The Next Console Cycle

[Rii]

I might point out that PS2s are still selling pretty well. Sales figures are no longer released (as far as I can tell), but as of late last year they were still moving over 100K units a month! And that's for a system that's about 10 years old.

Which is where Sony's "10-year lifecycle" for the PS3 comes from just as it did for the PS2. It doesn't mean they plan on waiting till 2017 to release a new system, it means they don't intend to cease support for the PS3 the day its successor is released.

And whereas that strategy for the PS2 was built upon its gargantuan market share, the most likely motive and means for such 'overlapping' console generations this time around is the supercharged superset hardware scenario I outlined earlier.

There are good reasons to expect that the current console generation will last somewhat longer than the previous one, but I think those hoping they won't 'have' to buy new hardware for another half-decade or more are fooling themselves.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Parallel could take things higher level, but I think what may need to happen is greater specialization of the multi core paradigm.

For example, physics takes a lot of processing. So instead of have 6 identical processor cores, there could be a hardware module specifically for physics. It could use a reduced instruction set, and be hard coded (circuitry over software) and optimised for its function.

I'd expect a physics engine would perform much better that way than with the current inefficient object oriented physics code, various layers of API abstraction, and running as a threaded task in a general purpose (unspecialised) processor.

Special-purpose processors are kind of interesting, because it goes all the way back to how video games used to be done. Arcade games in particular would have various CPUs, each with a specific purpose. One would be your sound chip, one would be your ROM processor, and you might have several graphics chips to divide up things like sprite scaling, palette swapping, etc.

Given that we have a fair number of physics engines out there and the growing number of games that use them, it makes sense to either optimize instructions related to physics processing or actually have a physics-specific CPU. Seems like that would mostly be a crazy fast FPU with physics-related instructions.

 

[Jadzia]

Well physics doesn't have to be done with floating point anymore. We're in 64 bit territory now, and int64 is easily dense enough to do physics in that data type, even with as low as a one millisecond clock.

The millisecond timer means you're not going be suffering from any quantization effects unless speeds are lower than around 10000 units per second.

But your game world can now be 2^64 units wide, and in order to move at these speed where quantization is suffered, you'd literally be taking millennia to cross the game world, which is unrealistic.

So int64 is easily okay.

In fact even int32 is okay for physics if one is careful.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Yeah, I guess 64-bit registers could be treated as ints and work just as well in terms of precision for physics calculations.

In any case, a CPU devoted to physics calculations probably doesn't make as much sense as simply optimizing the physics code itself. The console's operating system could include its own physics API, which would be optimized to the hardware and probably run crazy fast even without the benefit of a dedicated CPU.

 

[Blamo]

I wouldn't say Blu-Ray is a shoe-in at this point either. As pointed out the existing console cycle is looking to be at least a decade long before we see the next ones

You're saying we won't see new systems until at least 2015? I think not.

Handhelds perhaps, but new consoles? It's not very likely.

It's one of the reasons these companies are bigging up things like motion control, Natal and 3D gaming - they're trying to help extend it.

 

[Rincewiend]

Parallel could take things higher level, but I think what may need to happen is greater specialization of the multi core paradigm.

For example, physics takes a lot of processing. So instead of have 6 identical processor cores, there could be a hardware module specifically for physics. It could use a reduced instruction set, and be hard coded (circuitry over software) and optimised for its function.

I'd expect a physics engine would perform much better that way than with the current inefficient object oriented physics code, various layers of API abstraction, and running as a threaded task in a general purpose (unspecialised) processor.

Special-purpose processors are kind of interesting, because it goes all the way back to how video games used to be done. Arcade games in particular would have various CPUs, each with a specific purpose. One would be your sound chip, one would be your ROM processor, and you might have several graphics chips to divide up things like sprite scaling, palette swapping, etc.

Given that we have a fair number of physics engines out there and the growing number of games that use them, it makes sense to either optimize instructions related to physics processing or actually have a physics-specific CPU. Seems like that would mostly be a crazy fast FPU with physics-related instructions.

Like the Amiga computer had specialized processors?!?

 

[Teelie]

I wouldn't say Blu-Ray is a shoe-in at this point either. As pointed out the existing console cycle is looking to be at least a decade long before we see the next ones

You're saying we won't see new systems until at least 2015? I think not.

Handhelds perhaps, but new consoles? It's not very likely.

It's one of the reasons these companies are bigging up things like motion control, Natal and 3D gaming - they're trying to help extend it.

Exactly. Read the direct quotes from MS, Sony, Nintendo, they all pretty much have given a decade long time table for consoles. They'll definitely do a lot to extend it. We've already seen that with some of the new stuff coming out and there might be major design revisions (360 hardware improvements, Wii harddrive, PS3 slim etc) but an entirely new console? Likely 2015 is the next date we'll see a new console from the big three.

 

[Rii]

Catch you post-E3.

 

[Aragorn]

2015 is when Atari returns to rule the earth!

 

[darthraidr]

i havent heard any rumblings of new systems, but i dont work on consoles anymore... =(

 

[FordSVT]

I don't know whether people are aware of this or not, they never seem to be, but Sony is only one of many companies that own a piece of the Blu Ray pie, including Panasonic and Philips. Microsoft isn't putting great sums of money into Sony's pocket using Blu-ray. No one brought this up when the original XBox had a DVD player in it, Sony has their fingers just as deep into that format.

 

[Timby]

Of course, with the original Xbox, Microsoft made people buy the remote separately from the system, to cover the license fees to the DVD Forum.

 

[CaptainStoner]

I think it will be DX11 that brings another generation to consoles. From what we're seeing on the PC front, DX11 crushes previous gen graphic systems.
There is also power consumption. Newer tech is much more powerful while consuming a lot less juice.

 

[Arrqh]

Graphics improvements over the last few generations have come from three things: polygon counts, texture resolution, and shaders. Polygon counts and shaders are tied to clock speed on the graphics hardware, while texture resolution is bound to your video memory. I'm simply skeptical that current games have come even close to maxing out the PS3's CPU architecture. Any improvements in the next generation will probably not focus on making the CPU considerably faster.

We're still pretty heavily pixel shader bound these days. As a result, we have to pick our battles on consoles even running on 720p and some games even have to dip below on their internal resolution. Pixel shader time has a direct relationship to screen resolution, and that's one of the main reasons why so few games can actually run on today's consoles at 1080p native. I have no idea how we're doing in terms of fully using CPU time (but history has shown us that with every increase, we find some way of filling the gap) but if we want to be running all our consoles 1080p native and still give the sort of visual fidelity that we want... then we need a lot more processing power on the GPU side.

I'd love to be at a point where we can do whatever we want with our shaders and not have to worry about performance... but I think we've got a long way to go for that.

To put it another way... there's a reason why so many games have dead, leafless trees and bald marines.

 

[Yoda]

Well, the GPU side is there with the current generation of PC hardware to push good looking stuff at 1080p no problem. Since there's probably 1 or 2 more generations of Nvidia and ATI duking it out before Sony or Microsoft will finalize specs for their next systems, I think some marines are due to grow hair.

As for the shift to parallel processing, I got the feeling that it's more forced by the physical limits of cranking up clock speed. Have clock speeds even shifted in the past 4 or 5 years significantly? My Core i7 chip blows away my old Pentium D from back then, but they were both overclocked about the same to the 3.8GHz range. Just seems until they figure out quantum computing or something, they're tossing in extra cores as stopgap. For a PC that works pretty well, since they're multitasking environments, for a dedicated game console, it's not quite the same.

Nobody likes programming for multiple cores. I think just about any programmer would rather write for a single 12GHz core over four 3 GHz cores, for instance. God knows I would! As for the PS3 architecture, I've heard plenty of people complain about how tedious it is to work with the SPUs, and aside from Sony itself, I don't think I've heard anyone give anything but the faintest praise from a development standpoint.

As for specialized hardware... that's kind of an interesting question. You'd think at some point we'd have enough generalized computing power to not need anything too specific. In some cases that's already happened with stuff like 'Winmodems'... and I assume onboard integrated audio similarly uses CPU for tasks a full fledged soundboard of yesteryear would use specialized processing for. For physics, they did come up with that PhysX expansion card... of course Nvidia bought them out, phased out the dedicated expansion and put the PhysX stuff on their GPUs.

It seems like GPUs aren't going away anytime soon, but a lot of the other stuff is just too trivial to need specialized hardware.

I think 2012 or 2013 will be the next console generation. I really can't see them stretching it out to 2015 even if they want to. But that generation might make a full ten years.

 

[Aragorn]

To put it another way... there's a reason why so many games have dead, leafless trees and bald marines.

Does this mean you're not going to buy the video game I produced... Captain Robau and the Dead Planet?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Well, the GPU side is there with the current generation of PC hardware to push good looking stuff at 1080p no problem. Since there's probably 1 or 2 more generations of Nvidia and ATI duking it out before Sony or Microsoft will finalize specs for their next systems, I think some marines are due to grow hair.

As for the shift to parallel processing, I got the feeling that it's more forced by the physical limits of cranking up clock speed. Have clock speeds even shifted in the past 4 or 5 years significantly? My Core i7 chip blows away my old Pentium D from back then, but they were both overclocked about the same to the 3.8GHz range. Just seems until they figure out quantum computing or something, they're tossing in extra cores as stopgap. For a PC that works pretty well, since they're multitasking environments, for a dedicated game console, it's not quite the same.

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. That's why we're having trouble hitting clock speeds in the 4GHz range. We've just reached the limits of physics here.

Nobody likes programming for multiple cores. I think just about any programmer would rather write for a single 12GHz core over four 3 GHz cores, for instance. God knows I would! As for the PS3 architecture, I've heard plenty of people complain about how tedious it is to work with the SPUs, and aside from Sony itself, I don't think I've heard anyone give anything but the faintest praise from a development standpoint.

You are correct. Hell, wasn't there some Sony suit who said the system was intentionally difficult to code for, so they'd only attract the best of the best in terms of developers (and thus games)? Pure marketroid nonsense. I understand their development tools aren't that great, either. You can make parallel processing pretty painless provided proper programming tools.

As for specialized hardware... that's kind of an interesting question. You'd think at some point we'd have enough generalized computing power to not need anything too specific. In some cases that's already happened with stuff like 'Winmodems'... and I assume onboard integrated audio similarly uses CPU for tasks a full fledged soundboard of yesteryear would use specialized processing for. For physics, they did come up with that PhysX expansion card... of course Nvidia bought them out, phased out the dedicated expansion and put the PhysX stuff on their GPUs.

Well, maybe that's where we'll see physics processing in the next generation--right on the GPU. It would eliminate the need for a separate chip, which would cut costs. However, if you want to do physics calculations that aren't going to be used to assist with graphics rendering, it may not be wise to sap the GPU's clock cycles for non-graphical tasks. They're stressed enough as it is!

It seems like GPUs aren't going away anytime soon, but a lot of the other stuff is just too trivial to need specialized hardware.

No, GPUs are here to stay. That much is certain. Graphics processing is just too intensive to put back on the CPU at this point, no matter how many cores you have. Maybe, at some point in the future, we'll have systems with a crazy number of cores (16? 32?) and each core could be spontaneously specialized for a given task. Maybe add additional instruction sets for physics, or add special "physics" and "graphics" modes and the like, which change the core's operation to be optimized for a particular task, but only for the duration of a specific program (or boot cycle.) If we ever get to that point we may not need GPUs anymore, but that's a big "if."

I think 2012 or 2013 will be the next console generation. I really can't see them stretching it out to 2015 even if they want to. But that generation might make a full ten years.

Given what was spent on R&D this cycle--especially for Sony--I think 2012 is pushing it. Maybe we'll see something in 2013, but I think it will be 2015 before we're even hearing about a new Sony console. I think it's quite possible Nintendo will come out with a new console in the next couple years, and Microsoft won't be far behind, but this generation has cost Sony so much money I'm not sure they can even afford to be thinking about a new console anytime soon.

 

[TheBrew]

I hope that Sony doesn't release anything until 2015. It took two-three years for them to rebound from their botched launch.

 

[Kemaiku]

^Well that too. I think we'll start seeing the "8th Gen" consoles (HD/3D/BR) sometime into 2012 really, I don't see them waiting until 2015 with several of the 7th Gen already out for some years now.

 

[Yoda]

I don't think Sony will be first to market, I'd bet money that they will be last, but that puts them in a tough position. They'll lose market share again to Microsoft during the gap. Then again Nintendo is really in the driver's seat, neither Microsoft nor Sony can afford to wait very long if Nintendo releases their newest Money Printing Machine.