PS3 Production Has Begun

Asustek Computer, one of the world's largest producers of computer components, has reportedly begun to ship Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles to Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. The fact that the consoles are being manufactured means that the hardware specs had been finalized and the launch will take place in mid-November.

The Chinese-language Apple Daily and Commercial Times newspaper reported late on Tuesday that Asustek Computer started shipments of PlayStation 3 (PS3) game consoles in small volume in the beginning of July, according to DigiTimes web-site. According to a report, about 200 thousand component sets were shipped to Asus in June, which means that the company is in position to build 200 thousand game consoles. It is also said that in July the Taiwanese builder will receive higher amount of component sets for the PS3, while in September and October the company will get "more than one million [component] sets.

[Islandkiwi]

If the hardware specs have been finalized and production has begun, can we please see the finalized hardware specs?

[joemutt]

Went to lowes to buy a BBQ grill, they wanted like $1,000 for one, man the PS3 is going to be a steal!!

[gamerof360]

te he..nice like i said it before Sony should really think about teaming up with Gary Coleman

[achira]

how was it earlier ? noone was interested in specs. you just went to the shop and bought a console. games are the important thing ! i cant wait for all the good games.

[THELANDSOFSAND]

you're going to be waiting a long time...

[achira]

yes 4 months is a long time a very long time. i bet you cant wait also.

[THELANDSOFSAND]

what launch game has you so excited?

[Xconcepts]

Cause you won't get one unless you did. I reserved back in Dec 05. So hopefully they get enough so I get one. It'll go straight on ebay, sorry to much to get right now and keep. Expecially for the holiday season.

[Jay da 2KBalla]

the ps3 will play games! OMG I didnt know it culd do that

[THELANDSOFSAND]

xconcepts- you can sell it to achira on ebay!

lol

[MONOLITHICIDE]

also warhawk just because i was a fan of the old one, it might not be the best looking but it looks fun

[gamerof360]

the resistance games looks pretty good but it kindof looks like Lost Plant to me

[jwatt]

Start making them early.

[gnothe1]

I never doubted that the PS3 would launch this year!! it HAS to!! sony can not afford to give xbox another holiday shopping spree.so weather its ready or not, or in its best shape possibly, its coming this year!!

[shotty]

Thats why there is a huge fire in china right now and are having a huge energy crisis. :P

[THELANDSOFSAND]

4.6 million from this factory by november
4 million from another factory by november

thats 8.6 million.

so i presume they won't run out.

[kingboy]

by september we gonna know more and even more games to come..that`s the take over point.

[Jay da 2KBalla]

The ps3 will play games? OMG I didnt know it could do that!

[shoota33]

xflop 1.5 has games? OMG i didnt know it had that!

[MissAubrey]

but when i asked him what game he was gettin he could'nt answer.

[MONOLITHICIDE]

because he knew how good all the ps3 launch titles were gonna be he couldnt decide

[JIN KAZAMA]

looks awesome. MotorStorm look awesome, only gonna get better, COD3 looks awesome, Resistence looks awesome, heavenly sword looks awesome, tekken, not so awesome, but I know it will by launch time. Its a much better launch lineup than the 360. Oh yea, rainbow 6 looks awesome. Who knows what else is commin out, the PS3 is delivering everything it pormised, I am excited.

[HyperBear]

Visit www.ps3.net for the latest in PS3 related news. No Xbox ppl here. Cause our site is almost in dying stage and we need people to visit our site and our forums. Please. Thank You

[Islandkiwi]

I'm interested in specs because websites were talking about how the processor was (theoretically) being further reduced. But if they're manufacturing them, they've come up with a finalized product.

I'm glad they're manufacturing them, but it makes me sad, too...because obviously they're not going to be changing the controllers.

[mikeeno7]

At least the PS3 has started manufacturing before Xbox 360 did. Xbox 360 started mass manufacture in August. There were 700,000 360's on day 1 launch which had to be spread across continents. However, Sony (despite having slight advantages in hardware manufacture) will still probably do no better since they have to include Australasia in the launch and the PS3 has more complex architecture. All evidence can be viewed on Winstron Corp websites.

[Jay da 2KBalla]

But ps3 hasnt started MASS production o technically it didnt start before the 360 and probably wont hit mas production until august. Also wistron isnt the only ones producing 360s so no all evidence cant be found there.

[mikeeno7]

And Gametime, never reply to my posts ever again. In my eyes, you do not exist and never will on this site, which has been ruined by you. i thought this site was supposed to end all this crap.

[Real Gamer]

Yeah so did I, but from what I have seen its not gametime so much as it is xbox fans being so anti Sony and Anti PS3. They are usually among the first to attack the system in which they have NEVER even played. You want someone to blame, Blame them. My thing is, if you dont like PS3, dont read about it and dont comment. Fact is, most all of us REAL GAMERS know that PS3 will be every bit as good if not better than the 360 and I have a 360 and love it. I am a fan of 360 but a huge fan of PS as well.

[joemutt]

If you went to the store and bought 10 games, every week, it would take you 4 months to buy them all!!

How many will PS3 have??

Dont even bring up game lineup, you know you will get burned, and thats not even talking about the price you will be paying for them.

And no dont believe the retailers prices, they will change, just like the PS3 used to be priced at $400, now what is its price?? Ha Ha

[ASTAROTH]

160 games before christmas?? It has been nearly 9 months of the 360 launch and I think It doennt have more than 45 games. So you are saying than more than 160 games wiil be available by christmas. This is something I need to see to believe. Of the 40 plus games available right now at least 2 or 3 are good. So I believe if this happen, of the 160 games available for christmas at least 10 will be good. GOW, Mass Effect, COD3, Lost Planet and.... I dont know maybe VIVA PINATA!!!! JAJAJA.

[Jay da 2KBalla]

Completely your opinion and therefore doesnt mean sh!t.

[InSpectre]

Does that include all the xbox games that are backward compatible too? Probably. See what the headline category is? PS3. Get out!

[Bill Nye]

Yeah, the 360 will have 160 games by Christmas but half of them are Live Arcade games.

[GitRdone]

I was looking forward to the PS3. But I'm afraid Sony is going to allow significant manufacturing errors on the 8 core processor for business reasons. It's not unreasonable in manufacturing to have a percentage of errors, but I have read as much as 40% core processor un-usability will be tolerated in the PS3. They must figure the gamer will not know the difference at least with first generation games at launch. I'm sure Sony will get this core processor issue improved but unfortunately not in time for the launch units. I can find a real reason to not purchase this system at launch.

[InSpectre]

What does "40% core un-usability" mean? I've thought about it for a few minutes and I don't have a clue what you're trying to communicate.

Do you mean that chips with less than seven functional SPE's will be installed? Or do you mean that 40% of PS3's shipped will be dead and non-functional to make shipping numbers?

[gamerof360]

that is soo true i hope the GrillStation3 will not have a ring of light that just gives u more of a reason to buy the 360 some of the problems will be sorted out like over-heating man i hate to think how much it will cost to get the GS3 fixed

[HighCod]

http://www.ps3forums.com/vi...

[Cyclonus]

that forum post is well known to be full of crap. The kid thinks using technical jargon he learned in community college makes him an authority on the subject.

[mephixto]

your comment if full of crap Fanboy Spin, you don't even read it beacuse you are a noob who doens't understand nothing of computer architecture. The 90% of that post its true and if you READ the post tou will see a tons of links at the end and make the article very accurate. In other words your Xbox360 is history

[kingofps3]

Thing are sure looking to work out for sony.

[Cyclonus]

"doens't understand nothing of computer architecture."

Looks like you "doens't understand nothing" of the English language.

noob.

[Schmitty07]

It's a freakin video game console, why do some of you people get into arguements about a piece of plastic or whatever it is made out of. You act like it is your religion to defend a console

[MONOLITHICIDE]

because their brain washed into doing that, just look at 14.2, hes so opsessed with the 360 his name has to say Gamerof360, thats just rediculious, just read what he says

[PS3sux360inchWiiWii]

if you're gonna target people over a stupid user name. You could be targeted for a fanboy avitar pic! so think before you speak!

Bash my stuff, I don't care. Cause I have bigger things to worry about!

[THELANDSOFSAND]

so can we now have some finalised specs sony?

[THE TRUTH]

I can't wait for TGS this news is great because Sony will have demos playing on real PS3's at TGS, gamers just need to wait til Sony brings out BIG GUNS!

[THELANDSOFSAND]

well i hope their demos run better than this:

http://www.joystiq.com/2006...

[The Real Deal]

Its graphics card is not even close to the new Geforce 7950 cards. The ps3 graphics is already out dated. Think about it. When they review games for the ps3 they will compare it to a high end computer using the new Graphics cards and there will be no comparisson. Then what will ps3 fans say? lol.... Here is the Nvideas new video cards out. yes...1 gig of ram. Now thats memory. Ps3 has 256 ram dedicated to graphics. Thats bismal for gaming. Definately not next gen.

Designed for extreme HD gaming, the BFG GeForce® 7950 GX2 combines the power of two GeForce 7950 graphics processing units (GPUs) on a single graphics card. This unbelievable graphics horsepower, along with a 512-bit memory interface and an astounding 1GB of fast GDDR3 memory, enables an incredibly smooth, ultra-realistic gaming experience at resolutions up to 2560x1600.

[Bill Gates]

Seriously some of you people really need to get outside, specialy you bro.

[THELANDSOFSAND]

hey bill, nice one on donating $300 million to HIV research! (i'd like to see sony's owner do that!)

[The Real Deal]

Even ignoring the bandwidth limitations the PS3's GPU is not as powerful as the Xbox 360's GPU.

Below are the specs from Sony's press release regarding the PS3's GPU.

RSX GPU

550 MHz

Independent vertex/pixel shaders

51 billion dot products per second (total system performance)

300M transistors

136 "shader operations" per clock
The interesting ALU performance numbers are 51 billion dot products per second (total system performance), 300M transistors, and more than twice as powerful as the 6800 Ultra.

The 51 billions dot products per cycle were listed on a summary slide of total graphics system performance and are assumed to include the Cell processor. Sony's calculations seem to assume that the Cell can do a dot product per cycle per DSP, despite not having a dot product instruction.

However, using Sony's claim, 7 dot products per cycle * 3.2 GHz = 22.4 billion dot products per second for the CPU. That leaves 51 - 22.4 = 28.6 billion dot products per second that are left over for the GPU. That leaves 28.6 billion dot products per second / 550 MHz = 52 GPU ALU ops per clock.

It is important to note that if the RSX ALUs are similar to the GeForce 6800 ALUs then they work on vector4s, while the Xbox 360 GPU ALUs work on vector5s. The total programmable GPU floating point performance for the PS3 would be 52 ALU ops * 4 floats per op *2 (madd) * 550 MHz = 228.8 GFLOPS which is less than the Xbox 360's 48 ALU ops * 5 floats per op * 2 (madd) * 500 MHz= 240 GFLOPS.

With the number of transistors being slightly larger on the Xbox 360 GPU (330M) it's not surprising that the total programmable GFLOPs number is very close.

The PS3 does have the additional 7 DSPs on the Cell to add more floating point ops for graphics rendering, but the Xbox 360's three general purpose cores with custom D3D and dot product instructions are more customized for true graphics related calculations.

The 6800 Ultra has 16 pixel pipes, 6 vertex pipes, and runs at 400 MHz. Given the RSX's 2x better than a 6800 Ultra number and the higher frequency of the RSX, one can roughly estimate that it will have 24 pixel shading pipes and 4 vertex shading pipes (fewer vertex shading pipes since the Cell DSPs will do some vertex shading). If the PS3 GPU keeps the 6800 pixel shader pipe co-issue architecture which is hinted at in Sony's press release, this again gives it 24 pixel pipes* 2 issued per pipe + 4 vertex pipes = 52 dot products per clock in the GPU.

If the RSX follows the 6800 Ultra route, it will have 24 texture samplers, but when in use they take up an ALU slot, making the PS3 GPU in practice even less impressive. Even if it does manage to decouple texture fetching from ALU co-issue, it won't have enough bandwidth to fetch the textures anyways.

For shader operations per clock, Sony is most likely counting each pixel pipe as four ALU operations (co-issued vector+scalar) and a texture operation per pixel pipe and 4 scalar operations for each vector pipe, for a total of 24 * (4 + 1) + (4*4) = 136 operations per cycle or 136 * 550 = 74.8 GOps per second.

Given the Xbox 360 GPU's multithreading and balanced design, you really can't compare the two systems in terms of shading operations per clock. However, the Xbox 360's GPU can do 48 ALU operations (each can do a vector4 and scalar op per clock), 16 texture fetches, 32 control flow operations, and 16 programmable vertex fetch operations with tessellation per clock for a total of 48*2 + 16 + 32 + 16 = 160 operations per cycle or 160 * 500 = 80 GOps per second.

Overall, the automatic shader load balancing, memory export features, programmable vertex fetching, programmable triangle tesselator, full rate texture fetching in the vertex shader, and other "well beyond shader model 3.0" features of the Xbox 360 GPU should also contribute to overall rendering performance.

[The Real Deal]

When you break down the numbers, Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3. Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance. The truth is that both systems pack a lot of power for high definition games and entertainment.

However, hardware performance, while important, is only a third of the puzzle. Xbox 360 is a fusion of hardware, software and services. Without the software and services to power it, even the most powerful hardware becomes inconsequential. Xbox 360 games—by leveraging cutting-edge hardware, software, and services—will outperform the PlayStation 3.

[AuburnTiger]

This is probably the 5th or 6th time you have cut and pasted this same article from that 360 site. I know you’re not claiming this article like you wrote it, or are you? I mean you do you have an opinion on it? Are you going to share your thoughts on this or act like this is something you came up with? Are you acting like this just to make the PS3 look bad? Is this something you enjoy? I don’t see how you claim the PS3 as being totally crap and inferior to the 360 then turn around say you’re going to buy the console. No doubt you going to say that you’re a gamer and your rich and that you buy everything but still, you come on the ps3 section and post this article. I’m sure there are qualities about the PS3 that exceed the 360 but you don’t post those, and if you do I haven’t seen them.

And also, the next time you decide to post the this article again, why don’t you give the true author some credit, I mean we wouldn’t want you to come off as plagiarizing.

[The Real Deal]

I have never said the ps3 sucks. I'm sorry if the facts lead you to believe the ps3 will suck. I actually think it will be decent and at some point there should be some great games once the developers figure out how to get the most out of it. And the info I posted isn't from an xbox site. I know you wish it was. lol....Its from IGN. Its a system comparisson with the data that was given by Sony and Microsoft. Unless the specs change for the better, which with them announcing they are going to be assembled soon, the comparisson stands. But none of what I posted was lies. It was annalyst of the data given. It was their tech take on it. Not a fanboys take. lol...you guys give fanboy takes on data...You express your hopes and dreams in your quotes...."the Ps3 is way better than the 360"...lol..."its way more powerful".. lol.....And its because "I said so."...lol.... You will never ever hear me say that in regards to any system. I just post facts given by the pro's that get paid to know. Now you can read into the info any way you like. But its true. Sorry if you are dissappointed or in denial. Its not my fault.

[AuburnTiger]

Myfault is saw the URL and assumed to was from a xbox site, but it still doesn’t change the fact that you put negative comments about the ps3 every opportunity you get. You can call it facts or whatever, but if you were really out for “The Truth” you would put negative comments or “facts” about the 360 as well. But I understand, as much as you what to believe that you are not a “xbox fanboy” you really are or in denial.

Anyways if you really wanna a technical article
http://www.ps3forums.com/vi...

[The Real Deal]

CPU
The Xbox 360 processor was designed to give game developers the power that they actually need, in an easy to use form. The Cell processor has impressive streaming floating-point power that is of limited use for games.

The majority of game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math, with lots of branches and random memory accesses. This code is best handled by a general purpose CPU with a cache, branch predictor, and vector unit.

The Cell's seven DSPs (what Sony calls SPEs) have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a different instruction set from the PS3's main CPU. They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing. DSPs are not appropriate for game programming.

Xbox 360 has three general purpose CPU cores. The Cell processor has only one.

Xbox 360's CPUs has vector processing power on each CPU core. Each Xbox 360 core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread, with a dot product instruction, and a shared 1-MB L2 cache. The Cell processor's vector processing power is mostly on the seven DSPs.

Dot products are critical to games because they are used in 3D math to calculate vector lengths, projections, transformations, and more. The Xbox 360 CPU has a dot product instruction, where other CPUs such as Cell must emulate dot product using multiple instructions.

Cell's streaming floating-point work is done on its seven DSP processors. Since geometry processing is moved to the GPU, the need for streaming floating-point work and other DSP style programming in games has dropped dramatically.

Just like with the PS2's Emotion Engine, with its missing L2 cache, the Cell is designed for a type of game programming that accounts for a minor percentage of processing time.

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.

Based on measurements of running next generation games, only ~10-30% of the instructions executed are floating point. The remainders of the instructions are load, store, integer, branch, etc. Even fewer of the instructions executed are streaming floating point—probably ~5-10%. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else.

Game programmers do not want to spread their code over eight processors, especially when seven of the processors are poorly suited for general purpose programming. Evenly distributing game code across eight processors is extremely difficult.

[clayton]

Sony fanboys got pwned this generation. The real deal you know your tech, atleast there is someone else on this site with intelligence.

[shoota33]

xbo fanboys got pwned this generation and have to come to the ps3 section to bash ps3 every chance they get.

[mikeeno7]

PS3 fanboys got pwned this generation and have to come to the 360 section to bash 360 every chance they get.

[shoota33]

can you prove it? No. only like two ps3 fans go in there while every single one of you jealous xbots come here.I never go into the boring xbot section why? because xbox 1.5 is a piece of sh!t and i could care less about what news comes out for it.but you xbox f@gboys are more interested in ps3 news than xflop 1.5 news.

[PS3sux360inchWiiWii]

Woo Hoo!, thank god Spring 2005 is finally here...

[TitanXX]

He has no tech info half the stuff he says are not even true were are the links. Come on he is just another Xbox 360 fanboy who likes the 360 not the PS3 that is all. He knows nothing about the tech come on. the only reason people agree with him because he likes the 360 and another thing RealDeal you should get rid of that avetar making you look like you are some kind of G when you are just one of those techno geeks on the net.

[The Real Deal]

Lol.....Half the stuff I said is not true? You just don't want to believe it huh? And to the other guy who said its from a 360 web site. You lied. Everything I typed is from IGN. It was a system comparisson using the tech info given by Sony and Microsoft. By the way everything that was stated has been confirmed by Developers over and over again. The 360 is a dream machine for programmers and the ps3 is not ideal for game developement. Will there be great games for the ps3. I would be shocked if there wasn't. Why do I post this info? Because when Sony fans get carried away with the name calling and bashing of the 360, I have to give them Tech info to keep them in check. So when you bash the 360 saying its not as powerful as a cutting edge PC. I have to show you how it is and how the ps3 video card is equivelent to a geforce 6800 and there are now duel 7950 graphic cards that blow the ps3 graphics card out the box and the ps3 isn't even out yet. The things that gametime says is an advantage...blu ray...cell....those are the aspects of the ps3 that I feel are a disadvantage. Thats where I think sony went wrong. But TITANXX you think I'm a Joke huh? lol....Here is the article from IGN with the system comparisson. By the way if there was a system comparisson favorable to Sony I would post that as well. There is none. And once again. This article coincides with the developers who say there isn't enough ram for in game graphics in the ps3. Which cause the bottle necking. A lot of horse power but a little straw to get the game data through. And the Dsp's are not individual processors. They stream data into the games. Thats not best suited for games. Not because the real deal said so. Developers have said it. Once again I believe that some developers will be able to make good games on it. And at some point maybe even great games. I don't doubt that. But when fanboys get carried away. I let the Facts talk. Not the hopes and desires of a fanboy. Earth to Sony Fans....Earth to Sony Fans. Yes the ps3 will be cool. But for 600 dollars we will have to see if its a good value. And before you scream it is because of the blu ray player. You, I, and the annalyst can't predict if blu ray will succeed till the consumers decide. Till the millions and millions of every day people decide which formatt is best for them. Thats 5 to 10 years from now.

So I will give you a couple of things Titanxx. Thanks for saying I look like a G. And That was a picture of me taken at a video shoot in Fresno Cali earlier this year. Here is a link to my Myspace page so you can see that I am what I say. If thats not sufficient I can give you my xbox live accounts. All six of them and my email address and my aol profile. They all coincide with my picture I have up in my avatar. I'm the Real Deal.

http://xbox360.ign.com/arti...

http://www.myspace.com/jlon...

[The Real Deal]

What do you think of the PS3's Cell architecture? How much harder is it for developers to write asymmetric multiprocessing code that will run on the PPE and the SPE's? How difficult will it be to port code that is tuned for the Cell over to the 360 while maintaining good performance? Do you think Sony made the architecture complex deliberately to make porting that way harder, or were they just trying to get maximum performance out of their system?

I don't think the Cell is as well designed for game development as Sony would have you believe. Some aspects of the SPEs, such as the lack of branch prediction, make them particularly unsuited to running most game code, which contains a lot of branches. They appear to be designed more for serialized streaming math code, more common in video codecs and audio processing, the traditional domain of digital signal processing chips. The memory architecture of the SPEs, specifically their lack of automatic cache coherency in favor of DMA transactions, seems like a lot of overhead is needed to feed work units to the SPEs and copy the results back to system memory.

The PPE appears to be essentially identical to one of the Xbox 360 cores, except without the VMX128 enhancements and with half the cache. However, a much greater assortment of work has to be crammed into this single core—all of the game loop, all of the rendering commands, and the system allegedly takes over some time as well. Only the second and third cores on Xbox 360 use a small timeslice to provide cool stuff like the Guide, music playback, Dolby Digital encoding, and more things that we can add in the future to all games, past and present.

I think porting from Xbox 360 to PS3 will be reasonably difficult, since the Xbox 360 has a lot more general purpose processing power that can be flexibly reallocated, and all of the Xbox 360 CPU cores have equal access to all memory. The asymmetric nature of the Cell could easily lead to situations where the game has too little of one type of processing power and too much of another. And the content might suffer as well, since you'll never see a PS3 title with more than 256MB of textures at any given time, due to the split graphics and system memory banks. When we announced 512MB of unified memory on Xbox 360, I think all of our game developers (and the artists too) did a little happy dance. It's easier to use and gives developers much more flexibility in how they allocate memory for various resources.

In terms of performance, I think that the PS3 and the Xbox 360 will essentially be a wash. We ran the numbers a while back and the two systems come up surprisingly close in theoretical peak performance, despite the one year difference in release dates. However, I know for a fact that we have a great advantage in software and services—our development environment and tools are years ahead of the competition, and this will ensure that Xbox 360 game developers can easily realize all of this performance and make superior games. Xbox 360 is a great system to develop on, a real pleasure—and I believe our developers agree.

[TitanXX]

I had you wrong at first you are at my level player older but you are thier. A brooklyn brother wut up player. We may have are differences in tech but hay we got taste in women a man keep doin what u dion player nice my space page.