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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.

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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.

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Vision Gran Turismo leading Japanese PS3 launch lineup?

Source: A release schedule on Sony Computer Entertainment Japan's Web site.

The official story: "At this time we are not familiar with any announcements coming from the company on PS3."--Sony Computer Entertainment America spokesperson. Due to the time difference, Sony Japan reps were unavailable as of press time.

What we heard: Today, American gamers woke with news that Sony had revealed its first-party launch lineup for the PlayStation 3. The reports all stemmed from an updated software release schedule on SCE's site, which lists six games as coming to the PS3. Foremost among them is an entry marked "Gran Turismo series"--presumably Vision Gran Turismo. Behind it are five other titles: the "action RPG" Monster Carnival; the RPG Angel Rings; a fifth game in the Hot Shots Golf (Minna no Golf) series; a mystery game called "The Eye of Judgment"; and the sequel to the action-adventure Genji, now called Genji 2.

Some sites spun the story as Sony revealing its self-developed PS3 games for the first time. Others branded it as an announcement of the company's first-party lineup when the PS3 launches later this year. Both were wrong. First, all six games were unveiled last year, either at E3 or the 2005 Tokyo Game Show. Second, the ship dates for all six games are marked as "undecided," meaning none have been confirmed for launch in any territory.

However, the lack of official confirmation doesn't rule out one or all of the list games being available when the PS3 launches in Japan--or North America. That said, historically, no Gran Turismo game has launched alongside a PlayStation console. And knowing developer Polyphony Digital's proclivity for missing deadlines, it wouldn't be surprising if Vision Gran Turismo would miss whatever launch date it is initially given.

Bogus or not bogus?: Bogus that is it confirmed for launch; not bogus that the six games are coming to PS3...but we knew that already.

Posted by thorsen-ink, January 18, 2006 8:31pm

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Sony Quizzing For PS3 Online

List points to a possible Xbox Live-type service.

by Patrick Klepek, 01/18/2006

Sony continues to say they're leaving online gaming in the hands of individual developers and publishers, even as developers seem to continually favor Microsoft's approach. The difference between what Sony's saying publicly and actually prepping for, however, may be completely different, if a recent online poll is any indication.

An IGN forum user was one of those invited to participate in the survey asking users a number of questions about their online preferences. There's no doubt Sony will up the ante with their PlayStation 3 service, but many of the questions seem to point to the possibility of a unified, Xbox Live-esque service.

Why else would Sony be wondering about the "ability to choose an Avatar for all online titles," "a standard, interactive lobby structure for all games," "headset support in all online games," and perhaps most importantly, "a single identity and password for all online games." Sounds an awful lot like features found in a competitor's machine.

No one wants to pay for an online service, but you'll be hard pressed to find a gamer who wants individual usernames, passwords and friend lists for all their online games. The fact that Sony's even asking, however, bodes well for PlayStation 3 online.

The entirety of the 33 survey questions are as follows:

* 1. On a typical day, how often do you play games online?
* 2. Do you own a PSP?
* 3. What is your preferred Online gaming format?
* 4. What Online Gaming Formats do you own?
* 5. Do you think you will purchase a PS3?
* 6. A single identity and password for all online games?
* 7. Global Lobbies allowing you to play against anyone in the world?
* 8. Game Lobbies should be language based. (English, French, German etc)
* 9. Game Lobbies should be based geographically.
* 10. A standard, interactive lobby structure for all games.
* 11. Headset support in all online games?
* 12. A QWERTY keyboard as standard for messaging.
* 13. USB Keyboard support for every online title.
* 14. Friend List allowing you to see online/offline status?
* 15. Friend List allowing you to see what game your friends are playing?
* 16. Private Messaging across games?
* 17. A feedback rating allowing you to choose who you play against?
* 18. Ability to remove players out via a majority vote?
* 19. Game Host has the ability to remove players?
* 20. Automatically filter opponents based on connection quality?
* 21. The ability to download music, game demos and other content?
* 22. Ability to access the dedicated game forum whilst in game?
* 23. Ability to take screenshots during the game and share them with friends?
* 24. Ability to take movie clips in game and share them with friends?
* 25. Ability to play my music during a game?
* 26. An in game grief reporting system?
* 27. Ability to access and manage your gaming profile via PC, PSP as well as PS3?
* 28. Community features without the need for a game disc.
* 29. Ability to choose an Avatar for all online titles.
* 30. The inclusion of a web browser.
* 31. A specific lobby only for Adults.
* 32. Service should feature a Global Ranking system for each game.
* 33. Game Lobbies should be Eyetoy compatible.

Fingers crossed, everyone.

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Sony Reconfirms PS3 Games

Already revealed at TGS, but still good to hear.

by Patrick Klepek, 01/18/2006

Sensationalist headlines have been proclaiming Sony Computer Entertainment Japan's alleged announcement of the first wave of PlayStation 3 launch games, but those words are a little premature. The company's only reconfirming games revealed at last September's Tokyo Game Show that have been added to their release database.

The Eye of Judgment, Genji 2, Angel Rings, Monster Carnival, Minna no Golf 5 (Hot Shots Golf) and a Gran Turismo game have all been added to the extensive database of typically upcoming PlayStation 2 and PSP games. As you'd expect, the games don't have release dates attached to them, so talk of launch games is nothing but rumor mongering.

It'd be pretty odd for Sony to be so secretive since Tokyo Game Show and then suddenly blow everything by an accidental web listing, too. The sooner everyone realizes there won't be any PlayStation 3 information until Sony's good and ready to spill the goods, the less anxious we'll all be before it happens.

I'm not really kidding anyone, though. I'm just as anxious. Gimme a new Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots trailer before I lose it.

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Analyst predicts US November launch for PS3, 1m initial shipment

Rob Fahey 11:53 18/01/2006

Another pundit pins his colours to the mast over Sony's PS3 launch plans

Pacific Crest Securities analyst Even Wilson has predicted that Sony's PlayStation 3 will launch in November in North America, preceded by a summer launch in Japan and followed by a March 2007 European launch.

Wilson's glance into the crystal ball, reported in Marketwatch this week, is just the latest in a string of often conflicting theories from US analysts about Sony's launch dates for the next-generation console - but is interesting since Wilson also goes on to predict unit volumes for the system.

He believes that the PS3 will launch with a million units in Japan in summer, with similar volumes seen at the US launch in November, and presumably a similar number again when the system arrives in the European market in March.

The numbers he predicts are better than those Microsoft achieved with the Xbox 360 this Christmas, when a simultaneous global launch with just 1.3 million units of the console left retail in both North America and Europe unable to fulfil pre-orders for the system.

However, the shipments would still be small by comparison with likely demand for the PS3, and if Wilson's "most likely scenario" is correct, Sony would be under immense pressure to keep a steady supply of the PS3 into the market post-launch.

A number of elements suggest that Wilson may be off the mark, however - not least comments made by Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot at the start of this year, when he told the BBC that the PS3 was likely to launch by September in the US and November in Europe, with a Japanese launch as early as June or July.

Sources at other major publishers confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that their understanding from Sony was that the company was absolutely committed to launching in all three territories by the end of 2006 - with a slip into 2007 to be avoided regardless of the cost.

Wilson also voiced his thoughts on the PS3's initial software line-up, saying that it would be "clearly weaker than the Xbox 360 holiday 2006 line-up" - presumably based on the fact that Xbox 360 developers will have had longer to work on the hardware by then, although Sony claims that over four thousand development kits for PS3 have already shipped.

The analyst is unimpressed by the fact that Sony has not shown off hardware and software yet, ignoring the fact that this is a standard and unavoidable practice in the videogames sector - with even Microsoft forced to show off very early software running on PowerMac based boxes at a quarter of the performance of the final Xbox 360 when it went to E3 last year.

"All we've seen are [demos] running on a box supposed to be the equivalent of the PS3," Wilson commented. "We really have no idea."

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Sony's PS3 release date in question - analysts

AFX News Limited

01.17.2006, 01:28 AM

SAN FRANCISCO (AFX) - What Sony Corp. Chief Executive Howard Stringer didn't say at the recent Consumer Electronics Show about Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console spoke volumes about the key product's timetable, analysts said.

Giving a keynote speech at the Las Vegas trade show earlier this month, Stringer provided no updates about the product's US launch.

Although Sony had a prominent location on the showroom floor at the annual convention, the company showcased televisions and portable music players, while the PlayStation 3 was tucked behind glass in the back of its booth. Sony offered only non-playable, demonstration versions of a limited number of games.

Analysts now expect the product's US launch in the second half of 2006, although Sony may get a Japanese version out during the 'Spring 2006' launch window that the technology giant first predicted last year.

Any delays could make it much harder for Sony next holiday season as it races to put out its own new product to take on Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 in the market for video game players.

Sony , which has sold more than 90 mln PlayStation 2 game players since 2000, faces increased competition from Microsoft , which sold more than 24 mln units of its first Xbox version. Microsoft said it is on track to sell between 4.5 mln and 5 mln units of its new Xbox 360 by June.

And Sony faces a manufacturing challenge related to its switch to more-powerful computer chips, just as Microsoft did. Even the most optimistic analysts say Sony will wait and miss its predicted launch window to ensure it maximizes the ratio of usable chips per silicon wafer, better known as a chip's yield, before Sony begins mass production.

After touring the Sony booth at CES, analyst William Drewry of Credit Suisse First Boston wrote that 'the decision as to whether to delay the PS3 launch has yet to be made and is dependent on (improving its chip yield).'

Sony has said the computing power of the PlayStation 3 will be superior to that of the Xbox 360 thanks to a new microprocessor - dubbed the 'Cell' processor - jointly developed by Sony, International Business Machines and Toshiba Corp.

'We view any potential delay as being one to two months rather than six months duration,' wrote Drewry.

Another analyst, Evan Wilson of Pacific Crest Securities, said 'the most likely scenario' is that PS3 will be released in Japan this summer with about 1 million units and in the US in November with 1 million units, followed by a European launch in March 2007.

Even if Sony follows a staggered launch schedule, as it did with it PlayStation Portable (PSP) device - it will likely have a smaller slate of new software titles than Microsoft during the critical 2006 holiday sales season.

The chatter about PlayStation 3 delays heated up after Sony downplayed the product at its booth and Stringer, in his high-profile speech to the US electronics industry, did the same.

Stringer elected to showcase the firm's less-expensive PlayStation Portable and its ability to let consumers access television programs and other video content on the go. Portable devices generated all the growth in video game hardware and software last year.

The theme of mobile digital content delivered over the Internet was a major one at the huge consumer show this year, with everyone from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to top executives from Google Inc, Yahoo Inc. and Intel Corp forging mobile-related partnerships.

While the PlayStation Portable is a fast-selling new product, its revenue contribution is just a fraction of the PlayStation console.

For his part, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment of America Kaz Hirai in his keynote dubbed the PS3: 'a key pillar of Sony growth in 2006.'

But the box will have an uphill challenge if the slate of published software gaming titles isn't up to snuff by the key 2006 holiday sales season, which is looking likely.

Hirai said that Sony had shipped 4,000 development kits for PlayStation 3 games. At the biggest game-industry conference in May 2005, developers had their hands on developmental kits for only few months.

With the latest generation of video games now taking as long as 18 months to develop and bring to market, it's likely that Sony will have fewer new software titles at the PlayStation 3 launch than the 19 games Microsoft had for the Xbox 360 launch in the U.S.

During Take-Two Interactive Software's recent fourth-quarter earnings conference call, chief financial officer Karl Winter said he believes the introduction of the PS3 will 'occur near the end of our fiscal year.' Take-Two's fiscal year ends Oct. 31.

Wilson, the analyst from Pacific Crest Securities, expect Sony's launch line-up in the U.S. to be similar to that of the Xbox 360, but 'clearly weaker then the Xbox 360 holiday 2006 line-up.'

If video game developers encounter production hiccups and would-be launch titles are pushed out, then Sony could be better suited to launch in Japan with fewer titles, another analyst said.

'You don't need to come out with 20 games for a Japan launch, whereas in the US you need about 15 to 20 games, plus a few that really stand out,' said analyst Schelley Olhava of IDC.

Sony launched the PlayStation Portable in Japan in December 2004 and the US in March 2005. It wasn't until September 2005 when Europeans saw it on their shelves.

Wilson notes that industry analysts are starting to make predictions about hardware and software market share for Sony out as far as 2009, yet the company still has yet to unveil a functioning version of the hardware.

'All we've seen are (demonstration games) running on a box supposed to be the equivalent of the PS3,' said Wilson. 'We really have no idea.'

Among issues potentially clouding the PS3 release, none looms larger than the noise surrounding next-generation DVD formats. There are two competing standards for next-generation of DVD players: HD-DVD, backed by Microsoft and Intel, among others, and Blu-Ray, backed by Sony.

While most Hollywood film studios have aligned themselves behind the new, competing formats, it's unlikely that consumers will see a tremendous amount of playable film content in 2006, says Olhava.

Sony's Stringer has maintained that the PS3 would contain a Blu-Ray player. Yet at CES, electronics powerhouses Samsung and Pioneer announced Blu-Ray players that would cost 1,000 and 1,800 usd, respectively.

Those costs won't fly among video game buyers, especially with the Xbox 360 going for as little as 300 usd for a scaled-down version. Most analysts expect the PS3 unit to be priced at 400 usd: a loss-leader for Sony, but competitive with the Xbox 360, which does not have an internal HD-DVD drive.

At CES, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said that the Xbox 360 would be selling an external HD-DVD player.

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Sony's Hit Machine

Rachel Rosmarin, 01.19.06, 11:00 AM ET

BURLINGAME, CALIF. - Sony's future as a hardware company and legacy as a media company are both riding on PlayStation 3--its long-awaited next-generation game console. But the less Sony says about the device, the louder skeptical voices grow.

Sony hasn't said much about the PS3 since May 2005, when it spilled details about the console's new processor and high-definition graphics. It's been mum since then. And when no new details were presented at the Consumer Electronics Show this month--either during Sony Chief Executive Howard Stringer's keynote speech or under the roof of the company's megabooth, where it showed off a demo of the machine but wouldn't provide any other details--the buzz got only stronger.

Now industry observers are wondering when the machine will finally debut and what the price tag will be--both for consumers and for Sony itself.

The outcome will be big for Sony: The size of the videogame industry is nearing $30 billion, and Microsoft and Nintendo are simultaneously trying to position their own consoles as digital hubs in living rooms across the world. On top of that, the game machine is key to Sony's high-stakes bet on Blu-Ray, the next-generation, high-definition DVD format.

First there's the issue of the launch date. Sony's last word on this remains spring 2006, but almost nobody believes it--at least not for the North American launch---because of a history of delays for previous products. Thanksgiving looks to be a better bet, at least to Evan Wilson, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities.

If the PS3 does launch in November, Sony will have given Microsoft a full year's worth of potential sales of its next-generation console, the Xbox 360. "Microsoft's lead time in building share for this console generation is real," says NPD Group's Anita Frazier. "The longer that lead time is, the greater the initial risk for Sony."

Then there's the worry that there won't be enough PS3s to go around when the machine finally does launch. Gamers had these fears realized the last time around, when only 600,000 of them got their hands on an Xbox 360 during the last two months of 2005. "But that was the most restricted launch supply of any major console platform," says Frazier.

Other analysts have estimated that Sony could launch about a million PS3s before 2006 is over--but that's the same number of units that were shipped by Sony during the launch of the PS2, and if a million units wasn't nearly enough in November 2000, it won't be enough in 2006 either.

Finally, the high-end console looks as though it could break the proverbial piggy bank--not just for the consumer but for Sony too.

The company made sure to warn consumers in May 2005 that the new machine would be expensive. It didn't say how expensive, but with advanced components like a new "Cell processor" and a high-definition Blu-Ray disc drive, the PS3 will likely cost consumers more than the Xbox 360, which retails for $400.

Even at a pricey $500, Sony will be taking a loss on each machine, just as it did with each earlier PlayStation model. The company will hope to make money selling software for the console down the line--the same strategy Microsoft and Nintendo have taken.

But Sony's use of the Blu-Ray disc drive means even more is at stake for the company--Nintendo and Microsoft aren't including a high-definition player in their consoles (though Microsoft will offer an optional HD-DVD drive for sale before the year's end). The PS3 will cost Sony more to make, but the payoff in the future could be worth it.

Even the cheapest new Blu-Ray DVD players will retail for about $1,000. David Carey, president of electronics-component specialist firm Portelligent, says the Blu-Ray drive could add about $100 to the cost of owning a PS3.

Other components will drive up the cost of the PS3, Carey says. Based on his estimate that Microsoft loses about $100 for every Xbox 360 sold, he projects that Sony could see a $200 deficit per set-top box. That means consumers will pay $200 less than the cost of goods.

"This is more about egos and market share than it is about profits," says Carey. "This is a chest-pounding thing for Bill Gates and Howard Stringer. However, it's great for consumers to get this underwritten hardware."

Microsoft could already be recouping its lesser losses with surprisingly good sales of games during the holiday season. According to Wedbush Morgan Securities, Microsoft sold 4.3 games for every Xbox 360--this in a season when overall game unit sales were down more than 10%. If each game is priced at $50, Microsoft might earn about $25 in profits per game, suggests Carey. If the average Xbox 360 owner buys four games, Microsoft will have recouped the estimated $100 loss.

If the company actually sells the approximately 5 million units it boasts it will ship by June, Microsoft will be on its way to making some serious money off the console and its games.

Sony, with loss-leading machines that could cost the company $200 each, might need to sell eight games per machine to make up the difference--a big challenge. "Compelling content is what drives the long-term success of these systems," says NPD's Frazier.

For the first time Wednesday, Sony announced six game titles that it said will launch with the PS3 in Japan. That's good news. In fact, it's the only news we've heard from Sony regarding the PS3 in a long time.

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Holy Chip!

Daniel Lyons, 01.30.06

IBM's radical Cell processor, to debut in Sony's PlayStation 3, could reshape entertainment and spark the next high-tech boom.

Later this year millions of homes will get a new supercomputer for the living room. Or maybe the playroom. Sony's long-awaited PlayStation 3 game console, a slender yet muscular machine the size of a DVD player, performs a mind-boggling 2 trillion calculations per second. This kind of power, once reserved for seismic exploration and nuclear-weapons design, will let programmers create videogames that look as realistic as film.

Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM (with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five years. The Cell chip, based on a design inspired by supercomputers, runs at least ten times as fast as Intel's most powerful Pentium. More important, Cell boasts a staggering fiftyfold advantage in handling graphics-intensive applications that will define the next generation of visual entertainment--blindingly fast and seductively immersive games, virtual-reality romps, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive TV shows with multiple endings and a panoply of new services yet to be dreamed up.

http://img491.imageshack.us/img491/2976/cell7ne.gif

IBM reckons Cell, potent and versatile, can do a lot more than just play games. It sees a role for it in mobile phones, handheld video players, high-definition televisions, car design and more. Scientists at Stanford University are building a Cell-based supercomputer. Toshiba plans to use the superchip in TV sets, which one day could let fans watch a football game from multiple camera angles they control. Raytheon is set to use Cell in missile systems, artillery shells and radar. Other companies envision new high-definition medical imaging. "Cell is the next step in the evolution of the microprocessor. It's a peek into the future," says Craig Lund, chief technology officer at Mercury Computer Systems, which makes medical and military systems and is taking orders for Cell servers.

IBM is already at work on beefier versions of Cell, and it has launched an allout campaign to woo a new generation of code-crunchers and game boys to write software for its futuristic chip. In an extraordinary move IBM disclosed hundreds of Cell's design secrets on the Internet, releasing a developer's guide that 10,000 programmers have since downloaded. IBM, with annual sales of $94 billion, says Cell could power hundreds of new apps, create a new video-processing industry and fuel a multibillion-dollar buildout of tech hardware over ten years.

"We think this is going to spawn the next generation of growth in the industry," says James Kahle, 45, the renowned chip designer and IBM Fellow who oversaw the creation of Cell. "This chip will give you performance that is not achievable with any other architecture." Adds H. Peter Hofstee, an IBM scientist and the chief architect of a key part of the Cell chip: "We're talking about everything from making TVs to shooting things up into space to building huge supercomputers." He and Kahle spend much of their time on the road, running mind-blowing demos and proselytizing prospective licensees and geek groupies.

But IBM will have to clear some high hurdles to deliver on Cell's prodigious promise. Myriad competitors, including hotshot Silicon Valley startups ClearSpeed and Stream Processors, are in pursuit of next-gen chips. High tech is littered with the remains of chips that boasted remarkable abilities in the lab but failed in the marketplace, starved by reluctant programmers and recalcitrant customers and strangled by their own makers' miscues. A quarter of a century ago Gene Amdahl, the famed architect of the IBM 360 computer family, had an ambitious scheme to pack supercomputer power onto a chip but was too far ahead of his time, and his Trilogy Ltd. went down in flames. In the early 1980s the chip in the Amiga home computer far outraced those in the Intel line, but Intel conquered the market anyway. In the early 1990s Digital Equipment Corp. made the first 64-bit processor. It was an engineering tour de force and a commercial flop.

If anything stops Cell's commercial success, it is likely to be the chip's very power. It is, to put it politely, a challenging platform for software creators. "The programming model is a nightmare," says Marc Tremblay of Sun, chief architect of a rival chip called Niagara, which uses a more traditional approach. He argues Cell's balky design will snag widespread adoption beyond gaming.

Even the hard-sell salesmen at IBM are quick to say Cell poses no threat to Intel, the world's leading chipmaker. Intel's processors do a great job on the basic business applications for desktops, laptops and servers. In this mature and mundane market Cell, specially geared to spin out intricate images at very high speeds, offers no real advantage. But the Intel architecture, 25 years old and constrained by having to be compatible with predecessor chips, is ill suited to next-gen imaging. Thus the world must move up to Cell, IBM argues. "We are going into a new era," Kahle declares. "The world is changing."

An IBM demo shows the contrast. A terrain rendering program lets you fly over Mount Rainier at 1,300mph. Cell crunches through millions of lines of topographical and photographic data per second to paint topographically accurate, photo-quality pictures at a movie-quality 30 frames per second. On a similar program a Pentium takes more than two minutes to sketch a single frame.

Cell's genesis five years ago began with an audacious challenge. Sony's new PlayStation 2 had just debuted, and Sony videogame chief Ken Kutaragi was already looking ahead to the next version. He told IBM he wanted a thousandfold increase in power. IBMers took up the dare, one so bold that it challenged them to think beyond current chip designs. "We knew we could never make the existing stuff go a thousand times faster," says Hofstee.

In early 2000 Sony, Toshiba and IBM set up the STI Design Center, housing it at an IBM site in Austin, Tex. James Kahle was put in charge. Armed with only a bachelor's degree from Rice University, Kahle, born in Venezuela and raised in New York, had joined IBM out of school in 1983 to write software for designing next-generation chips. His low-key, nice-guy style masks his intensity as a chip designer--his work shows up in the Apple G3, G4 and G5 computers, the Nintendo GameCube and IBM's biggest Unix servers; he calls some chips "my grandchildren."

The project employed 450 engineers, mostly from IBM. They worked a lot, socialized a little (group dinners, a few ski trips) and struggled with the barriers of technology and physics--and of language and culture. Weekly English classes were held for Japanese staffers. In brainstorming sessions some Sony and Toshiba engineers had a penchant for diplomacy and mulling every option; they found it jarring when their IBM counterparts relied on instinct and blunt, bare-knuckled debate.

Cell's creators needed to strike a balance between raw power and the versatility to do more than just play games. Special graphics chips are superspeedy, but for only one task. General-purpose chips like those made by Intel devote a lot of muscle to the ability to handle a wide variety of jobs, but they aren't superfast at any one of them. For two decades Intel boosted performance by cramming more transistors onto a chip, but now chips draw so much power and generate so much heat that they can't be cranked up much more. Intel and others boost performance by lashing together two or more thinking elements on a single chip. Intel makes dual-core chips. Sun's Niagara boasts eight cores. For Microsoft's Xbox 360, IBM linked three Power cores. But even these multicore chips will not be powerful enough to drive the next wave, Kahle argues. Cell needed an entirely new design.

Cell uses a single, central processing core that routes work to eight tiny (but powerful) offspring called synergistic processing engines, or SPEs. A year into development the engineers had a design ready but then felt compelled to revise it because it would be too difficult for developers outside the game business. "Game developers don't mind working with a difficult chip, but we wanted to reach a wider audience," says Michael Day, an IBM software engineer.

Months later they devised a new approach that drives Cell today. But more hurdles arose. Engineers grappled with a highly complex memory-management system that controls how bits of data are fed in and out of the SPEs. For 16 weeks Kahle's staff would meet every morning at 9 a.m. to hash out the problem. "We came up with one design after another and kept throwing them out and coming up with new designs. We sat there for three or four hours a day. Sometimes we never got out," Hofstee says.

By April 2004 the first working chip came off the line at IBM's silicon factory in East Fishkill, N.Y. The new Cell didn't deliver the 1,000X gain that Sony wanted--but it did deliver 50X. Cell cranks out 200 billion floating-point operations per second (200 gigaflops). That is akin to a full-fledged supercomputer in the late 1990s. Add an Nvidia-designed graphics chip and PlayStation 3 runs 2 trillion instructions per second.

By early last year Sony was sending out Cell prototypes and software tools to get developers started on writing new games for PlayStation 3. "We're seeing stuff that goes dramatically beyond what we can do with the current generation [of games]," says Andrew Goldman, chief executive of Pandemic Studios, a Los Angeles outfit that wrote a series of popular Star Wars games for PlayStation 2. "And what you will see over time is going to be even more amazing." He says it will take years to fully exploit Cell's capabilities.

Last year IBM began its own evangelizing. Instead of revealing design details to only a small number of potential partners sworn to secrecy, IBM trumpeted Cell's secrets on the Internet, releasing 700 pages of documents describing the new architecture and a 1,100-page development kit, free for Internet download. "We've opened up the architecture and provided all the details," Kahle says. "We want to see this architecture proliferate in the marketplace."

The wooing is necessary, for Cell's "asymmetric" design (its eight co-processors have a different architecture than the main core), though key to the chip's superior performance, is also what makes writing software for it so difficult. In the mainstream chip world designers use an array of tool kits and high-level programming languages (such as C++) to easily convert instructions into a form the chip can comprehend. Such tools exist for Cell, but the chip's design is so complex and so utterly different from anything before it that code-crunchers do some of the work "down on the metal," cranking out basic assembly code, which can take five times as long.

The good news: Some designers say creating games for Cell is far less complicated than writing for PlayStation 2. "Anyone who worked on the PlayStation 2 is jumping for joy," says Jeremy Gordon, chief executive of Secret Level, a gamemaker in San Francisco that is remaking a classic 1980s Sega videogame for the new Sony box.

Selling Cell, Hofstee last year gave eight speeches at technical conferences. He and Kahle have visited more than 50 companies, enduring abundant skepticism from jaded industry veterans--until they ran their speedy Cell demos. "It's just amazing to go meet with people who have been in the industry for 25 years and just see their jaws drop," Kahle says. When a famous chip designer, a veteran of Motorola and Apple, visited Austin for a demo in 2004, Kahle showed him images from the Mount Rainier flyover, eliciting stunned silence. "He just got really quiet," as he realized "what this is going to do to the industry," Kahle says.

Toshiba demos a Cell-based "Magic Mirror" that turns an LCD screen into a virtual mirror by combining feeds from several cameras. Look left, look right and your "reflection" mimics you on screen, thanks to that tiny Cell chip zipping away. In the next generation of TV sets Toshiba hopes to lay the foundation for interactive viewing. One day you might watch a football game from the quarterback's perspective and shift to a seat up high on the 50-yard line, then zoom up to watch from the blimp overhead, backflips that videogame players take in stride.

Masakazu Suzuoki, Sony's lead designer on Cell, says Sony aims to use this power to create movies that are interactive and changeable, with multiple story lines, so people will watch the same flick more than once. Another idea Sony is kicking around: placing ads in the background of movies and TV shows and customizing them to suit the viewer, with Cell processors keeping track of who sees what.

Breakthrough chips easily inspire such big ideas, but Cell enjoys a running start that previous chips didn't have. It is likely to end up in millions upon millions of homes around the world as the PlayStation 3 rolls out. Once these Cells throb away in game consoles, TV sets and set-top boxes, they can be fed digital fare by new networks of Cell-based servers. "As the clients become very powerful, then the servers will have to become very powerful, too," Kahle says.

The PlayStation hook inspires confidence at Raytheon, the Waltham, Mass. defense contractor, which has studied Cell for 15 months and plans to use it in scores of next-generation systems. "Sonar, infrared sensors--there are hundreds of products that Raytheon designs that could use this type of technology," says Peter Pao, chief technology officer. "Current chips are going to run out of steam. We always look to the future."

At Mercury Computer Systems in Chelmsford, Mass. engineers are working on a Cell system called Turismo, which is due later this year and will pack up to 128 Cell chips into a 6-foot-high rack, producing up to 25 trillion calculations per second. Mercury, which sells modules for medical gear made by General Electric, Philips and Siemens, says Turismo could make a CT scanner so fast that it will be able to paint a 3-D image in four seconds versus five minutes on an Intel Pentium. Mercury is even pushing Cell to firms that create computer-generated special effects for movies. "This chip is opening doors for us," says Joel Radford, a Mercury vice president.

Back in Austin Kahle talks about "immersive interaction," 3-D virtual worlds modeled with such detail that you can see, from your screen, exactly what it looks like when you're standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street in Manhattan. "This is going to open a whole new realm of how people interact with computers and each other, where we'll mix reality with virtual reality," he says. For his entire career Kahle has been driven to create a chip that could change the world; now, he says, it has arrived. "This project is the culmination of that desire."

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Developing for PS3 is “Crazy-Easy”

Over at the PlayStation Forums, the Kill Zone 2 development team has been answering questions about their upcoming PS3 title. The Lead Tester at Guerrilla Games posted this juicy morsel:

Of course that quote went platinum, leading to the Lead Testers to say, “Stop quoting me people. All I know is that the guys are quite excited about working on it and have come further faster than when they started on KZ1.”

This is the first good news I’ve read about developing for the PS3 in a while. Granted, it did appear on a Sony forum so be wicked-cool take the “crazy-easy” remark with a grain of salt.

Thread Here [PlayStation] Thanks Alan!

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EA Hiring Technical Director for Bond Game

According to a job posting at the EA site, EA is looking for a Technical Director for the James Bond team. But that’s not the interesting part, companies hire all the time. This is where it gets interesting: “Next year’s James Bond game from EA Redwood Shores will be based on the next movie from Sony/MGM pictures, Casino Royale. CR will be the first Bond movie in over four years and the first one since Sony bought MGM. This will also coincide with the release of the Sony PS3.”

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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...unna24/Ps2.jpg

"President of Sony has made it clear that his company has an amibitious new online strategy."

"Cast aside any doubts and start gazing toward skyward, because thats where Sony is aiming with plans that go far beyond simple leaderboards and matchmaking."

"Sony has just delivered the final development hardware to U.S. game developers. We can confirm that developers have already begun meetings with Sony's support teams to make sure their games are compatible with the yet unnamed Online Service."

"Its very real, one source tells us. They (Sony) are dead serious about it. They've declared a full on assault on the latest version of Xbox Live!"

"The online service is being designed to also work with the PSP and its games. Think one, BIG Playstation network!"


If this has been posted already then sorry and you can lock this.

thanks to {AmazinG} at gb.com

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The story is more than one page, behold!
key points:

* PS3 will have online service that goes beyond xbox live
* PS3 will be a DVR
* It will connect with psp
* There are alot of games being worked on for it right now in the US (alot more then what people know about)
* The final ps3 dev kit is alot faster than they thought (according to the developer)
* The ps3 will have an itunes type service to let you download HI DEF movies, music, etc
* The Ps3 will take the media center functionality the 360 has even further

* PS3 will serve as a location free player for the psp, means you can watch the dvd's that you have in your psp on your psp (from anywhere in the world), or any other video files you have on your ps3, though this is still only being planned.

* PSP will be able to send its files straight to the psp from anywhere in the world, and it can also control its DVR functionalities

* Firmware updates will add more functionality, much like with the psp

* The Blu Ray Player functionality doesnt cost as much as a stand alone player because the Cell and RSX can take care of alot of the stuff the ps3 will need to do to be able to read the disks

* Fall release date for ps3, no release date for online service, but expected to launch w/ the system

http://x2.putfile.com/2/3216094062.jpg

http://x2.putfile.com/2/3216060422.jpg

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