Kaz Hirai, the chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment, in an interview for the Official PlayStation Magazine:
"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" (More of his interview can be read
here.)
I've tried to come up with an angle from which this quote makes sense, but I honestly can't figure it out.
A friend has suggested that perhaps what he wanted to say is that their strategy isn't to invest in easy to program hardware, but instead they design powerful yet cheap to manufacture hardware, relying on the developers to catch up with its quirks over time.
Except that, compared to its most direct competitor -- the XBOX 360 -- the Playstation 3 isn't more powerful or cheaper.
In my opinion throughout the years, SONY consistently didn't recognize (or worse, completely ignored) the problem that eventually caught up with them:
Game console hardware today is too complex for the market to tolerate the lack of good software support
The first Playstation was brilliantly designed, cheap to manufacture, and easy to program despite the total lack of software support. SONY didn't even bother to provide proper standard C library for it. The only graphics libraries they provided were so flawed that if a game developer was lame enough to use them, the Playstation's graphics unit, geometry unit, and CPU would never run in parallel!
The PS2 was more powerful and more complex, but it did follow the "cheap to manufacture" principle which proved critical for its market dominance. The XBOX in comparison was too expensive to cause any real problems (which was a combination of Microsoft's decision to ship it with a hard disk, and NVIDIA's total lack of interest in helping to lower production costs.)
With the current generation, it is in fact Microsoft who learned their lesson and beat SONY in their own game: XBOX 360 is more powerful and cheaper ($299 vs. $399.) That would have been enough, but on top of it both the PS3 and XBOX-360 are so complex that the lack of proper software support from SONY pretty much sealed the deal.
In other words, the problem for SONY today -- more than ever -- is that launching a successful game console is a software problem. And SONY is a consumer electronics company. :)
Mathema Compilica — 28 March 2009, 14:16
The statement could actually make sense, if it referred to the cell broadband engine, especially the SPEs. (The Xbox 360 only uses PPEs, which are easier to handle.) It's hard for me to tell whether the cell broadband architecture is the "right way to go", but the problem it's trying to address is real. (I think Intel tries to address the same problem with its "Threading Building Blocks" library, because the programmers and their "serial software paradigms" are a main part of the problem.)
Emil — 30 March 2009, 10:53
I think that the likelihood of the CELL architecture (at least in its PS3 implementation) to contain any hidden, yet to be mastered abilities is very slim. In the game industry there are great incentives to do things seemingly impossible, the problem for the Playstation seems to be that many of those things are easy on the XBOX. :)
Mathema Compilica — 31 March 2009, 16:50
It depends both on your definition of "hidden", and on who your talking about when you say "yet to be mastered". Some people definitively succeeded in mastering them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Cluster_computing
The Cell architecture includes a novel memory coherence architecture for which IBM received many patents. The architecture emphasizes efficiency/watt, prioritizes bandwidth over latency, and favors peak computational throughput over simplicity of program code. For these reasons, Cell is widely regarded as a challenging environment for software development.
The Xbox 360 has a more conventional architecture (multicore+GPU), so it doesn't represent any "special" challenge. It's quite possible that a 3 core system together with a fast GPU can offer superior processing power to a 1 core system + 6-7 tightly coupled coprocessors. However, the GPU solution has its own drawbacks (but perhaps the Xbox 360 is not affected by them). My current PC now has its third graphics card, because the initial graphics card burned within the first half year and next graphics card wore out its cooling system within another two years. I hope that the current card will have a longer live.
Emil — 31 March 2009, 18:03
Ah, but whether the CELL architecture in general has a bright future or not has nothing to do with whether anything more can be squeezed from a PS3.
stringer — 18 May 2009, 17:34
The guy is an ass because Naughty Dog claims that for Uncharted 2 they're now close to 90% SPEs usage. And when you see Killzone 2 i don't think we will see much better looking games in the lifetime of PS3..
And yes IBM was right, futur is in software :)
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