Le Saboteur said:
No. I should have written "gaming laptops." This is why you shouldn't watch teevee while typing out messages. Considering they come in similarly sized packages, could Sony borrow some of their design to help out with the thermal dissipation? I ask because there was a post on
AMD's blog about the architecture being integrated rather than separate components, which somebody else said would help out with said dissipation.
Well, I think I actually answered this question already - twice, in fact. And 'Hachi, perhaps unwittingly, helped too. If you don't know your hardware, you can easily fall prey to marketing and think you actually have worth-its-salt gaming laptop, while in reality you've got nothing that can run a contemporary AAA title. Or you can, but the level of eye candy is going to take you back to the PS2 era. Though that can be harder to notice, given the smaller screen.
But this is actually a minor point. The main one still stands the same: lateral architecture. You stick mighty effective parts under the hood, then place artificial limits on them so you still get mid-range output with less power consumption and heat. (In fact, they do the same, though with lesser effects to desktop components as well, it's why overclocking is such a healthy subculture.) There's something that should be a pretty big giveaway - the price. A good gaming laptop will fetch you quadruple digits in any of the western world's main currencies while you can get a desktop PC with similar capacity from 500 to 800 units.
The reason for this should have become obvious by now. The parts inside the laptop are actually
better than the ones stuck into a PC of similar capacity. They've just been choked down to the desktop levels. (This is a huge simplification to be honest, but I'm working hard to keep the readability rated E for everyone.)
Okay, now somebody walks in and asks me to explain that if my laptop's got Core i3 with X hertzes or AMD Xsomething and it's been choked down, why don't I notice any difference between it and my desktop which has similar specs?
The answer is that PC marketers are actually
honest here. They tell you the component capacity by their real levels, rather than what you could theoretically get out of the chip. This is because any chump can download a diagnostic software from the web and get the reality after a simple five-minute test. So not giving any theoretical promises is going to save 'em a ton of flak, refunds and calls to support. (This may not, however, stop Mr. Shinesmile on the sales floor of your local appliance store from giving you a faceful of dung, because they know that once they've got the sale, most RMAs will be made directly to the manufacturer.)
Now, what comes to that AMD blog post, well, if they've stuck both the CPU and GPU on the same chip, it's definitely going to save 'em the space of at least one heat sink inside the case, but there'll still be more than enough heat to go around regardless. But like I already said, it's something to review once we have more intel.
Now, I'd definitely be interested to know which specs Sony is giving us at this stage, but in reality it shouldn't really matter in the end. Whether they can squeeze some extra juice out of it or play it safe, it shouldn't matter. It should be a notable leap forward from the current generation regardless. The extra RAM definitely helps with building more complex games and if they've gone for
SSD as storage space solution instead of regular spinning disk, that's going to help even more (tl;dr - skip
here to get to the meaningful part). But if that turns out to be the case, there's no way those rumors of a 300€-price range hold true. One should never say never, of course, so I guess I'll say "I'll buy it when I see it" instead.
Le Saboteur said:
The past couple of months featured several articles across the trades indicating that the two consoles had reached some sort of parity with ~70-million units sold. Not bad, right? Not until you consider that the PS2 had ~140-million units sold.
Which got me to thinking: Why? The price-point was an obvious deterrent (at least initially), but in looking through the games I own this generation they come from a very narrow spectrum. I would have to dig out my box of PS2 games, but of the ~100 titles I ended up purchasing, they were from a far broader range of ideas. Mad Maestro anyone?
Heh. Yeah. Now, due to my preferences, I stopped playing on consoles a few generations ago, so I've never owned a PS2 but I can still say it truly was the s**t of the prev-gen. The sales of the first Xbox were apparently meager 25 million, so I suppose most people who got that had PS2 right on the side, likely for the very reason you said - not to miss a single game worth playing.
What comes to the lack of innovation in the current gen, I can directly point my finger at the laughably small amount of RAM. 512MB on X360 and 256(!!)MB on PS3. Seriously - what the hell, Sony? No wonder the devs are coming in their pants all across the board thanks to the 8GB announcement.