Sony spent a lot on developing Cell, and especially on developing Blu-Ray. They can use both of those technologies in a new console without suffering anything like PS3 development costs.

Sony has been paying for die shrinks of Cell and RSX this entire generation, as they've been lowering the cost of the PS3s they are selling. Cell itself was designed to be a scalable architecture, with support for multiprocessing (i.e., multiple Cells) from the beginning. They could put a 28nm next gen Cell chip with 2 PPEs and 16 SPEs and have something decent, or they could do 4 PPEs and 8 SPEs (for backwards compatibility), or perhaps they could even take handful of Power 7 cores along with the 8 SPEs to get good branchy behavior along with the vector processing of the SPEs for backwards compatibility.

None of that should cost anything like what it cost to develop the first Cell chip.

As far as Blu-Ray, that was *expensive* when the PS3 launched. Those 405nm laser diodes were hard to come by, with really poor yield, and they cost a *lot*. Nowadays, they could put in an 8x BD drive "off the shelf", and get better performance with far, far lower costs than they had to come up with Blu-Ray in the first place.

With such a system, they could bring forward all of the software they developed in coming up with the PS3, as well. PS2 had basically no operating system, so Sony had a lot of software development costs to bring PS3 out. All that is paid for and ready to go if they wanted to go with a next gen Cell and Blu-Ray.

The GPU is going to be something modern and fast from AMD or Nvidia, so that's not development costs they'll have to incur, either. And remember that consoles don't have to worry about driving 4k monitors at higher than 60hz or anything crazy like that. Just a nice, simple 1920x1080 x 60 frames. That's easy for modern GPUs.

All in all, Sony should be able to spend far less on development costs while still fielding a very powerful next gen system. They just have to take advantage of the very significant investments they have already sunk developing PS3.

This. Is. Not. True.

Kutaragi wanted Cell to be a far out next generation Emotion Engine style chip, a custom designed extreme vector processing chip. The PS2 also had the Graphics Synthesizer, provided by Toshiba. In the very early stages of PS3 development, Sony was working with Toshiba to design a next generation GPU, but they abandoned that and went with a very nearly off the shelf Nvidia part.

In no event was Cell intended to be the GPU. Clues to this include the fact that Cell has no video output capability, nor any ROPs, or anything like that. Cell was designed to do what Cell is doing in the PS3.

That doesn't mean the RSX has held up its side of the deal.. Nvidia delivered a part to Sony just before they made the transition to unified shaders. ATI got there first with Xenos, and made a very much better GPU than Nvidia could deliver, even a year later. That has hurt the PS3 a lot this entire generation.

But that's *not* because Sony had insane dreams of using Cell as a GPU.

Oh, Michio Kaku is going to be talking about science in Firefly? Guh.

I wish Discovery would have the guts to rename the damn channel, for all the shit they care about the science on it.

As always, The Onion put it best: Science Channel Refuses To Dumb Down Science Any Further

But it is rolled into glibc, and into libc on Solaris, and elsewhere.

We ported Drepper's SHACrypt() to Java for Ganymede, and use it for password hashing.

Do you think authors should be able to patent novel plot points? Or mathematicians novel proofs?

If not, why not?

It doesn't work like that. Sony screwed up their crypto so badly that the private signing keys that Sony uses in approving firmware releases is known to the hackers. All 40 million PS3s out there are made so that they will obey anything signed by those keys like zombies.

Sony can't change the hardware on the 40 million PS3s to ignore the signing keys. That's just part of the construction of the PS3. Sony could (and probably will) release a new hardware version of the PS3 that has the crypto fixed so that hackers won't be able to run their own firmware any more, but all 40 million zombie PS3s are free to dance to the hackers' tune.

The second generation PS3s had the PS2 graphics chip in them, but took out the Emotion Engine CPU which was run in emulation.

Later PS3s have neither the PS2 graphics chip nor the Emotion Engine CPU, and are not able to run PS2 games in emulation at all, regardless of what the firmware says.

Have you checked out Auditorium? It just came out on the PlayStation store for PS3..

Yeah, this. Learn Lisp. Take a look at Clojure on the JVM, even.

Mmm, mmm, good.

Qt might be as easy to work with as Swing, but that doesn't mean that programming in C++ is the equivalent of programming in Java.

There are not nearly as many thread-safe, easy-to-use, open source, cross-platform programming libraries for C++ as there are for Java, surely.

Really? Where are these magical JVMs going to come from?

Unless you were writing custom line-of-business software that you expected your internal users to be able to run, whether they were on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

There are a lot of custom, in-house apps developed with Java specifically to handle cross-platform issues.

We couldn't have done a lot of our apps if we had to write separate versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

They don't need to create an Installer, they need to create an entire port to a new operating system. The low-level threading and memory management, the GUI.. who wants their Java apps to be running under X11 on Mac?