being the most notable. So what does "DVD" Jon Johansen (the Scandi-man who cracked CSS) have to say about it?

AACS, like CSS, will be a success. Not at preventing piracy. That’s not the primary objective of any DRM system. Anyone who has read the CSS license agreement knows that the primary objective is to control the market for players. Don’t you just love when your DVD player tells you “This operation is prohibited” when you try to skip the intro?

True that, Jon. Oh, and did we mention he registered deaacs.com as his followup? Ya damn right he did (though there's nothing there yet, of course). Stay tuned, everybody, this could get interesting sooner than later.

Sony DevStation PS3 Developer EU Conference

2006-01-12T18:06:00.000-05:00

According to Gamasutra.com, DevStation, Sony Europe's yearly development conference for Sony platform developers, will this year focus exclusively on game development for the PS3.
The conference, which will take place in London's Brick Lane from March 1st to March 2nd, has posted an extensive agenda online, which includes significant discussion on the Cell chip, graphics, art, performance, audio, networking, and a new tool named PSSG, which is described as "a PS3 optimised cross-platform graphics engine and tool-chain."

There will also be a third-party demonstration and a lecture from Unreal Engine creator Epic, as well as middleware input from companies such as Havok and Ageia, who have already officially signed up to provide their physics technology to PlayStation 3 developers.

More information on the conference is available on its official website, which notes: "DevStation 2006 is a PlayStation 3 Development Conference, to receive a delegate space your company would have to have an executed TMLA agreement with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe."

PlayStation 3 price - $500?

2006-01-11T19:45:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – While there was little doubt the Xbox 360 was going to be a hit in the just completed holiday season, no one was real sure how consumers would react to the $399 price tag.

Despite the $100 bump over the launch price of the original Xbox, few seemed to mind. Now, with Sony's PlayStation 3 looming, it appears another price threshold may be crossed before the year is out.

Sony hasn't commented on specific pricing figures, though Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Consumer Entertainment, reportedly told attendees of a 2005 corporate meeting "it'll be expensive." Analysts and many video game developers, though, suspect the system may debut with a price tag reaching nearly $500.

"[Sony] could now consider launching its PlayStation 3 at a price range of $399 to $499, with the $499 price point more likely," said American Technology Research's P.J. McNealy in a note to clients Monday.

Sony, as you might guess, didn't have much to say about McNealy's theory.

"We haven't made an official announcement about pricing yet," said Ryan Bowling, PR manager for Sony. "At this point, that's all speculation."

The strongest argument behind the $499 price point is the PS3's inclusion of a Blu-Ray drive. This bleeding edge technology will give Sony (Research) significant bragging rights, but it comes at a cost. Pioneer last week at the Consumer Electronics Show unveiled a standalone Blu-Ray player for $1,800.

Obviously, Pioneer's earning some profit there – and Sony will almost certainly subsidize the cost of the drives, but you're still looking at an expensive bit of hardware. The PS3 will also feature other pricey items, such as a hard drive, the Cell processor and a new graphics chip from nVidia (Research).

Developers, for the most part, say they, too, are expecting the PS3 to be more expensive than the Xbox 360's highest price package. Sony, they said, has been sending mixed messages to the gaming world, but several developers I spoke with (under the condition of anonymity) said their studios were expecting the system to launch at $499.

There wasn't universal consensus, though. Some predicted the price would be closer to $450, others said they wouldn't be surprised if it was as high as $600. $700 was mentioned by a couple of developers, though even they said the number seemed unreasonable. And one game maker felt Sony would try to stay in line with Microsoft, offering the PS3 for just $399.

None of the developers, by the way, echoed my hypothetical theory that Sony might be pulling a head-fake on Microsoft with the high price warnings, though a couple did bring up the months of speculation leading up to the PSP's launch. Analysts, journalists and even publishers were wildly grasping for a solid clue about the launch price of the handheld device. (Atari's CEO even publicly proclaimed he expected the PSP to sell for $500.)

Sony, while this went on, smiled enigmatically and did nothing to dissuade anyone that the device would be $300 or more. It launched at $249, still incredibly expensive by handheld standards, but lower than some consumers were expecting.

We're seeing much the same thing with the PS3. After an onslaught of information last May, the company hasn't released any information of substance. Even at CES, the device was an essential no-show. (A hardware design was there to be gawked at and a video loop of potential gameplay footage, but no new information was announced.)

There's one other possibility about the PS3 that few people have discussed: Dual-pricing strategies. It's frustrating from a consumer standpoint, but Microsoft proved it can work – at least in the U.S. Whether Sony's willing to risk fragmenting the market by offering both "bare bones" and "bells and whistles" versions of the PS3 is another matter.

For one thing, it would look as if Sony were following Microsoft's (Research) lead – a vision the market leader does not want to convey. Offering a PS3 with reduced features would also chip away at the company's stance that the system is much more than a video game machine.

Whatever Sony decides, we should start to get some sort of clarification in the next few months – almost certainly by E3 in May. One thing's for sure, though: For saying a whole lot of nothing, Sony has somehow managed to keep everybody talking about its product.

Fox Predicts Blu-Ray Win in HD

2006-01-10T18:02:00.000-05:00

The head of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the division of News Corp. responsible for its motion picture output, has predicted that Sony's Blu-Ray format will be the victor in the coming battle against the DVD Forum's HD-DVD format. The two competing media are currently gathering supporters in an effort to become the next media standard, as CD and DVD were before.

"In terms of the number of companies involved, the PS3 momentum and the level of content that is committed to Blu-ray, it does seem to have a pretty strong lead," said Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chairman James Gianopulos at the Reuters Media and Advertising Summit in New York. "We believe that Blu-ray not only has the superior technology and backing in terms of strength to market but also the superior content protection."

Gianopulos is not the first executive to cite the PlayStation 3 support as a decisive factor in supporting one side over the other: similar comments have come from Paramount, and from Universal and Lions Gate. Neither the Xbox 360 nor Nintendo's upcoming Revolution take sides in the conflict, with both using standard DVD media for their games.

First Blu-Ray Movies Announced

2006-01-10T17:39:00.000-05:00

There's still no word on how long we'll have to wait for the PS3 to arrive, but at least we'll have something to watch when it does - Sony has announced that the first batch of Blu-Ray movie titles will be out this spring.

As you can see from the list below, the line-up will include high-octane adventure titles such as xXx, SWAT and Robocop, along with tired old nancy like Sense and Sensibility and Legends of the Fall. Later in the year you can look forward to Black Hawk Down and Bridge on the River Kwai, which will come on 50GB dual-layer discs.

Sony is aiming to release four Blu-Ray titles per month to start off with - a figure that will rise to 10 per month by the start of 2007. And it don't just expect movies, either, since hit TV series will be making the transition too (please Uncle Sony oh please we've nearly worn out our Babylon 5 DVDs).

If you can't wait for the PS3 to turn up, you can always buy a Blu-Ray disc drive separately - loads of 'em are going on show at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, and they're set to go on sale in Japan shortly.

But if you're not ready to invest in The Future yet, don't panic - Sony will continue to release movies on DVD as well as Blu-Ray, for a good while at least. In fact, blockbusters such as Underworld Evolution, which is out later this year, will get a simultaneous release on both formats.

Like DVDs, Blu-Ray discs will be region-encoded - but there's a twist. There will only be three regions this time round: Region 1 (the Americas and East Asia, excluding China but including Japan), Region 2 (Europe and Africa) and Region 3 (Russia, China and Others). Which means Japanese and American PS3 owners will be able to import movies from each others' countries with wild abandon, while we're a bit stuck.

PS3 Released Next Sept in Europe

2006-01-10T17:32:00.000-05:00

With the Xbox 360 already out and about, let the PS3 rumor mills kick into high gear. Revolution-Europe Forums has word that the PS3 will hit Europe this September. Price and packaging has yet to be decided. Our tipster said that he knew for a fact this info was posted by someone who works for a Scandinavian game outlet

MGS4 Real Time Video

2006-01-10T17:28:00.001-05:00

This is a video from the Tokyo Game Show 2005 (with English subtitles) of Metal Gear Solid 4 for the PS3 being shown in real-time action

http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/714/714044/vids_1.html

Cell's 9 processors - Supercomputer

2006-01-10T17:01:00.000-05:00

We're flying at about Mach 1.5 around Mount Saint Helens, in Washington state. IBM Corp. senior programmer Barry L. Minor is at the controls, rocketing us over the crater and then down to the lake at its base to skim over the tree trunks that have been floating there since the volcano exploded over 25 years ago. The flight is exhilarating, even though it's just a simulation projected on a widescreen monitor in a cluttered testing lab.

Then, at the flick of a switch, Minor turns the simulation over from his new Cell processor to a dual-processor Apple Power Mac G5, and the scenery freezes. The G5 almost audibly groans under the burden, though it's no slouch. In fact, it's currently the top of the line for PCs. But Cell is something different entirely. It's a bet on what consumers will do with data and how best to suit microprocessors to the task—and it's really, really fast. Cell, which is shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, is a US $400 million joint effort of IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. It was originally conceived as the microprocessor to power Sony's third-generation game console, PlayStation 3, to be released this spring, but it is expected to find a home in lots of other broadband-connected consumer items and in servers too.

Executives at Sony Corp., in Tokyo, wanted more than just an incremental improvement over PlayStation 2's processor, the Emotion Engine. What they got was a 36-fold acceleration, to a whopping 192 billion floating-point operations per second (192 gigaflops). Because Cell is a combination of general-purpose and multimedia processors, it defies an exact comparison with other upcoming chips, but it's thought to be more powerful than the chips driving competing game systems.

Cell can calculate at such blazing speed, in part, because it's made up of nine processors on a single chip of silicon, optimized for the kind of real-time calculations needed in today's broadband, media-rich environment. A specially designed 300-gigabit-per-second bus knits the processors into a single machine, and interface technology from Rambus Inc., Los Altos, Calif., gives it fast access to memory and other off-chip systems.

So far, microprocessor watchers have been impressed with what they've seen of Cell. "To bring huge parallel processing onto a single chip in a clean and efficient way is a real accomplishment," says Ruby B. Lee, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University and an IEEE Fellow.

A graphics-heavy item such as PlayStation 3 isn't just a showcase for an unusual chip. For IBM it's a philosophical statement. "Gaming is the next interface driving computing," says James A. Kahle, Cell's chief architect with the IBM Technology Group, in Austin, Texas [see photo, "Multicellular"]. Just as moving from punch cards to electronic displays changed what people expected of computers, the highly collaborative, real-time realism of today's games will set the standard for what people want from computers in the future.

But even now, the sheer desire for power in the gaming market guarantees that Cell will be made in volumes that more than make up for the loss last year of IBM's highest profile customer, Apple Computer Inc. Market research firm iSuppli Corp., in El Segundo, Calif., predicts that 37 million game consoles will be sold this year alone worldwide. By 2007, when all three game console makers will have released their next-generation products, the market will have grown to 44 million. And though Cell is exclusive to the PlayStation 3, IBM has a lock on the rest of the console market. Its microprocessors will power both of Sony's competitors, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube.

The Cell-powered PlayStation 3 can expect to pick up a little less than half of what could become a market worth up to $9.5 billion in 2007, according to iSuppli senior analyst Chris Crotty. And, of course, there are other high-volume plans for Cell.

Toshiba Corp., in Tokyo, for one, plans to build television sets around it. The company has already shown that a single Cell processor can decode and display 48 compressed video streams at once, potentially allowing a television viewer to choose a channel based on dozens of thumbnail videos displayed simultaneously on the screen. And in a smaller market, Cell has already found its first outside customer in medical- and military-systems maker Mercury Computer Systems Inc., in Chelmsford, Mass., which is developing a two-Cell blade server due out by April.

With two such massive consumer electronics makers as Toshiba and Sony behind it, Cell is an obvious attempt to control the "digital living room," as technology executives have dubbed their dream of a home where all the media players are intelligent and networked together. "[Sony's] goal is to make a computer fun...to make it an entertainment platform," says Sony's Cell director Masakazu Suzuoki. "But even if we make the Cell system an entertainment platform, there's nothing if there's no content."

Indeed, experts say Cell's success hinges on whether programmers outside IBM, Sony, and Toshiba will be able to exploit the gigaflops that Cell has to offer. Tony Massimini, chief of technology at the consulting firm Semico Research Corp., in Phoenix, puts it bluntly: "Cell has strong potential, assuming that the game developers satisfy their customers' needs. But if the games suck, who wants to buy it?"

That Cell has more than one processor core on a single chip is more a sign of the times than a revolution. All the microprocessor stalwarts are moving to multicore design. The principal reason is that the old way of doing things—increasing the number of calculations per second by shrinking the processors into a tighter knot of tinier transistors and then dialing up the clock speed has essentially crashed headlong into the brick wall of heat generation.

Because transistors using today's technology are so small, even when they are supposed to be in the "off" state, infinitesimal currents still leak through them. That leakage warms them constantly, and with the extra heat generated when transistors switch "on" or "off," it produces a microfurnace on a chip. If chip makers had continued on their old path, by the year 2015, microprocessors would be throwing off more watts per square millimeter than the surface of the sun.

As a result, the industry has shifted from maximizing performance to maximizing performance per watt, mainly by putting more than one microprocessor on a single chip and running them all well below their top speed. Because the transistors are switching less frequently, the processors generate less heat. And because there are at least two hot spots on each chip, the heat is spread more evenly over it, so it's less damaging to the circuitry and easier to get rid of with fans and heat sinks.

The Cell microprocessor that will power Sony's PlayStation 3 game console has nine processor cores. The core making up the left quarter of the chip is similar to the processors in Apple computers. The other eight cores, notable by their columns of memory [brown], are designed to do multimedia tasks.

Multicore processors on the market today are generally symmetrical—that is, they have two copies of essentially the same core on one chip. Cell, on the other hand, has an asymmetric architecture that contains two different kinds of cores [see photo, "Cell City Map"]. One, the Power processing element, is similar to the CPU in a Mac; it runs the Linux operating system and divides up work for the other eight processors to do. Those eight—called Synergistic processing elements—are designed specifically to juggle multimedia applications: video compression and decompression, encryption and decryption of copyrighted content, and, especially, rendering and modifying graphics.

The Synergistic elements were built from the ground up to do what are called single-precision floating-point calculations—the kind of operations needed for dazzling three-dimensional graphics and a host of other multimedia tasks. The design traded flexibility—a Synergistic element is not versatile enough to run the Linux operating system on its own—for eye-popping speed. When pushed to its 5.6-gigahertz limits, a single unit can do 44.8 billion single-precision floating-point calculations per second. Not wanting to cut Cell off from a role in scientific computing, its designers included circuitry in each Synergistic element that can do the more exacting calculations, called double-precision, that scientists demand, but its performance is only about one-tenth that of the single-precision unit.

In fact, the Synergistic elements are so fast that a single one could easily consume the entire bandwidth on the interconnects to the off-chip memory, leaving its siblings starved for data and stalled out. IBM and its partners had to design a special chunk of circuitry into Cell just to prevent that problem.

Apart from its raw power, Cell has content-protection tricks that should make it attractive to multimedia applications makers. For instance, the Synergistic element's architecture prevents any application or external device from accessing the element's local memory, so that, for instance, a program cannot steal a music file that is being decrypted by the processor. "Once you bring your code in and decrypt it, it can execute in a virtually trusted environment," says IBM's Cell architect Charles R. Johns. "All the data it calculates on, sends out, and brings in is fully protected."

The isolation function can be used in several ways, says Kahle. "We knew we couldn't anticipate all the different security needs in the future, but we wanted to know we had the right hardware to support a very robust security system."

Barry Minor's Mount Saint Helens simulator is a good example of how Cell's different processors work together. His program takes a satellite photo of the volcano, lines it up with an elevation map, and then turns it into a detailed 3-D terrain on the fly. The Mount Saint Helen's data has a resolution of 2.4 meters. The city of Austin, where the Cell design center is, once gave Minor access to its 15.4-centimeter-resolution satellite map. "You could land in Michael Dell's backyard and check out his view," Minor says with a grin.

What's happening inside the processor is a finely choreographed dance. The Power processing element starts by figuring out where the joystick is pointing the simulator in the stored 2-D maps. Then it divides that scene into 32 portions, four for each Synergistic element. Though perfectly capable of it, the Power processing element does no calculations on the actual data. Instead, it plays to its strength as a controller, figuring out which chunk of work should go to each of the other cores according to how complex the scene is and which cores have more or less time on their hands.

The Synergistic elements then go to work. They pull their portion of the data into their local memories, which they can access at great speed. Then each runs a rendering algorithm on the data and stores it off the chip in the system memory. When the processors are done, they signal the Power element, which instructs one of the synergistic units to run a video compression algorithm. That processor compresses its sister units' finished products and then pushes them out to be displayed on the screen or streamed to a PDA or some other device.

Because the compression takes less time than rendering the graphics, the compressing processor automatically switches gears when it's finished and runs the rendering algorithm on a portion of data until it's needed for compression again. With each frame, the process starts over.

This dance works so well for two reasons. The first has to do with the way Cell handles memory. Rather than waste several clock cycles waiting for the right data to arrive from memory, a Synergistic element works only on data stored in its own 256 kilobytes of memory, to which it has a high-bandwidth connection. More important, Cell's memory-handling engines can be programmed to keep data streaming through the processor. "We can get over 128 memory transactions going in flight at once," boasts Michael N. Day, a distinguished engineer at IBM.

The memory-access engine takes in new data and sends out the old just in time for the synergistic unit to perform the necessary calculations. When Cell runs Minor's volcano simulator, it waits for data to arrive from memory for only 1 percent of the time; the G5, in contrast, stands idle for about 40 percent of the time.

Cell's other key to speed has to do with breaking problems into parts that can be done in parallel. In Minor's simulation, it probably seems obvious that an image can be divided up into eight strips and these worked on independently. What wasn't so obvious was that the 3-D rendering could be done four pieces of data at a time within each synergistic processor. Such four-way parallel computing is called single instruction multiple data, or SIMD, and it is particularly well suited to the manipulation of graphics and other multimedia.

In these problems, you typically want to perform the same operation on each of the elements in a large chunk of data. For example, to increase the brightness of an image, you'd want to add the same number to every pixel in it. Since around the mid-1990s, general-purpose processors such as the Intel x86 architectures have been doing SIMD computing using a set of multimedia-specific instructions, explains Princeton's Lee, a multimedia instructions pioneer.

But SIMD instructions run far faster on Cell's Synergistic processors, because the Cell processors were designed from the start to handle them. And don't forget: there are eight such processors on each chip. Cell programmers spend most of their time turning complex algorithms into efficient SIMD algorithms, says Minor. "Once you've done that, you're 80 percent done."

The chip's commercial success will depend on whether programmers can learn to exploit its full potential. To that end, the developers have from the beginning put a high priority on crafting the appropriate software tools.

One of the key deadlines the Cell development team had to meet was having its software ready and tested in time for the arrival of the first chips, in spring 2004. The software team was running programs on a Cell simulator two full years before it got the first chip—and when the chip finally arrived, both the operating system and the applications worked on the first try. "Had we waited to do software development until the chip came back, it would have been a disaster," says Theodore R. Maeurer, software manager at IBM.

With such a head start on the software, the group could focus on how to familiarize new programmers with Cell. "A programmer has to do a really nice job of laying out the data transfers and so forth," says Day. But soon that job will be turned over to the compiler and the programming tools. IBM software engineers are also developing tools that will make it easier for programmers to divide tasks between the Power element and the Synergistic cores, and they're making others to automatically find solutions to problems that fit well with the Synergistic units' SIMD strengths. The company has already released more than 700 pages of documents to applications developers and will begin releasing tools and compilers, as well.

Cell's asymmetric architecture signals the beginning of a big shift in how computers are programmed, says Craig Steffen, a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana-Champaign, Ill., who gained some fame lashing together 70 PlayStation 2 consoles to form a $50 000 supercomputer.

"How do you program with eight engines running full speed without them constantly stopping and waiting for data?" Steffen asks. Cell will force mainstream programmers to wrestle with that question. But ultimately, parallel programming will become fairly routine, he predicts. "Over the next several years, we won't think of an asymmetric processor as anything different."

Indeed, some think Cell is an indication of what's to come in other microprocessors. "In the future, we'll see convergence of general-purpose multiprocessors and game- and media-oriented processors," says Princeton's Lee. "Media processors will become more general purpose, and general purpose, more multimedia." And with any luck, that will make your living room a more entertaining place.

Goal: Make a new microprocessor architecture that beats all others at handling graphics and broadband multimedia.

Why it's a winner: It met that goal and is being designed into high-volume mass-market items like game consoles and televisions.

Organizations: IBM, Sony, and Toshiba.

Center of activity: Austin, Texas.

Number of people on the project: 400 at its peak.

Budget: US $400 million.

Toshiba Demos CELL

2006-01-10T16:58:00.000-05:00

Toshiba demos the future Sony PS3 CPU at the COOL Chips VIII conference in Japan.

Toshiba showed how the CELL Chip can simultaneously decode 48 SDTV MPEG-2 video streams. 48 MPEG-2 streams stored on a HDD were read, decoded and projected to a 1,920x1,080 pixel resolution display divided into 8 x 6 cells, each of which showed a different video.
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