PS3 chip to be 1 TeraFLOP.
April 21, 2003 - 12:54pm — gfair
I came across an interesting article about the fab for the next-gen Sony Playstation chip. I wonder if this fab will exclusively produce Sony PS3 chips, or the support and related chips as well.
Interesting to note - the team plans on making the PS3 chip the first 1 teraflop chip for a consumer product. That's a lot of power. I wonder if Apple may some day look at this as the future of Apple's own CPU line, minus the ability to emulate the PS3 system.
Whatever the case, the console gaming world is beginning to look a lot more exciting than the computer world in terms of how radically it advances the performance curve.
But will game development and graphics be able to catch up and utilize all that extra performance?
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A Pentium 4 has 55M (Northwood) to 100M (Prescott) transistors. An Nvidia NV30 has 125M, and the ATI Radeon 9700 has 110M.
The 'Emotion Engine' in a PS-2 has 40M, the 'Cell' engine for PS-3 is expected to have ~500M transistors.
People caught up with Intel dies a while ago.
In semiconductor fabbing, transistor count is pretty much proportional to die size, manu costs, and design complexity. So why does Intel get such a big premium for its silicon? Undeserved and unfair IMHO. It is interesting how Intel protects its markets, more aggressively than MSFT or anyone else.
And yes, they usually fab the whole chipset for a Playstation on the same process, however, the PS-2 rev.2 due this year will have all the support chips integrated within a new 50M-transistor, 90nm 'Emotion Engine' die for a single-chip PS-2. An efficiency the multi-vendor XBox won't ever be able to match.