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GamesRadar.com wrote:PlayStation 5 to be as powerful as human brain

[25/05/05 17:25]
Which makes it 100 times more powerful than PS3. Heck

"PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain." This is the remarkable claim made by Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT and Britain's leading thinker on the future.

Pointing to the specs of PlayStation 3, which was unveiled last week, Pearson highlighted the fact that it is 35 times more powerful than previous consoles.

"The new PlayStation is one per cent as powerful as a human brain," he told the Observer. "It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain.

"We're already looking at how you might structure a computer that could possibly become conscious. There are quite a lot of us now who believe it's entirely feasible."

Pearson also claims that "if you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine". Can't wait.

You can keep your steenkin' PS3/Revolution/Xbox 360.

rather presumptuous aren't they?

Yep.

Whether it can make use of such power is another matter (if it can even get that much power). A pocket calculator has more serial processing power than the human brain. Where organic neural networks excel is in parallel processing and not one of the supercomputers can really rival the human brain in that regard. Even if they did have the physical power to run such computations, there's the fact that you need adequate software too. Wetware doesn't suffer from this problem since the structure of the processor is the CPU, as it were, memory and kernel.

Remember that commercial Sony ran six or so years back where they showed what they thought the PS3 (I think) was going to be? It was some sort of crazy total emmersion artificial reality thing. So yeah, they're probably full of shit.

Remember that commercial Sony ran six or so years back where they showed what they thought the PS3 (I think) was going to be?

No, it was the PS9, and, uh... it was a joke, dude. A joke. Laugh-laugh?

From another board:

GhaleonEB wrote:PS3:



PS4:



PS5:

http://ga-forum.com/showpost.php?p=1417059&postcount=42

Anyone who works in a department of "futurology" is, as far as I'm concerned, completely full of shit. The guy's got no credentials that I'm aware of; he's just pontificating baseless numbers from the "department of futurology."

"The new PlayStation is one per cent as powerful as a human brain." Oh really? And where are the calculations to back up this bit of quackery?

I wonder if they have degrees in fungineering...

SPOOFE wrote:

Remember that commercial Sony ran six or so years back where they showed what they thought the PS3 (I think) was going to be?

No, it was the PS9, and, uh... it was a joke, dude. A joke. Laugh-laugh?

I know, but they're still full of shit. Its Sony for Gods sake, future-tech wanking is half of what they do!

And I take it that at this rate, the PlayStation 6 will be so powerful, it will need to be recalled after several of them rise up against their owners and enslave the human population?

Are we absolutely sure that this article isn't being satirical?

Drooling Iguana wrote:Are we absolutely sure that this article isn't being satirical?

Yes.

Wow, thats pretty powerful for a box of spoons...

I know, but they're still full of shit. Its Sony for Gods sake, future-tech wanking is half of what they do!

Its how the Sony hive-mind thinks... they want to be the grand champion bringing the technology of the future to the masses. That's why they keep creating proprietary formats.

And people wonder why I take the PS3 specs with a large grain of salt. Saying it can do something on paper is one thing, actually achiveing it in a cost effective way is another.

ggs wrote:And people wonder why I take the PS3 specs with a large grain of salt. Saying it can do something on paper is one thing, actually achiveing it in a cost effective way is another.

Exactly. Anyone remember the claims of "being able to render Final Fantasy VIII FMVs in real time" for the PS2? Talk about way off the mark.

Durandal wrote:

ggs wrote:And people wonder why I take the PS3 specs with a large grain of salt. Saying it can do something on paper is one thing, actually achiveing it in a cost effective way is another.

Exactly. Anyone remember the claims of "being able to render Final Fantasy VIII FMVs in real time" for the PS2? Talk about way off the mark.

Another mind boggling stupidity that is the CELL, is that it suffers a 90% preformance hit for using double precision floatpoint numbers of single precision floatpoint.

Why would you use double precision over single? Single precision has one rounding mode, truncate(aka round down). Double can round to the closest whole number or just down.

Why is this so damn important? For physics code and vertex manipulation the rounding to nearest helps prevent number drift, as in general it works out even between rounding up and rounding down.

With single precision it just rounds down, biasing every floatpoint operation downwards. Which needless to say is bad for your physics code.

ggs wrote:Another mind boggling stupidity that is the CELL, is that it suffers a 90% preformance hit for using double precision floatpoint numbers of single precision floatpoint.

I'm not incredibly familiar with the Cell. Is there a VMX unit in there somewhere that could handle vectorized code using double-precision floating-point?

Durandal wrote:

ggs wrote:Another mind boggling stupidity that is the CELL, is that it suffers a 90% preformance hit for using double precision floatpoint numbers of single precision floatpoint.

I'm not incredibly familiar with the Cell. Is there a VMX unit in there somewhere that could handle vectorized code using double-precision floating-point?

I'll search for the exact quotes, but I'm sure that is the preformance of double precision on the VMX units on the Cell chips (the sub-cores which do the heavy floatpoint crunching, not the main core).

Well I'm sure Sony, MS, and Nintendo will say that future generation platforms will make everyone good looking, provide cold fusion power to the entire planet, and bring world peace. Oh yeah, they might be able to play some kick ass games as well.

Well I'm sure Sony, MS, and Nintendo will say that future generation platforms will make everyone good looking, provide cold fusion power to the entire planet, and bring world peace.

Not Nintendo. They'll just smile slyly, tell us that their new console will be the best thing ever, and that we'll just have to wait and see for ourselves.

As for the Cell... remember about 18 months ago when Sony was saying that the Cell was going to be designed specifically to trade spare processing power with every other Cell processor hooked up to the Internet? That was the big thing... that they wouldn't HAVE to put a lot of processing power into the PS3, because the processing power would come from someone else's PS3.

But recently, we ain't heard NOTHING about this centralized feature that resulted in the processor's name. My guess? Sony was bullshitting from the start.

I don't see how a LAN or WAN based parallel processing feature would help. If you can't hook up to the net easily or the other Cells are already busy with what's currently running, then it seems a tad silly. I'd rather have it as a base perfomance, without relying on this anomalous feature.

I had heard Cell chips would be in all new Sony hardware now though.

Plus there's the fact that the data to be processed changes every time the player touches the controller, which means that the amount of time it would take to process any given chunk of data would be fairly small compared to the amount of time it would take to recieve that data and transmit the results. Distributed computing over the Internet works when dealing with large, unchanging blocks of data. It does not, and cannot work for realtime game processing.

Plus, can you imagine how hard it would be to program for something like that, even if it did work? It's hard enough to make computer games that work across a wide variety of machines with different levels of processing power. Imagine how hard it would be to code for a machine whose processing power varies significantly from one moment to the next.

I think that there must have been some severe miscommunication between the engineers and the marketers on that issue.

Drooling Iguana wrote:Plus there's the fact that the data to be processed changes every time the player touches the controller, which means that the amount of time it would take to process any given chunk of data would be fairly small compared to the amount of time it would take to recieve that data and transmit the results. Distributed computing over the Internet works when dealing with large, unchanging blocks of data. It does not, and cannot work for realtime game processing.

Plus, can you imagine how hard it would be to program for something like that, even if it did work? It's hard enough to make computer games that work across a wide variety of machines with different levels of processing power. Imagine how hard it would be to code for a machine whose processing power varies significantly from one moment to the next.

I think that there must have been some severe miscommunication between the engineers and the marketers on that issue.

I doubt that. More likely the engineers and marketters communicated correctly, the marketers just decided to lie as always

Yeah, like you said, its absolutely ridiculous to have two processors connect at the speed of it being physically part of the motherboard, through the internet. If that could be done we'd be downloading things in split seconds.

The differences in RAM and HDD recall speeds is bad enough, from nanoseconds to milliseconds. So imagine getting processor power online.