Samsung's in the 90nm 512Mb XDR RAM slot of the PS3
By Barb Dybwad 
posted May 23rd 2005 2:23PM
posted May 23rd 2005 2:23PM
Samsung has won a seat inside the Sony Playstation 3 with the first 90nm 512 Megabit XDR chips. XDR stands for Extreme Data Rate (which should really be EDR, but X looks better in an acronym), which in turn stands for hot and fast memory for multimedia applications. At transmission speeds up to 9.6GB per second, these chips will fly about 12 times faster than DDR400 memory. They're especially designed to handle maximum performance for applications requiring advanced imaging and 3D graphics. As a general rule, we approve of maximum performance. Carry on, Samsung.
I could use these chips in my PC. That is fast!
Another factor on the high price...
so the ram really is going at the same speed as the processor (3.2Ghz) ?
i can never say no to maximum performance.
You misspelled "X-Treme".
Does anyone know exactly how much faster this will run than X-box 360's and do you think that it will be much of a factor. Seeing as they probably will never reach to the extremes of the first xbox and ps2's capabilities hardware-wise.
Yea, I just don't see how they can release the PS3 at a reasonable price point with all this expensive tech in it.
I don't know if you can fully compare the XBox 360 and the PS3 as they are completely different in terms of hardware setup. The XBox is PowerPC based and the PS3 has their proprietary 'Cell' processor. Theoretically though, the PS3 will roughly twice as fast (1 teraflop of the XBox verses the 2 teraflop performance of the PS3). Realistically though, it all comes down to games at this point.
The problem with calling this speed of RAM "extreme data rate" (XDR) is: what do you call the next generation that's even faster? There's nothing more extreme than extreme -- if there were, that would be called extreme instead of what was originally called extreme.
Subsidising it - sell the kit at a loss and make your money back on the game sales.
price isnt a factor. Havnt you ppl hear of, if ther's a will thers a way??
Anyways what i mean is that ppl will buy the next gen consoles even if they cost 500€. Sure, they wont be happy bout it, but c mon its not like they have a choice. PS and xbox fans will keep on buying the products, even if they have to work extra and do side jobs to buy them.
Plus by the time the PS3 comes out and they start mass-producing them, I'm sure a lot of the prices will go down. Plus the whole "buying in bulk" thing. I'm still buying a PS3 -- two words: Silent Hill.
Fishes,
narco.
#10 that's what Neo Geo marketers said...
for real, they will take one helluva loss if they decide to sell at the acceptable price point in attempt to make it up on the software sales side. regardless, gamers and their parents will be paying through the nose for next gen equipment whether it be on the hardware or software.
#10, price isn't a factor? You are completely wrong... not everyone is a Sony fanatic willing to give up their first born child just to play a game. Prices do make a difference. Sure all the "fanboys" will buy it because they probably have too much money sitting around anyway, but for the general public, if something is too expensive it will not be purchased. For a lot of people games are just a hobby, not a lifestyle.
#10 that's what Neo Geo marketers said...
for real, they will take one helluva loss if they decide to sell at the acceptable price point in attempt to make it up on the software sales side. regardless, gamers and their parents will be paying through the nose for next gen equipment whether it be on the hardware or software.
if the memory is the same speed as the processor than you can't really go more 'Xtreme' than that. the actual Hz will increase as processors do, but the 1:1 thing is what its all about. only half of the 512 is supposed to be this fast tho. which is still quite insane.
#10 that's what Neo Geo marketers said...
for real, they will take one helluva loss if they decide to sell at the acceptable price point in attempt to make it up on the software sales side. regardless, gamers and their parents will be paying through the nose for next gen equipment whether it be on the hardware or software.
Guys, it's "specially designed," not "especially designed." Unless you are espanish.
Sony has only sold 90 Million PS2s. I think they know how to hit both the production costs and price points that they need to hit.
You also forget that they get not only game royalties but a royalty on every BD movie folks buy to play on their ps3 - Sony's incentive is to get these into as many homes as possible. If they want to give us some world beating technology too, well the only ones who will complain are MS and their fanboys.
so this means that it won't take a year and a half for a game to load?
Games can still take a year and half to load. If it won't, it means, they are not utilizing the system.
Load a NES game on a PC, you'll understand what I mean.
#16 don't forget to add the mommies and daddies that have to put this next gen hype on their credit card as those who will complain.
meant #18
Tisk tisk tisk. XDR is an initialism, not an acronym. Acronyms can be pronounced as real words can (scuba, snafu, AIDS, et cetera). Initialisms are said with just thier initials (HIV, DDR, etc.).
http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-2-of-4/
"Sony’s CPU is ideal for an environment where 12.5% of the work is general-purpose computing and 87.5% of the work is DSP calculations. That sort of mix makes sense for video playback or networked waveform analysis, but not for games. In fact, when analyzing real games one finds almost the opposite distribution of general purpose computing and DSP calculation requirements. A relatively small percentage of instructions are actually floating point. Of those instructions which are floating-point, very few involve processing continuous streams of numbers. Instead they are used in tasks like AI and path-finding, which require random access to memory and frequent branches, which the DSPs are ill-suited to."
All the XDR memory in the world won't help the PS3.
The Cell will make a great chip for a Digital Video Recorder.
Tisk tisk tisk. XDR is an initialism, not an acronym. Acronyms can be pronounced as real words can (scuba, snafu, AIDS, et cetera). Initialisms are said with just thier initials (HIV, DDR, etc.).
"There's nothing more extreme than extreme"
Ultimate is more extreme than extreme, by definition. So we'll have "UDR" at some point.
"The Cell will make a great chip for a Digital Video Recorder"
Someone apparently missed E3 last week.
Sony better watch out. While I'm all for the newest and best technology, I also won't spend an arm and a leg for a gaming system. Sure the die hards will, and hell, i have all 3 systems in my den right now, so I might normally fall into that catagory.
But with that being said, if PS3 is going to sell for $500+, while XBOX 360 sells for only $299-399, a lot of the casual gamers are going to pick up the XBOX since it's a more resonable price.
Hopefully Sony will just sell PS3 for a loss to keep in competitive.
But then again, you just know they arent' going to have nearly enough produced at launch, so the demand would keep the price high for a while :(
I'm content with current generation technology right now. I'll probably wait a year or so after the last of the three hits the shelves, especially if they keep putting out titles for PS2, Xbox, Gamecube...hell i just got a cube the other day.
After initial price drops and bugs (if any) are discovered and resolved, then I might buy one of the three depending on games for each system and their gameplay.
So wat does this mean??
how about God fast date rate? (GFDR)
The new PS3 seems so powerful. I really hope this is not all vaporware annoucements to steal thunder from the PS3
andy andalibian
Bruce, that link is a Microsoft press release (see it repeated here: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html) and is pretty disingenious. Their 'bandwidth advantage' goes to only 10MB of their total memory (frame buffer), while the PS3's 'X-treme'ness is for 256MB. it remains to be seen how they are used, but Cell's sub-processors are more than just DSPs. it's a new chip so no one really knows HOW and WHAT much more they can do.
either way having that much ram at the same speed as the processor is almost unheard of, something even PCs dont have.
Why are people still citing Major Nelson's page?
http://spaces.msn.com/members/jeromeontech/
This was already covered in an earlier thread, Nelson's estimations aren't even close.
That aside, I love seeing innovative technology in new stuff. Price point estimates are $399-460, and thats not unreasonable given the technology, especially that it'll have a Blu-ray player as well. And its not an unreasonable amount to save up, especially if you started now. Can't say I'd preorder one, but I certainly intend to get one (XDR is just icing)
I don 't think Major Nelsons's numbers are any more disingenuous than the numbers sony supplies. So right now we have sony who says
"ps3 is twice as fast as xbox360"
and microsoft who says
"only twice as fast at the 12% that doesn't matter, for everything else xbox360 is faster"
I don't see why you should believe either of these claims. They both have obvious spin to them, and I'm pretty sure that in the end, you won't be able to tell the difference between a game running on PS3 and Xbox360, just like now, some PS2 games genuinely look better than Xbox games, and some Xbox games look better than PS2 games.
#33
Thats very true, and I don't believe Sony's numbers either. I just think its unfair that Sony gets the bad rap for twisted data while the same people cite MS' equally twisted data. At the moment, just from watching the tech demos on both sides, I think the PS3 presents a more immersive environment, mostly from lighting, range of motion and especially physics. We'll see, but on that & gaming lineup, I'm still weighing with the PS3
Remember how developers complained about PS2's meager 4mb of on-chip video memory? It has been the system's achilles heal ever since. Yes, we have seen some amazing games, but Xbox and even GameCube has outperformed it time and time again.
Will the 10mb of on-chip video memory be the 360's achilles heel?
The one thing that gives me hope for 360 is the fact that the only games demoed were running off G5's with 1/3rd to 1/2 the power of the actual 360.
The titles they showed off looked pretty good, but not mind blowing.
On the other hand, most of the "games" shown off for PS3 weren't even games at all, rather they were pre-rendered demo reels based on "estimates" of what the final game is supposed to look like (i.e. Killzone 2, MotorStorm, etc).
The couple "real" games they showed off (i.e. Gran Turismo, WarHawk) weren't all that impressive. The one thing that gives me hope for the PS3 is that Fight Night Round 3 demo. It really looked great, however that had nothing but a static background and no AI.
Despite all the specs being thrown around, I think both systems will be much closer in performance when they are released.
In any case, I think we'll have a better idea of actual system performance in the Fall when developers will be using the real hardware (not dev kits) and showing off their games.
that 10mb on the xbox is just for anti-aliasing: http://techreport.com/etc/2005q2/xbox360-gpu/index.x?pg=2
the actual 360 video memory is unified with main ram at only 700mhz vs PS3's at full 3.2ghz!
i think the performance battle will lay squarely on what the Cell's 7 co-processors can do vs. 360's three full cores. thats even if developers use them for graphics at all. they'll prolly end up just hitting both their graphics cards which are actually pretty similar.
if thats ends up being the case, seems to me this 'Xtreme' ram at 3.2ghz would win out just on the framerate front..
mind you the ps2 hardware was originally sold at a loss, and they've done pretty well, as far as I can see.
One of the reasons the ps2 sold as much as it did initially is that it was a very good dvd player for the time that it came out, at least 50 bucks cheaper than comparable standalone dvd players of the time.
So as I see it, they're about to repeat this with a competitively priced Blu-Ray dvd player that just happens to play badass games.
I can't really see any reason M$oft isn't putting a next gen drive in their system... with the drive they're using you can fit at most 18gigs for a double-sided dual-layer... while that blu-ray drive can potentially fit 100 gigs on a single disc... although I don't think we'll realistically see that much space used by any game or movie that comes out.
My response is a bit irrelevant to the article, but people seem to be comparing the ps3 to the 360, so here is my take.
The PS3 will probably be more expensive, I have no doubt about that. But it seems like in spending more (50 bucks more maybe?) I'll be making a larger investment because of the hardware capabilities. I wouldn't mind dishing out that amount of money if the PS3 will have many features. Afterall, the price of the console is tiny compared to how much you spend on games.
It seems that people assume the PS3 won't be media-centric as the 360 - but it's just that sony has not announced anything yet.
I assume that it will be able to stream content from a pc via wireless. The card reader will be able to play music and photos. optional hdd, and the usb slots will be able to support endless peripherals. HD movies, of course as well. I believe Sony or any company for that matter will not put so much money into hardware and not utilize it. And obviously the stuff I mentioned so far is only scratching the surface, who knows what third party developers will come up with.
And having more advanced hardware will also prolong the life of the system. This is a big bonus for the games. Developers will be able to create games for the PS3 for a long time and get better and better. Like the PS1, which lasted nearly 8 years. Eventually games reached their full potential. Unlike the orginal xbox - which i think could be in the market for much much longer. To add to this - more people will own HD tvs in the future. Eventually sets will be capable of 1080p. What if blu-ray is the next movie format, successor to dvd?
The 360 will probably be just as media featured as the PS3, if not more. But its weakness is that the media capabilites are based on software, while the ps3 is based on hardware.
All in all I expect a wide range of multimedia features from both consoles - except one system is more future proof and is free of media center pc.
I could go on about the diversity of game genres on sony consoles, but i think i've typed too much already.
I agree with #34. Sure major nelson is biased but so is Sony. They didn't show any actual gameplay, so we have no idea what the machine will do. They also have a fairly bad history about lying on spec and performance to hurt their competition with P.R. instead of performance. I'm still waiting for Toy Story graphics in gameplay from my ps2, and wasn't it Sony that said more pwerful hardware didn't matter. Too bad the Gaming industry press sucks, or we might actually know the truth and not just the company press releases. The electronics industry press has next gen dvd's coming in 2 to 3yrs and is still undecided between Blu-ray and HD-dvd. HD is cheaper and supported by the motion picture industry. That's going to suck if that $500 machine won't even play movies. ANYBODY EVER HEARD OF BETA MAX?
What it comes down to.
The ps3 will play dvds, it will play cds, it will play blue-ray. The same thing will happen with blue-ray that happened with the umd. There will be no need for hd-dvd if there is nothing that supports hd-dvd. The ps3 will be the first home unit of any kind to support any next generation disk. Will the movie industry back the hd-dvd once there has been 20 million ps3's shipped that use blue-ray, i don't think so! Thats 20 million owners (will be ten times as many eventually) who half of which would probably love to shell out 20-30 dollars to buy movies in high def.
So far I have not even heard of plans for hd-dvd drives in the near future. If Sony (one of the biggest home electronics companies) backs blue-ray, you can bet the movie industry will take notice. Like i said before, there is no reason for the movie industry to back hd-dvd when there is nothing that uses it.
The ps3 WILL be a better console than 360. Its graphics supposedly are twice as good. They are significantly better in the least. Other than Halo the playstation pretty much kicks its ass in the gaming department. The disk will have more room for high-def content. Think about it, with as much room as the blue-ray disk offers, could we have GTA...WORLD? The storage capacity of dvds will not cut it in the next generation. Some people are all worried about the price of the ps3. Who cares? Lets say it cost 120 dollars more. Whats that? Two games. Thats a pretty cheap price to pay for a console that your going to have for five years that is a far superior system to anything else, from its blue-ray drive to its xtreme ram or whatever.
Microsoft is banking that people will buy the 360 based on xbox's reputation. After all, it was the most powerful console of the last generation. But when it comes down to it, how next generation is the 360? It does not have a next generation disk, it does not have a next generation processor, it does not have the extemely clear next generation resolution, and its power pales in comparison to that of the ps3. Ya, I get to customize my 360 by changing the faceplate, thats pretty next-gen.
All in all microsoft WILL sell consoles. But, at the end of this generation who will be left in the dust?
Its all about ps3!!!
I agree all the way with #41
M$ left all the hardcore gamers behind, premeiring on MTV, what is that?! their all about marketing now, which i dont see going good for them, thier presentation was the most scripted, most proffesional, but the content of the presentation...
things that make ya go BAHAHA
is velocity girl gonna buy a 300 dollar system so she can design t-shirts and cell them for credit? ya didnt think so...
that was supposed to be #42, sorry
everyone is buying Sony's press release performance numbers and pre-rendered FMV clips as proof of being 'twice as good'. mission accomplished, Sony.
as for media choices, few current gen games are on DVD, most fit on CDs. the amount of game content needed to fill a DVD is enormous, and only won't be approached anytime soon.
im sorry, everyone of my xbox game and every new PS2 game is on DVD ROM, most are probably like 2gigs, but with high def its gonna be storing some huge textures, and with all the extra space, huge worlds can be made, and Fable can be brought to its full potential (PLZ?!).
I dont beleive any of the numbers, mainly because a lot of them dont matter, its how much its optimized for gaming, but after watching xbox360 and PS3 demo's, im going with PS3, Sony would not be so bold to release killzone without those graphics after releasing that the game was realtime and thats what it will look like
Blah, blah, blah... you know, best of E3 for graphics was just awarded to Unreal Tournament 2007, an upcoming Xbox 360 game. And best game of show went to Zelda for Nintendo. Look, PS3 can shit gold, but it's all about the games.
And to think.. I can play Unreal Tournament 2007 on my future PC. So I guess that means Xbox360 suks. It's all about the games.. not the box.
What I want to know is if a company DOES make a game that fills the PS3 blue-ray discs, how will publishers/developers fit all that extra detail/data into a X360 disc?
Does that mean that the consoles are even more likely to have exclusives?
Will X360 have games of a lower quality - graphics-wise and in-game "space" (ie will X360 games have to come on multiple discs?)
#38 i think the performance battle is dependent on what type of content developers can supply the the console makers. only then will we experience their ULTRA SUPREME PROCESSING POWER THAT CAN ROCK YOUR FACE.
#49 one if any game company fills a blu ray with a game, it won't be a game it will be a movie and that company will become a film studio. another thing if a blu ray is ever filled with "gaming" you as the consumer will be paying through the nose considering development costs for such a bloated epic.