Tim Kvitek
Project 1 Lecture Notes
History of the Playstation Series:
It all started in 1988 when Nintendo and Sony teamed up to make a CD ROM add on for the Super NES.
But because of how the contract was worded Nintendo wanted out and so at the 1991 Chicago CES they said they were going with Phillips for the cd-rom addon and not Sony. In 1993 they dropped the cartridge design on the PSX and went for a full cd-rom instead. Sony then went out and grabbed a lot of 3rd party developers so that the PSX would not end up like a 3DO. It was finally released on Sept 9, 1995 in the US.
The ps2 was release in April 1999. It offered more than normal in a console. It had backwards compatibility with the PSX, it also had vibration in the controllers and it had a DVD player built right into the system. It also had support for a few usb ports and IDEE 1394. The PS 2 sold good on its release because it could tap into the PSX fanbase with the backwards compatibility. It continued to do good throughout its life.
PS VS PS 2 VS PS 3
The various hardware stats of the different Playstations that have been made.
PS 3 Architecture:
The ps3 had 3.2 gigahertz core that has 512k l2 cache. The core does not do the main processing. It instead delegates the processing tasks to 8 other processors on the chip itself by way of Synergistic Processing Elements. The 8 processors are all SIMD (single instruction, Multi data) 128 bit vector processors. These were used in the early 1980's to run super computers but fell out of style to scalar processors. Scalar processors can only work on 1 data element at a time so IBM resurrected the vector based ones for the cell processor. There are 8 SPE's on the chip but only 7 are used, as the 8th is used a backup is one of them don't work. Each one comes loaded 256k SKAM memory. This memory is also viewable by the main processor so it can quickly look to see what processor can handle any request at any given time.
The GPU for the PS 3 is the "reality synthesizer". It was designed with Nvidia, and based on some of their Geforce chips. It's a 550-MHz, 300-million-transistor graphics chip. The RSX is built upon individual vertex/pixel shader architecture.
The PS3 also contains blue-ray. Which is a new format for DVDs that can hold up to 54gb of content on single disk. Even with this new laser it can still read older PS 1 or ps2 disks.
IBM PS3 Cluster:
Cluster of 5 ps3 using open mpi to run them together to run programs.
Program designed to run on the PS3 home network to research protein folding and misfolding to help to treat disease.
PS 3 Vs Home Computers:
The PS3 is very close to a computer and with partitioning of its hard drive you can put a Linux distribution on a PS3 Linux on PS3. The set up the PS 3 is more in line modern computer then game console. Though the PS3 is more designed around processing of games and the graphics that they require. It is also unable to be upgraded if you need to. It also does not have the same amount of ram that you would probably find a computer that is designed for gaming. Though if you compare prices you probably can't get a good gaming computer for the 400 dollar price tag.
Here are my links I used in my project if you want to look at them for more info.