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Beauty and the beast

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 6th 2006 | Discuss
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We get our hands on Playstation 3 as well as AMD’s 4x4

This week we got to play with two black beauties, one a monster, the other smaller but almost equally powerful. I’m talking abut an AMD 4x4 and a Sony PS3; read on.

When we returned from a long and tiring trip to India we found a giant box in the lab (and a somewhat smaller one on top of it.) We were tried and said, let’s check it later, and then we went off to celebrate the US holiday, Thanksgiving, with friends.

We should have never left, and may never again.

PLAYSTATION 3

Beauty

Figure 1. The Playstation 3 in action. (Photo: JPR)

First off, Playstation 3 is gorgeous. It’s sleek, shiny, and very consumer appealing. It is a pleasant out-of-the-box experience.

As you know, the unit comes with a Blu-ray DVD player and a 60-GByte HDD. All that plus its built-in power supply make the unit a little heavy at 11 pounds, about 50% more so than an Xbox 360 (3.5 kg, 7.7 lb). Physically it’s a little smaller than the Xbox 360, but its curved surface makes it appear to be larger.

Hooking it up is trivial—nothing new to learn and no gotchas, except one: no component cable. There is a HDMI cable, and a three-wire (red-white-yellow) AV cable, a mini-maxi USB cable for the controller, and a power cable. Also, the console has a RJ45 Ethernet port and an optical audio port, all that’s on the back side.

On the front side are four USB slots, and CF, SD, and Memory Stick I/O slots in the front, behind a small hinged cover.

So much for the mechanics.

The first thing you do is plug in the controller. That registers it to the console. Once registered, and charged up (as indicated by four red lights), you can unplug it and use it wirelessly.

Unlike the Xbox 360, the PS3 controller is also used as the DVD RC, whereas the Xbox 360 has a separate RC that is conventional in its layout and shape, similar to that a of a regular DVD player. The result is that, due to the limitation of controls, you have to use on-screen controls to forward and reverse, pause, or jump within a DVD.

Watching and saving videos

The PS3 is meant to be the big brother of the PSP, and so you can copy, download, or make media on the PS3 and then transfer it to the PSP via either the Internet or a memory stick. The only type of storage media that can be used to move copyright-protected video files is Memory Stick PRO.

Two Blu-ray DVD movies came with the PS3, Blackhawk Down and Talladega Nights, and both are rendered in 1080p (more on that later). However, as we said, a component cable isn’t provided with the system, so you have to purchase that separately. The good news is if you have a PS2 component cable it will work with the PS3.

Believing that the video playback on Sony’s new system seems to have no restrictions of any kind, and that the PS3 will play back videos without issue, even at full HD quality we decided to take our chances and run the movies out over the AV cable. We plugged that into an ADS Tech upscaler box and generated a 1080 image.

It didn’t look so hot. In fact, it looked pretty crappy. This will be an ongoing experiment. Next effort is to just use the line doubler in the projector and stay at a native 480.

When we plugged in the component cable, the image looked great; you could clearly read all the captions and text, every-thing was sharp, very sharp.

Compounding all this resolutions stuff, which of course is amplified by the inclusion of the Blu-ray player, is the fact that the PS3 doesn’t currently offer a 1080i solution, which is the most common “HD” resolution in TVs today and in our projector as well.

Now we all know the Nvidia GPU in the PS3 can squirt out any resolution you can come up with, so that’s not the problem. But it does have to be told what to squirt out and that is the issue. Making matters even worse is that for a PS3 title running in native 720p resolution, the PS3 will not scale up to 1080i, but will instead downgrade to 480p. So if you don’t have a set that does 1080i or 1080p, you’re going to be forced into 480p, which is far less impressive, and really disappointing given what the Blu-ray can deliver.

Allegedly a fix is in the works, but no timetable was given on availability.

No wires

Setting up the system on a wired Internet connection to our router was ridiculously easy—Sony’s got it right there.

Setting it up for a wireless connection was a bit more problematic, as all wireless setups are, and to do so required us to first go back to the system update and download (wirelessly, mind you) an update. However, it took a very long time—over an hour to download, and then another 15 minutes to update.

Games

Although the console will probably be sold as much for its Blu-ray player as for a game player, it really is about the games—at least initially. Four came with the system: Resistance Fall of Man, Genji Days of the Blade, and NBA07. We tried (due to limited time) Resistance Fall of Man.

As mentioned, we’re still learning on this, but first reactions to the game were positive—it’s an exciting FPS. You can only save by exiting.

What do we think?

Well, so far so good. The timing was too tight for us to get all the testing done in time for this issue of TechWatch so we’ll carry on and report more in the next issue.

4x4 and more

La bête

Last July AMD executives said this week that they will promote their “4x4” enthusiast platform to counter Intel’s Core 2 Duo (C2D) Extreme, which was targeted at unseating AMD from the gamer enthusiast crown. Word leaked out about AMD’s 4x4 coming sooner than later, and on the 20th of November some photos of the motherboard showed up on the web.

Figure 2. Fans on and next to the CPUs. (Photo: JPR)

The AMD Quad FX platform with dual-socket Direct Connect architecture and AMD Athlon 64 FX-70 series proc-essors is here—in the Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs.

The 4x4 platform has two socket-1207 (socket F) dual-core Barcelona 3 GHz FX 74 CPUs (for a total of four CPUs) on an Asus L1N64-SLI WS mobo. The two CPUs are connected via AMD’s Direct Connect architecture.

It has four PCI Express—(think about that for a moment) two x16 slots and two x8 slots—enabled by a Nvidia Nforce 680a MCP (the 680a is two Nforce 590SLI chips), four DDR2 DIMM memory slots (two memory dedicated for each processor), and there are 12 SATA ports (two RAID5 arrays of six drives each).

And the system could even serve as a hardware router, since the 680s chipset comes with four Gigabit Ethernet ports, using Nvidia’s Nv Gb Engine.

Due to the complex design of AMD’s 4x4 platform, the Asus L1N64-SLI WS uses an eATX form factor, which will not fit in smaller cases. And due to what appears to be limitation of mother-board space, the L1N64-SLI WS only has one PCI and PCIe x1 slot. However, the fourth PCIe x16 (or x8, not sure which it is) gets covered when a dual-slot-wide graphics AIB gets plugged in the third slot. That leaves slot two still open for another graphics AIB, which could be run as a physics engine.

Take a breath—that’s a hellofalotta computer, and yet it’s still a “PC”—hard to imagine just five years ago.

The monster we got to play with came with 4 GBytes of memory (2 GBytes per socket, 1 GByte per CPU), four 250-GByte HDDs, and two Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX AIBs in SLI. Without a doubt, this is the most computer I have ever had my hands on.

Inside it’s full of fans—nine of them, with five fans for the CPUs and chipset, one for the chassis exhaust, one in the 750W power supply, and one each on the graphics AIB. There’s also heat pad that runs from the chipset under the back end of the graphics AIBs.

Notice in the photo to the left that the CPUs have a vertical and a lateral fan, as well as a lateral fan on the chip set (just below the CPU to the right).

Schematically the system looks like the block diagram in Figure 3 (below).

Figure 3. AMD Quad FX platform block diagram Nvidia chipset configuration. (Source: AMD)

With that for a background, it was time to light it up.

Testing the beast

The first thing we did was to run some 3Dmark06 tests on it and compare them to the FX64 system, aka former king of the hill, and, for comparison purposes, an Nvidia 8800GTX in an FX64 slot.

We tested at two resolutions, 1280 x 1024, and 2560 x 1600, with SLI turned on and off.

The results are surprising, in fact a little disappointing (Figure 4, next page). So we tried some games; that too was disappointing, not in the system but in our ability to get any of the external game benchmarks running. So we reverted to a game that has a built-in benchmark, F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. shows the CPU dependency of the game, and how even superior graphics like Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX doesn’t help as much as the CPU does (Figure 5).

Figure 4. Comparison of 3D benchmarks. (Source: JPR)		Figure 5. F.E.A.R. benchmarks. (Source: JPR)

We also looked at just the CPU scores and there you can see the difference (Figure 6).

Figure 6. AMD Fx74 vs. AMD FX64. (Source: JPR)

Benchmarking is problematic

OK, so we did all the usual stuff, but guess what? It’s like testing a car’s top speed by snapping a buggy whip against the hood.

The 4x4 platform is truly a different paradigm. As is pointed out in the story this issue on HP’s quad-core workstations, we need a new set of benchmarks when we get into this class of system.

AMD makes the point that the multi-core CPU transition is similar to GPU CrossFire and SLI, and asks, “Would you test Quad SLI at 1024 x 768 and compare it to single GPU?” (In case you don’t know, the answer is no, you’d only test them at the highest possible resolution.)

So scalability is a new benchmark need—something that measures the cores’ efficiency as a platform. Frequency is no longer the primary determinate of performance, and, therefore, neither is elapsed time to complete, because everything is going to complete in real time.

PC users, gamers, and enthusiasts are trying to run multiple, multi-threaded applications today; enthusiasts seek personal workstation-type performance, and they’re going to get it.

Doing it all

Here’s a scenario. You want to make a copy of that old VHS tape of The Day the Earth Stood Still and give it to one of your science-fiction-fan buddies. But, you’re dreading the time it will take. You’ve already done the conversion from tape to HDD with that nifty ADS Technology box and software, and the thing is sitting there on your disk, eating up 2 GBytes waiting for you. But it’s going to take time and CPU power to get it on to a disk.

So here’s what you do. First, you get a glass of good red wine. Then you queue up a nice mix of Bob Dylan’s newest CD, with a random mix of Willie’s stuff, and a little Pope just to keep you alert, and fire that off. Keep the volume low—you’re not here to dance, and besides the cats hate Pope.

Then you fire up Intervideo’s DVD Copy 5 or Sonic’s MyDVD 8, load a DVD blank disk and press Burn, baby. But the music is doing it for you, so to pass the time, and enjoy the wine, you launch GRAW. This time, you vow, you will clear that intersection of rebels, protect your team and not get too beat up yourself—better go easy on the wine.

And just so you can kind of keep track of what’s going on, you open up the taskmaster and tab to the performance window, and then you go to Mexico to kill rebels. Oh, and you’re doing this at 2560 x 1600 on that gorgeous Dell 30-inch HD monitor, of course, with all eight speakers cranking out (it’s going to be tough hearing Willie over the gunfire).

Sound far-fetched? Well, guess what? I did it and never noticed any slowdown, lost frames, or sound clicks in GRAW, and it’s a very demanding program.

Not only that, but because it seemed so easy for the beast, I did it a second time, only this time around, I also played The 5th Element using Intervideo’s WinDVD 8.

AMD’s product plans

The Athlon 64 FX70 series processors are going to be offered in three classes: good, best, and mostest bestest. The good is the FX70, the best is the FX72, and mostest bestest is the FX74. All three processors share some common features, as shown in Table 1.

Feature	Specifications
Cache size	L1 Cache (Instruction + Data): 128 KB+128 KB (64 KB+64 KB each core) L2 Cache 1 MByte + 1 MByte exclusive to each core
Process technology	90-nanometer DSL SOI = “Dual Stress Liner” strained silicon-on-insulator
HyperTransport technology links	Multiple 16-bit/16-bit links at up to 2000 MHz full duplex
Memory	Integrated DDR2 memory controller—up to 12.8 GBytes/second memory bandwidth
Types of memory	PC2 6400 (DDR2-800), PC2 5300 (DDR2-667), PC2 4200 (DDR2-533), or PC2 3200 (DDR2-400) unbuffered
Chipsets	Solutions are now available from Nvidia
Packaging	Socket 1207—1207-pin organic Land Grid Array (LGA)

Table 1. These are the features shared by the
Athlon 64 FX70 series processors.

Then the individual differences between the three processors are shown in Table 2.

Model	Clock frequency	System bus tech	Package profile	Voltage	Max. temp.	TDP	L2 cache
FX-70	2600 MHz	2000 MHz	1207	1.35–1.40V	55-63°C	125W	1 MByte+
FX-72	2800 MHz	2000 MHz	1207	1.35–1.40V	55-63°C	125W	1 MByte+
FX-74	3000 MHz	2000 MHz	1207	1.35–1.40V	56°C	125W	1 MByte+

Table 2. The lineup of the Athlon 64 FX70 processors series.

AMD is going to sell these processors in pairs. The pricing for each class of a pair of processors is:

Processor pair	Price for the pair
FX-70	$599
FX-72	$799
FX-74	$999

Table 3. FX70 series pricing.

This is the age of the threading

I think 2006 will mark the year the computer and the game console industry went parallel. In 2006 we had the two major PC CPU suppliers introduce, or announce, quad-CPU chips. At the same time Sony came to market with an 8+1 parallel processor, Microsoft came with a 3+1, and Nintendo has a multi-processor, too.

All of this is just great, but … but, if there aren’t any apps or OSes to take advantage of all this hardware horsepower than it’s just a waste of watts.

Aha, but there is. The game developers get it now. They understand that if they want to be cross-platform–compatible, they’ve got to be multi-threaded. This year you’ll see the first hints of it in PC land and in the first wave of console games.

AMD, who is tracking this very closely, as you can imagine, has found over 50 multi-core titles in development in just Europe, due for release in 2007/8.

And with new distribution schemes like Valve’s online Steam, we’ll be able to get our hands on these new games as soon as the compiler cools off.

So in the meantime, the primary application for a 4x4 will be to load up a bunch of applications and do more work while playing. Next year we’ll see some absolutely killer games with special effects, realistic people, and totally scary AI.

What do we think?

Well, for one thing, I may never buy or ask for another computer. Does that seem possible? Look at what this 4x4 has. Two processor sockets, four DIMM sockets, and four PICe sockets. When AMD comes out with their quad-core processor, it will drop into the sockets in the beast. And I could add two more graphics AIBs. Here’s a picture of how AMD did it (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Four graphics AIBs and four CPUs in one system. (Source: AMD)

You put two single-slot AIBs on the bottom two PCIe sockets, which go to one SLI chip, and you put the double-wide AIBs in the top two, and then you have in effect a Quadplex. But, the idea is the bottom two would be used for physics. Needless to say, Nvidia loves this system—they get to sell two SLI chip sets and two GPUs.

AMD’s mantra has been, “It’s about the platform,” and this system, this beast, makes the point in spades. It’s powerful out of the box, it can scale and be expanded, and it has long legs. And the enthusiasts, for whom it was designed, will get it. The enthusiasts are the best-educated market segment in the world, and they will immediately punch a hole in a weak product, or sing the praises of one that truly delivers. Enthusiasts really want a supercomputer or a workstation, they just don’t want to pay those kinds of prices—the 4x4 solution puts that kind of power in their hands for under $3,000.

With all the CPU power this beast has, if it was a little quieter it would make one heck of a home entertainment server. We’re going to investigate that aspect too in a future issue.