40GB PlayStation 3 console
a newly revised 40GB PlayStation 3 console will now be on sale - but don’t trade in your PS2 just yet!
A cheaper PS3 before Christmas was always on the cards given the state of the game console market.
Sony’s new 40GB model will be on sale later this week in NZ stores for $800.
That’s a price that puts it in league with the Xbox360 Elite (selling at GPstore for the same) while the Xbox 360 complete set is there for $649.95. The Wii is still the cheapest at around $500.
And it comes at the critical time for the consoles with Christmas looming and everyone bringing out the creme of their new titles.
So what’s missing from the new model? PlayStation 2 backward-compatibility will be gone and there will be just two USB ports, and you won’t find media slots for Compact Flash, Memory Stick, or SD Cards.
Maybe none of that matters to the thousands of PlayStation fans who want to get their hands on the new console and the new exclusive games like Heavenly Sword and Ratchet and Clank.
But it’s a shame that the mountain of games most gamers own and still love from their PS2 collection won’t be playable on the console.
In the past, Sony has made this a point of difference saying it’s a core value and necessary for the future.
Now the argument is that there are heaps of great new PS3 titles coming and anyway consumers tell Sony they don’t want backward-compatibility.
That statement sounds somewhat dubious. I love putting in my God Of War and Everquest/Final Fantasy games and upscaling the image to hi-def and saving myself swapping dozens of memory cards (I have about 14 PS2) by storing them to the PS3 virtual memory cards on the internal hard drive.. hard to believe that ability has been removed for a mere $400.
Even at the reduced money - $800 - the only way some PS2 gamers will graduate to the next-gen will be to trade in their PS2 to a gaming shop to get a discount off the price - with the return of some PS2 titles.
PS3 online does offer some cool retro/arcade PlayStation games to download like Wipeout but until there is a huge range of titles to choose from and you can afford them (prices are dropping), it’s hard for those gamers to think they’ll never play games like their GTA favourites again.
Anyway good luck to Sony. They have sold 15,000 current PS3s in NZ so far and promise 65 PS3 titles in the stores by Christmas.
One of those just out is Atari’s Colin McRae: DIRT (already on Xbox and PC) which has taken on new symbolism since the recent death of the rally legend.
It’s a brilliant reworking of the popular series with the chance to do heaps of new high speed muddy offroad racing whether its a high-powered Celica, SUV or a Super Buggy.
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November 30th, 2007 at 11:27 am
By implementing common ciphers and hash functions using vector computing, Breese has pushed the current upper limit of 10–15 million cycles per second — in Intel-based architecture — up to 1.4 billion cycles per second.
Breese, who has been working on the project, called “Crackstation”, for the past six months, used the Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console for his break-through research. PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine technology was created by IBM, Toshiba and Sony. The companies collaborated to create the CBE, commonly known as Cell, processor, which consists of one scalar processor and eight vector processors.
By design, PS3 is very suitable for cryptography, says Breese. Intel processors are designed to do all kinds of complex calculations, whereas the PS3 is good at doing simple things very quickly. “And believe it or not, cryptography really is simple,” he says. “Lots of simple operations being done one at the time.”
The strength of cryptography implementations is usually based on its cracking time — how long it would take for someone to sit down and crack it, says Breese. His discovery has demonstrated that the capability of cracking encryption algorithms has multiplied by 100.
Breese’s discovery “will unfortunately make cryptography cracking faster”, he says. However, he hopes that his research will help drive the need for stronger cryptography to be used, and push for better implementations of cryptography.
The big implication for the industry is the fact that using Intel processors as a benchmark just is not good enough anymore, he says.
Within PS3, in Breese’s case running Linux, there are six SPU (Synergistic Processing Unit) processor cores. Each core is able to do four calculations — so across all of the cores it is possible to do 24 calculations at the same time, he says. The simplistic design of the processor architecture also helped increase the speed, he says.
Breese was looking for a way to optimize processing to make MD5 calculations go very quickly, he says. MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is one of the most used cryptographic hash functions. The PS3 managed to conduct over 1.4 billion MD5 calculations a second, he says.
But the speed increase relates to the use of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) computing, rather than solely the PS3, he says. “It’s just that the Cell processor cluster within the Playstation 3 is very good at it,” he says.
Vector, or SIMD, computing involves performing calculations against a data group, rather than against a single piece of data, which is known as scalar computing, says Breese. Using vector computing allowed him to run cryptography calculations in parallel, he says.
Breese presented his findings at the Kiwicon hacker conference, held in Wellington earlier this month.
“We seem to have a world’s first here, with potentially huge implications around the validity of some encryption algorithms going forward,” says Security-assessment.com chief executive Peter Benson. “While we have not currently worked on distributing load across PS3s, the theory is there to increase this level of performance further.”
The team rewrote some of the code to run under the vector-based methodology, and as soon as they did that they started getting “some pretty spectacular results”, says Benson. It took a while before the company decided to release the numbers “because we just didn’t believe them,” he says.
Breese also increased the speed in x86 processors by using the same method on the x86-equivalent technology known as SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions), but the increase was not as significant. He found that the x86 SSE2 implementation could conduct over three times the number of MD5 calculations than the scalar equivalent.
Breese says the initial reason for embarking on the research project was to get the company to buy him a PS3
November 30th, 2007 at 11:28 am
The video game industry has turned a corner after a lengthy hardware transition, with new console purchases expected to reach 200 million units in five to six years, the head of Electronic Arts Inc (ERTS.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Thursday.
“It’s been the longest, hardest transition in the history of the industry,” EA Chief Executive John Riccitiello told the Reuters Media Summit in New York.
“Last Friday marked one of those points where you can say something’s changed,” he said. “Around the world, based on the data I’ve got, it was pretty clear that the transition is now over.
Key to that was Sony Corp’s (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) recent price cut for its PlayStation 3, which should ensure the struggling console hits the company’s fiscal-year sales target of 11 million units, Riccitiello said.
Since its launch a little more than a year ago, sales of Sony’s PS3 have lagged those of Nintendo Co Ltd’s (7974.OS: Quote, Profile, Research) Wii and Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Xbox 360.
But in a sign of changing fortunes for the PS3, U.S. sales jumped in the weeks following a mid-October price cut and launch of a lower-priced version. Sony said this week that PS3 sales on “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving that is a big U.S. shopping event, more than tripled from a year before.
“It looked like it might have been a two-horse race, but it’s clearly a three-horse race,” Riccitiello said of Sony’s revitalized sales. “I think from this point, pleasantly for me, it’s sort of fat city in the game industry.”
Separately on Thursday, Microsoft said it had sold more than 310,000 Xbox 360 units during the week of Thanksgiving, nearly as many as it sold in the whole month of October
November 30th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Riccitiello suggested all of the console makers would cut prices next year, on their way to selling more than 200 million units by about 2012 or 2013.
That is about 18 percent higher than total sales in the last console cycle, which started in 2000 with the launch of Sony’s PlayStation 2.
EA expected to increase its market share for the Wii, which has been dominated by games from Nintendo rather than outside publishers. EA now had about 14 percent of Wii software sales, versus more than 20 percent for the Xbox 360 and PS3.
“The Wii is a challenge for all of us … partly because of the strength of Nintendo and partly because it’s a more casual game experience that most game companies aren’t as comfortable building for as they are for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3,” Riccitiello said.
One game that would boost EA on the Wii is “Rock Band,” which went on sale for the Xbox 360 and PS3 last week, and is due to come out for the Wii next year.
“Hundreds of thousands (of copies) sold through over the Thanksgiving weekend. Literally every box we made,” Riccitiello said. EA distributes “Rock Band” for MTV Networks, a unit of Viacom (VIAb.N: Quote, Profile, Research). The $170 game is challenging Activision Inc’s (ATVI.O: Quote, Profile, Research) “Guitar Hero 3″, which racked up $115 million in sales in its first week.
Riccitiello, who engineered a deal last month to buy two independent game studios for up to $855 million, said most consolidation in the industry had already taken place, but there was potential in fast-growing areas such as subscriptions and advertising.
“Is it ripe or has it already been picked? I would argue that it’s been largely picked,” Riccitiello said. “That doesn’t mean it’s done. I think there will be more consolidation to come. But let’s just say a lot has already happened.”
EA shares fell 0.6 percent to $56.95 in late afternoon trading on Nasdaq.
November 30th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Microsoft sold more than 310,000 Xbox 360s last week in the United States, according to data released by the company this morning. The number essentially completes the statistical picture for the first week of holiday console sales. Nintendo said previously that it sold 350,000 Wii consoles in the country for the week.
Sony hasn’t disclosed the raw number of PlayStation 3 units it sold last week. (A Sony spokeswoman says it will give those numbers when NPD Group stats come out in mid-December.) The company did say that PlayStation 3 hardware sales were up 245 percent last week, when compared with the same week last year, among the top 10 North American retailers. This morning, Microsoft said the Xbox 360 still outsold the PS3 two-to-one last week, according to “estimates from top retailers.”
Update, 12:30 p.m.: Sony is disputing Microsoft’s statement about the ratio of Xbox 360 to PS3 sales. Here’s what Kimberly Otzman, a Sony spokeswoman, said in an e-mail just now:
“It’s (Sony Computer Entertainment America) policy not to disclose our unit sales numbers until NPD numbers are officially released which will be December 13th. However, I can assure you that Microsoft’s estimates of our PS3 unit sales numbers are way off and they did not outsell PS3 2:1 during Black Friday week.”
I’ve asked a Microsoft representative if the company wants to respond or check its numbers. The original post resumes below.
The different prices for the three consoles means the comparison of unit sales isn’t exactly apples-to-apples. It’s not the same as comparing hardware revenue and profits. But ultimately, a big goal for each company is to get its console into as many homes as possible, so it’s important to watch the market-share race.
More statistical jousting from the three companies:
* Microsoft says software sales for the Xbox 360 are on track to exceed software sales for the PlayStation 3 and Wii combined this holiday season.
* Sony says PS3 hardware sales have increased by 298 percent since Nov. 2, with the availability of both the 40 gigabyte and 80 gigabyte models of the console.
* Nintendo of America said it sold “more Nintendo products than at any other time in its history” last week, including 653,000 Nintendo DS systems and the 350,000 Wii consoles.