Michael Dolan Dot Com

Archive for the 'Gaming' Category

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Buying an HD video player? Looks like Sony is the best bet…

I recently acquired a Samsung 50″ Plasma which has full 1080p resolution and I must admit… I’ll never go back to SD television. Even for what little I watch, the picture is just unbelievable. Now, keep in mind my prior TV was a 25″ Sharp CRT from back when I was in college… Yeah, I was long overdue for an upgrade. However, I chose to go with the 1080p, top spec sheet model for a number of reasons, but the top being it’s ‘near futureproof’ (famous last words, right?). Well, as far as resolutions go, 1080p should be around for a while and honestly, I can imagine a TV with a higher resolution as it looks amazing right now. I have a 1080i HDTV camcorder that I acquired last year and an Xbox 360 which does native 1080p and DVD upscaling. You could say within the last 12 months, I’ve gone from home media antique museum to MoMa.

However, I have two pieces of my setup that are still a generation behind. First, there’s the home theater. I have a cheaper setup that my wife bought me years ago and it serves its purpose and until the HDMI systems come down in price, there’s not much to gain from an upgrade. The other piece is the whole High Def video player. The HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray battle has been raging on and it now appears that Blu-Ray will win out (I *think* this is the better of the two, but it’s hard to tell - Microsoft vs Sony is like a computer virus vs a rootkit - which is less evil?).

Putting the standards battle aside, I’ve been waiting on the sidelines waiting for the future proof answer for high def video. The first Blu-Ray player I noticed on the market at sub-$1,000 was the PS3. It still is a competitively priced Blu-Ray player today (some newer models are ~$300). And guess what happens to all those who ran out and bought a Blu-Ray player for $1,000+, or when they dropped to $800 or when they hit $500 and then ~$300… they’re already antiquated: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080118-new-nlu-ray-2-0-spec-makes-ps3-the-most-future-proof-player.html

Who loses out in these standards wars? The consumer who’s willing to pay too much. But, I guess if you have $1,000 for a high end DVD player what does it matter anyway… just buy another.

So I guess I’m waiting again this time for a Blu-Ray v2.0 system (or PS3).  It’s quite a shame that HDTV has come along so poorly for consumers. First it was 720i, then 1080i and then 1080p was the end game. Then you need to upgrade your cable, upgrade your DVR, upgrade your camcorder, upgrade your video player, upgrade your home theater system… if you bought any of those components at 720/1080i, upgrade again to 1080p. I have to wonder if HDTV will ever get to being “simple” and easy for consumers? I’m fairly knowledgeable, I can’t imagine some of my less than technically inclined friends of family buying all the right components in a future proof progression - it’s been hard for me I’ll admit… good luck to anyone looking to make a future-proof HDTV decision.

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

Nintendo is looking a Wii bit sharp

Opening up the Wii to outside, independent developers is a brilliant move by Nintendo as they’re clearly differentiating themselves from Sony and Microsoft. As our culture moves towards user generated content (see YouTube), it only makes sense that some users will likely create highly popular games as well with small capital requirements. Games do not have to be developed on the scale of Halo - look at Tetris or … GNU Chess … err, maybe not. Anyway, I love the move by Nintendo and I suspect it will only be a matter of time (and lost market share) before Sony or Microsoft follow suit. I suspect Sony would be the one to gain the most from doing something similar, but seeing what they’ve done to limit the impact of Linux/PS3 (see video drivers), it’s clear they’re intent on controlling the gaming content and don’t want end user competition. A poor move if you ask me; this is how market leaders fall.

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

PS3 Cell BE Processors Computing up a Storm at Folding@Home

From James, found a new link to data on Folding@Home stats. 30K Cell BE CPUs in Sony PS3s WW running Folding@Home are currently cranking out 482 TFLOPS - compare that to 161,000 Windows PCs (5x the # of PS3s) cranking away to produce merely 154 TFLOPS (3x LESS than the few # of PS3s).

So with this data in mind, think of what you would use for your next compute cluster: a group of Windows PCs or a cluster of PS3s running Linux….? Based on the stats, 1 Cell BE CPU is cranking out 0.016 TFLOPS. 1 Windows PC processor is currently cranking out 0.00095 TFLOPS.

That means Folding@Home would need 506,000 Windows PCs to do the work of roughly 30K Sony PS3s. Think of the power, heat, space savings from that! That’s roughly 16 Windows PCs to accomplish the same amount of work as 1 PS3. Even at $500 per Windows PC, that’s a substantial cluster hardware savings as well…
Certainly benchmarkers would point out many flaws in this rough analysis. This sort of compare doesn’t provide a purely equal comparison as it also depends on what workloads are running on the PS3s or Windows PCs that are cranking out data. There are certainly also chances that some of the Windows PCs are more powerful and others bringing down the averages and making a Windows PC vs PS3 comparison less fair. However, it’s interesting to note the trends ;-)

And all those research students now have a reason to buy new PS3s for the labs!

Thursday, March 15th, 2007

PS3 Curing Cancer, Alzheimers, and Parkinson’s

Folding@home is now available for the PS3. While you sleep your PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processor could churn out 10x as much as your cool gaming AMD64 FX desktop. 10x is quite a bump in terms of performance in processor land these days. I would like to see a system with a dual/quad core ppc processor, a Cell BE co-processor, Linux, XGL, and every conceivable 3D graphics hogging piece of code you could throw at it. That would be ideal.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/15/ps3_folding_at_home/ 

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

Gentoo Linux on PS3: It’s here

http://ps3.qj.net/Gentoo-Linux-on-your-PS3-With-full-install-instructions-/pg/49/aid/78739

I saw /. picked this up today and it’s somewhat of a shame b/c there’s some great news to publish around this new development and to be quite frank I found the article to be a bit lacking. I have a strong feeling we’ll be seeing more about this quite soon.  Don’t read this and think “that’s it?”…. it’s better.

Monday, October 16th, 2006

Yellow Dog Linux for PS3 Expected Mid-November

This is going to be really cool. I can’t tell from this how much they will leverage the SPEs in Cell, but this could create an awesome Linux client with tons of processing power. Now… what if there was a dcc cluster for Gentoo users similar to Folding @Home?

Friday, September 15th, 2006

Gamers never cease to amaze…

One may say this guy just needs to get out more… others may wonder why even MSFT hasn’t come up with this yet… still others may say “I think I could actually sell these things”… modding is like mashups for hardware - you can get some very interesting results.

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

PS3 for My Birthday?

Just noticed that Sony’s PS3 will launch on my birthday… how timely…