There are at least three web sites (Gizmodo is one of them) with pictures of fluffy clouds this week as the only illustration they could come up with for the idea of a PS Cloud ‘ a PlayStation Cloud. Someone noticed that Sony had filed a trademark claim for the expression and now everyone is trying to guess at what it is that Sony is planning to launch. Naturally a cloud is being assumed to be a large number of PlayStations attached to the internet.
There are a few things that come to mind immediately, the spare capacity of networked PS3’s everywhere being harnessed to create a distributed gaming super computer facility on the net is one, another might be that a very orchestrated set of server farms, made up entirely of squashed PS3 Cell chips, could play games centrally taking their instruction from underpowered machines, such as the PlayStation portable, and creating a video heavy gaming experience with lightweight power and processing costs.
This is pretty much what OnLive announced a week or so ago, a gaming paradigm which puts all the heavy lifting in a central place and then just sends rapid video streams to lightweight devices which can show them without doing any graphics rendering. One outcome of something like that would be the complete doing away with onboard graphics accelerators such as those produced by Nvidia and AMD’s ATI, or at least the depowering of them.
But the vision of Ken Kutaragi, the now deposed inventor of PlayStation at Sony, always catered for such a development, and we should have been more generous to Sony when we saw the OnLive announcement, rather than just saying that Sony and Microsoft had been out of the loop on that one and now had to play catch up.
We have said for a long time that the PS3 will be like an onion, revealing layer after layer of capability. Four years ago Sony filed patents that related to using PS3s as servers for the PlayStation Portable, both in-room and remotely. So this is really just that remote feature which is coming into play. It does well to remember that IBM is the real designer of the Cell chip and that IBM has a long established history in Grid Computing architectures, and although it may not quite be the inventor of the concept, it is certainly one of the pioneers. For the past decide IBM has allowed its top server customers to offload some of their seasonal processing power to devices on its own network, charging for processing cycles used.
If Sony wanted to build out centralized game servers they’d be the dual and multiprocessor monsters that IBM has been architecting, built around clusters of Cell chips, which deliver the power of a supercomputer.
Remember the Cell chip is a master slave architecture, with a single Power 5 core cpu doling out work to 8 MIMD parallel slave chips, over a superfast internal bus. In some specific job types they will outperform the chip that drives the Xbox 360 by a factor of 100 to one. They will always deliver around 10 times the performance. Two can come together on a board and multiple boards can be strapped together to make a supercomputer, and IBM is in the middle of producing a Petaflop class machine using them (Thousands of billions of floating point operations per second). In 2005 we revealed that the Cell roadmap included a super powerful game server.
But the idea of doing ‘both,’ which means building a few Cell processing centers, which can be augmented by spare PS3 cycles from PS3s at home, is doubly enticing, and if Sony did that it would need to come up with a ‘credits’ system for Cell CPU processing minutes for customer machines which might be spent on its own PS3 Network.
Kutaragi also said during his period of tenure that the PS3 could be used to run games at 120 frames per second, something that would create ‘graphics that will shock’ and saying that the new frame rate will “become the benchmark for the coming generation of digital life.” In other words, a frame rate too powerful for the Xbox to keep up with, and bringing this type of graphics to a Sony PlayStation experience is sorely needed. However since Kutaragi was removed as head of the PlayStation division, all those dreams of ‘revolutionizing’ gaming seem to have evaporated, and the division hardly functions and has been outflanked by both the success of the Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft Xbox.
As for Microsoft, back in 2006 it also filed a patent to allow remote players to join multiplayer online Xbox games as spectators, and this is one of the key features of the OnLive announcement that has so shaken up the gaming world. If Microsoft holds patents on showing spectators instant replays and representations which make the games look like any other sporting event, then it might go after OnLive legally once it comes to market with similar features.
Can you imagine TV networks vying with one another to buy the broadcasting rights to the global gaming championship finals, in much the same way they bid for the Open Golf championship or Soccer rights?
This ‘viewing’ of gaming content has been growing for some time,. Ever since gaming went to two and four player formats, but it has always remained constrained to a single ‘household.’ When one player was passive or when they were temporarily ‘out’ of a game (their character was dead or out of ammunition or whatever) they take on the role of adviser. They say things like, ‘This is where that big boss gets you from behind’ or ‘I always go left here because there are less aliens’ or whatever. The key thing is that past gaming genres were only shared inside the game, now there are games which are best shared as a viewing experience.
With the advent of broadband connected games, growing out of the knowledge built up by operating Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), households became connected. Both Sony and Microsoft HAVE to adjust their models to take this in.
The learned ‘passive’ gaming activity is now part and parcel of the learning curve of any gamer. Watching how someone else handles a given situation, or watching an avatar with different powers, is all part of the learning experience that makes a gamer better equipped to dominate a particular set of gaming skills.
Also, key to this process is the fact that the processing power required to offer this facility, should not slow down the game play otherwise game watching systems won’t scale. Transporting streaming video is ideal.
Sony Japan just filed a trademark for “PS Cloud”, which, along with some other US PTO filings, point to internet-based “entertainment services” like accessing games online.