Need for Speed

http://www.popsci.com ^ | Steve Morgenstern

[mastercylinder]

Videogames have never looked more hauntingly realistic, yet many don’t seem to have the artificial-intelligence oomph to act realistic. (You can practically smell the city burning in Half-Life 2, but shouldn’t the guards flinch when you blow the head off one of their squad mates?) Now a powerful new chip will add brains to the games’ beauty. Developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, the much-ballyhooed 3.2-gigahertz Cell processor is packed with nearly 235 million transistors and nine onboard processors that can blast simultaneously through multiple calculation-intensive tasks, such as physics-simulation algorithms. Parallel processing is the latest performance- enhancing approach: Instead of upping gigahertz ratings, which are approaching their practical limits, chipmakers are combining more than one processing core on a single chip. AMD and Intel recently released dual-core processors that can handle four calculations at the same time. The Cell chip’s unprecedented nine cores can perform up to 18 tasks at once. The Cell’s first assignment will be crunching numbers for PlayStation 3 when the game console arrives next spring, but that’s just one of its many potential applications. IBM plans to incorporate the technology in its next-gen systems, and next year Toshiba will launch an HDTV set that uses it to decode high-definition digital-television signals. For now, though, we’re waiting on PlayStation 3, eager to blow more things up real good.

Courtesy Tom Way, IBM Corporation

PLAYSTATION 3’S CHIP (UNDRESSED) 1.The Power Processor Element (PPE), an updated version of the PowerPC processors in Apple computers, runs the chip’s operating system, divvying up calculation chores among the eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). 2.The SPEs are the math whizzes of the Cell, programmable to handle a variety of calculations, from artificial-intelligence algorithms to audio encoding. 3.The Element Interconnect Bus (EIB) connects the PPE and the SPEs. 4.The Rambus FlexIO moves data from the processor to external chips (including, in the case of PlayStation 3, Nvidia’s graphics processor) at up to 76.8 gigabytes a second, 10 times as fast as any other chip. 5.The Rambus XDR DRAM accesses memory at a blazing 25.6 gigabytes—the equivalent of four full-movie DVDs—per second to keep the chip constantly fed with data.

[Zack Nguyen]

I blowed it up good.

[KoRn]

marked for later read

[Zack Nguyen]

I'm a big fan of the Splinter Cell series. One of the best games I've ever played, aside from Madden, of course.

[mastercylinder]

I agree

[Nateman]

This nation would have collapsed under its self imposed socialism by now if not for technical innovations like this keeping it a few steps ahead .

[publana]

According to my son:
"OMG! The PS3 is going to own. This fixes the AI problem that was the only drawback. AI was the only advantage of the XBox."

[Revel]

Blah! Need for speed III for play station was so much better than all the newer versions that followed. More tracks, more cars and way better handleing on NFSIII. Of course that is also thanks to that wonderful code called "Spoilt".