http://animationphysics.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/solving-general-shallow-wave-equations-on-surfaces/
http://blogs.intel.com/research/2007/08/what_makes_parallel_programmin.html
http://www.thinkingparallel.com/2007/08/06/what-makes-parallel-programming-hard/
http://softwareblogs.intel.com/2007/08/04/microsoft-appears-to-have-got-its-multi-core-shinola-together/
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/id-tech-5-project/810525p2.html
http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/techpage.php
http://www.forkparticle.com/product_sdk.html
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Dear Yahoo, So long and thanks for all the SPAM
Yahoo Mail... what a shame. I used to actually pay them for their service way back in the day. Now I can't bring myself to login more than once every few months due to all the SPAM. I mean come on, how many penis enlargement kits and opportunities to lend my bank account to African diplomats does one person really need??!!
Today after seeing several thousand SPAM messages that didn't get filtered (again) I decided I'm not going to use it for email anymore. So long Yahoo Mail. It was nice while it lasted. Now, I'm going to leave the account open as an experiment to see just how much email can fill up in there before Yahoo gets pissed off and kills it on their own... and yes... go for it.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
What did Amazon do?
Have you looked at Amazon lately? I went to but a book the other day and couldn't believe how much extra crap there was on the web page. All I wanted to do was buy a book not see information on every subject by every person that was any way associated with any word in the book.
I mean look at this: Harry Potter
I don't care about the Best Value
I don't care about what other customers who bought this item bought
I don't want to visit the Harry Potter Store
I don't want to browse the entire Harry Potter collection
I don't care why Amazon loves Harry Potter and feels obligated to tell me about every book
I don't want to read about a conversation with J.K Rowling
I don't really care what J.K Rowling's favorite book is.
I really don't care what Mary GranPre has to say about the cover of the book (she illustrated it)
I really don't want to hear what the Publisher's Weekly has to say about the book
I also don't want to see all the Leaky Cauldron Posts whatever the hell that is.
I also don't care about the statistics of other customers who looked at this page and what they ultimately bought.
I sincerely don't care about tags customers associated with this product
I'm not the publisher or author of the book so why is Amazon asking me to learn about making the book an eBook?
I don't want to read the discussion people are having about the book.
I especially don't want to read the (BETA mind you) Amapedia Community's opinion (whatever the hell that is)
I care not about Listmainia
I don't get the "So You'd like to..." section at all
And finally I don't want to give feedback nor see my entire search history.
All I wanted to do was buy the damn book. Now I'm tired... Too tired to even read it.
When I wake up I think I'll get off my ass and go to borders and pick it up...
Let's see if they have it in stock.. now that's useful.
I mean look at this: Harry Potter
I don't care about the Best Value
I don't care about what other customers who bought this item bought
I don't want to visit the Harry Potter Store
I don't want to browse the entire Harry Potter collection
I don't care why Amazon loves Harry Potter and feels obligated to tell me about every book
I don't want to read about a conversation with J.K Rowling
I don't really care what J.K Rowling's favorite book is.
I really don't care what Mary GranPre has to say about the cover of the book (she illustrated it)
I really don't want to hear what the Publisher's Weekly has to say about the book
I also don't want to see all the Leaky Cauldron Posts whatever the hell that is.
I also don't care about the statistics of other customers who looked at this page and what they ultimately bought.
I sincerely don't care about tags customers associated with this product
I'm not the publisher or author of the book so why is Amazon asking me to learn about making the book an eBook?
I don't want to read the discussion people are having about the book.
I especially don't want to read the (BETA mind you) Amapedia Community's opinion (whatever the hell that is)
I care not about Listmainia
I don't get the "So You'd like to..." section at all
And finally I don't want to give feedback nor see my entire search history.
All I wanted to do was buy the damn book. Now I'm tired... Too tired to even read it.
When I wake up I think I'll get off my ass and go to borders and pick it up...
Let's see if they have it in stock.. now that's useful.
The trouble with the PS3
Unless you've been living under a rock you must have heard about the PS3 by now. I have had the opportunity to work on the PS3 for the last year and have written some decent software to make PS3 and Cell programming easier. I know first hand how hard it is to get good performance out of the PS3 and what it takes to get frame rates close to the XBox360. The Sony hype engine has finally backed off a bit now that reality has set in and things seem to be getting better for people making PS3 games. There are still a lot of issues that need to be overcome though and I think Sony is still sending the wrong message the developer community. At least they're being helpful now though.
It’s really a good thing that Sony has “fessed-up” about how badly they’ve handled developer support. It says a lot that they are willing to admit that they dropped the ball and are committed to doing a better job in the eyes of developers, studios, and publishers. They started this process a few months back at the PS3 Developer Conference where the keynote was almost entirely an apology to the developers for missing deadlines, delivering inadequate tools, shipping buggy SDKs, and providing extremely poor technical support. The tools, technologies, and insight presented at the conference while superb may have just been too little too late. Even with this "personality change" I am convinced they are still "doing it wrong" if they hope for the PS3 to ever be number one like the PS2. Maybe matching the performance of the 360 is good enough in Sony's eyes. If I put my consumer hat on however I certainly don't see any game out there worth shelling $600 + $50 dollars.
With that said, this statement by Phil Harrison in reference to helping Epic get the Unreal3 engine performing well on the PS3 is extremely troubling:
First of all, throwing more programmers at a problem is almost never the correct solution and Phil should know better. Porting existing, non-parallelized architectures to the SPUs should not be considered the proper coarse of action for PS3 games. The approach of coding everything on the PPU and then porting to the SPUs to optimize has unfortunately become the status-quo . This approach will never lead to superior games on the PS3 that live up to the expectations set for the platform. Until addressed (meaning games run roughly 80% on SPUs and 20% on PPU) the true potential of the PS3 (if it really exists) will never be realized. Running 60-70% on the PPU and 30-40% on the SPUs will never result in high fidelity games superior to the 360. The bad news is that porting existing code bases to the platform is near impossible without significant re-architecture for fine grained parallelism. The fact is that you need two different compilers (PPU/SPU), two incompatible instructions sets, and two incompatible sets of intrinsics to build software for a single CPU, with a single main core! Sure, you can argue all day that this is necessary because the architecture of the Cell is so radically different and talk about possibilities for optimal parallel execution across the 5 (not 6, not 8 that were promised) SPUs. This is extremely challenging, expensive, and not something a studio really wants to be spending money on. When you can make an excellent game on an XBox 360 for a fraction of the development cost why would you ever lead on the PS3? The answer is, you wouldn't and extremely few studios have. You build the game for the 360 ship it and the port to the PS3 and do the best you can. This sucks for everyone; Sony most of all. Its sucks for the consumer because they get crappy ports on the PS3 (and few at that). It sucks for developers because it costs a lot of money and the return on investment isn't exactly huge given the current PS3 install base. Most of all it sucks for Sony... how many billions have they sunk into the PS3?
Sony needs to stop openly promoting this as the way to get PS3 performance. The SPUs are not a silver bullet and to use them properly in the context of something as complex as a game is a tremendous effort. Instead, Sony needs to find a way deliver a modern development environment that makes PS3 development easy, cost effective, and feasible in a timely manner. This is what Microsoft did with the XBox 360 and I can attest first hand that it is a true pleasure working on that platform and the end results (the games) are amazing.
I think that its still too soon to call the PS3 and Cell a failure but until we get better tools from Sony I just don’t see why any company would go out of their way to run on PS3. Again Epic is a great example of company of top notch people who focused on the PC and Xbox360. I sincerely doubt this was an accident.
I also take issue with the allusion (and illusion) that there is a magical SWAT Team of experts ready to come out and make your game rock on the PS3. I know the Developer Relations and R&D guys in the U.S. They are wonderful people and very knowledgeable, but they are in the same boat as the rest of the developer community… they get documentation and SDKs at the same time as the rest of us when they are released from Sony Japan. I'm not criticizing Sony's process (they can do whatever they like), but at the same time I don't think its fair to say there is a team of experts ready to bail you out. In all honesty I think it is fair to say that the people on my team know almost as much as the SWAT Team about the PS3 (not to imply we know everything about the PS3, just that we know about as much as they do since we have access to the same materials).
The Developer Relation and R&D guys, when not helping customers, generally build examples, sample code, and do research projects. In other words, they aren’t building games. It’s an important role they serve, but I question whether they can really be the SWAT Team/Experts for middleware and game developers.
For the record, the guys that are truly intimate with the PS3 are the first party developers at Sony World Wide Studios. These are the guys that ONLY have to worry about the PS3 so they have the time and budget to build what I’ll call “proper” PS3 tools, technologies and games. I don’t think most developers have that luxury.
Even with the recent positive changes with regards to how Sony is treating the PS3 developer community, there is no changing the fact that the Cell is still extremely difficult to program efficiently and the RSX (GPU) is underpowered making optimal Cell programming that more important. The GPU was added when it was realized that the Cell wasn’t going to cut it on its own. Originally it was thought that a GPU wasn’t needed at all. Many people (including myself) agree that the end result is a major step back in modern architecture where more and more work is being offloaded to the GPUs. Having the majority of work run on the Cell coupled with the difficulties with Cell programming appears to have created a tremendous barrier for budget conscious studios and publishers when it comes to leading on the PS3… something Sony badly wants. True, there are exceptions, but in general this seems to be the case. Just go to GameStop and you’ll see the end result… very few games for the PS3, even fewer exclusive PS3 games.
It is my opinion that this situation is not likely to change until Sony provides the desperately needed compiler technology, documentation, runtime system, and higher level SDKs needed to do proper PS3 development. The underpowered GPU really can’t be fixed since it’s a hardware limitation issue. Sony, IBM, or some 3rd party is going to have to deliver proper compiler technology and runtime support that abstracts away the SPUs and PPU, handles all of the low level DMA transfers , program segmentation and code swapping, scheduling, software caching, synchronization, GPU offloading (to SPUs), SPU shader execution, etc... Until this kind of enabling technology is stable and made available to the developer community I have grave
concerns about the moderate to long term success of the PS3 (no matter what the analysts say).
In simplest terms, until the PS3 is tamed I think it’s unlikely we will see the kinds of games that have been promised. At best we will see games equal to the quality of the 360 as the current trend in optimizing by porting to SPUs continues. I don’t think this model is sustainable or worth it long term when considering what the consumer wants.
For more information of how the PS3 development tools need to improve you might want to check this out: http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sj/451/eichenberger.html
It’s really a good thing that Sony has “fessed-up” about how badly they’ve handled developer support. It says a lot that they are willing to admit that they dropped the ball and are committed to doing a better job in the eyes of developers, studios, and publishers. They started this process a few months back at the PS3 Developer Conference where the keynote was almost entirely an apology to the developers for missing deadlines, delivering inadequate tools, shipping buggy SDKs, and providing extremely poor technical support. The tools, technologies, and insight presented at the conference while superb may have just been too little too late. Even with this "personality change" I am convinced they are still "doing it wrong" if they hope for the PS3 to ever be number one like the PS2. Maybe matching the performance of the 360 is good enough in Sony's eyes. If I put my consumer hat on however I certainly don't see any game out there worth shelling $600 + $50 dollars.
With that said, this statement by Phil Harrison in reference to helping Epic get the Unreal3 engine performing well on the PS3 is extremely troubling:
“We have parachuted in some of our SWAT team of super engineers to help them. Specifically, to optimize for SPUs, which are the point of difference that the Cell Processor has.”
First of all, throwing more programmers at a problem is almost never the correct solution and Phil should know better. Porting existing, non-parallelized architectures to the SPUs should not be considered the proper coarse of action for PS3 games. The approach of coding everything on the PPU and then porting to the SPUs to optimize has unfortunately become the status-quo . This approach will never lead to superior games on the PS3 that live up to the expectations set for the platform. Until addressed (meaning games run roughly 80% on SPUs and 20% on PPU) the true potential of the PS3 (if it really exists) will never be realized. Running 60-70% on the PPU and 30-40% on the SPUs will never result in high fidelity games superior to the 360. The bad news is that porting existing code bases to the platform is near impossible without significant re-architecture for fine grained parallelism. The fact is that you need two different compilers (PPU/SPU), two incompatible instructions sets, and two incompatible sets of intrinsics to build software for a single CPU, with a single main core! Sure, you can argue all day that this is necessary because the architecture of the Cell is so radically different and talk about possibilities for optimal parallel execution across the 5 (not 6, not 8 that were promised) SPUs. This is extremely challenging, expensive, and not something a studio really wants to be spending money on. When you can make an excellent game on an XBox 360 for a fraction of the development cost why would you ever lead on the PS3? The answer is, you wouldn't and extremely few studios have. You build the game for the 360 ship it and the port to the PS3 and do the best you can. This sucks for everyone; Sony most of all. Its sucks for the consumer because they get crappy ports on the PS3 (and few at that). It sucks for developers because it costs a lot of money and the return on investment isn't exactly huge given the current PS3 install base. Most of all it sucks for Sony... how many billions have they sunk into the PS3?
Sony needs to stop openly promoting this as the way to get PS3 performance. The SPUs are not a silver bullet and to use them properly in the context of something as complex as a game is a tremendous effort. Instead, Sony needs to find a way deliver a modern development environment that makes PS3 development easy, cost effective, and feasible in a timely manner. This is what Microsoft did with the XBox 360 and I can attest first hand that it is a true pleasure working on that platform and the end results (the games) are amazing.
I think that its still too soon to call the PS3 and Cell a failure but until we get better tools from Sony I just don’t see why any company would go out of their way to run on PS3. Again Epic is a great example of company of top notch people who focused on the PC and Xbox360. I sincerely doubt this was an accident.
I also take issue with the allusion (and illusion) that there is a magical SWAT Team of experts ready to come out and make your game rock on the PS3. I know the Developer Relations and R&D guys in the U.S. They are wonderful people and very knowledgeable, but they are in the same boat as the rest of the developer community… they get documentation and SDKs at the same time as the rest of us when they are released from Sony Japan. I'm not criticizing Sony's process (they can do whatever they like), but at the same time I don't think its fair to say there is a team of experts ready to bail you out. In all honesty I think it is fair to say that the people on my team know almost as much as the SWAT Team about the PS3 (not to imply we know everything about the PS3, just that we know about as much as they do since we have access to the same materials).
The Developer Relation and R&D guys, when not helping customers, generally build examples, sample code, and do research projects. In other words, they aren’t building games. It’s an important role they serve, but I question whether they can really be the SWAT Team/Experts for middleware and game developers.
For the record, the guys that are truly intimate with the PS3 are the first party developers at Sony World Wide Studios. These are the guys that ONLY have to worry about the PS3 so they have the time and budget to build what I’ll call “proper” PS3 tools, technologies and games. I don’t think most developers have that luxury.
Even with the recent positive changes with regards to how Sony is treating the PS3 developer community, there is no changing the fact that the Cell is still extremely difficult to program efficiently and the RSX (GPU) is underpowered making optimal Cell programming that more important. The GPU was added when it was realized that the Cell wasn’t going to cut it on its own. Originally it was thought that a GPU wasn’t needed at all. Many people (including myself) agree that the end result is a major step back in modern architecture where more and more work is being offloaded to the GPUs. Having the majority of work run on the Cell coupled with the difficulties with Cell programming appears to have created a tremendous barrier for budget conscious studios and publishers when it comes to leading on the PS3… something Sony badly wants. True, there are exceptions, but in general this seems to be the case. Just go to GameStop and you’ll see the end result… very few games for the PS3, even fewer exclusive PS3 games.
It is my opinion that this situation is not likely to change until Sony provides the desperately needed compiler technology, documentation, runtime system, and higher level SDKs needed to do proper PS3 development. The underpowered GPU really can’t be fixed since it’s a hardware limitation issue. Sony, IBM, or some 3rd party is going to have to deliver proper compiler technology and runtime support that abstracts away the SPUs and PPU, handles all of the low level DMA transfers , program segmentation and code swapping, scheduling, software caching, synchronization, GPU offloading (to SPUs), SPU shader execution, etc... Until this kind of enabling technology is stable and made available to the developer community I have grave
concerns about the moderate to long term success of the PS3 (no matter what the analysts say).
In simplest terms, until the PS3 is tamed I think it’s unlikely we will see the kinds of games that have been promised. At best we will see games equal to the quality of the 360 as the current trend in optimizing by porting to SPUs continues. I don’t think this model is sustainable or worth it long term when considering what the consumer wants.
For more information of how the PS3 development tools need to improve you might want to check this out: http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sj/451/eichenberger.html
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