- Sony has thrown nearly 2 billion dollars into a revolutionary
processing chip that it hopes will transform the face of home entertainment.
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- Its first role will be as the central processing unit
in the PlayStation3 games console -- a machine that we recently learned
is slated for release in early 2006, though Sony is being awfully coy about
confirming it. The hugely powerful chip will eventually be fitted into
TV sets and a host of other consumer electronics devices.
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- Ken Kutaragi, the brains behind the PlayStation games
consoles, believes that the chip -- codenamed "cell" -- will
give future video games machines the power to animate figures as realistically
and smoothly as Golem in the Lord of the Rings, or the CGI hero in the
recent film version of The Hulk.
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- The chip, he said, means that within a few years the
genres of film and video games will "fused and become indistinguishable."
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- That strategy is based on trends in the games industry
that became startlingly obvious at the recent E3 videogames trade show.
Dominating the games market is the US company Electronic Arts -- a company
that has achieved its lead by concentrating on generating ultra realistic-looking
games based on films and sports. It is also clear that the cell is being
groomed for some future era where most homes have broadband internet connections.
Its designers believe it will be perfect for managing the sort of vast
online role-playing games that are already starting to draw armies of addicts.
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- But here comes the clever bit. Within the next six months,
Sony will be offering video games makers a cell-workstation that will let
them start programming software using the new chip. Behind Sony's strategy
is the theory that by delivering all that graphics power, the process of
animating games characters will be dramatically shortened. Games are far
more complicated than they used to be, and anything that reduces the average
3.5-year development time of each game is, commercially, very attractive
to the industry.
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- IBM shares the Sony prediction that the chip could become
the start of a revolution that unites the PC, the games console and broadband
entertainment-on-demand services -- and puts it all inside your TV. "The
PC is no longer the driving force in semiconductor innovation," said
IBM technology director John Kelly, "networking and consumer electronics
applications are driving the evolution of a new semiconductor industry."
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- The entire videogame industry has been waiting on tenterhooks
for the end of an extended game of "chicken" between Sony and
Microsoft, producer of the rival Xbox console. Microsoft attributes the
limited success of its first machine to the 18-month headstart it lost
to the PlayStation2, and some pundits speculate that the US company will
do everything in its power to put its Xbox2 machine on the shelves first.
Others believe that both companies see an advantage in holding back a release
and then undercutting their rival on price.
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- But Sony's ambitions for the chip do not stop with the
next-generation games console, and the Japanese company has already put
its plans for a cell-dominated world into action. In addition to aiming
the cell workstation at games programmers, it will also be pushing it towards
Hollywood studios and filmmakers everywhere, betting that the future of
cinema lies in the increasing use of computer-generated characters and
special effects.
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- Analysts have remarked on the coincidence that Sony is
also currently pursuing a possible takeover of US film studio Metro-Goldwyn
Meyer, speculating that the Japanese group is engineering a scenario in
which it controls both the hardware and content of cell-enabled TVs.
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- http://www.japaninc.com/newsletters/index.html?list=jin&issue=275
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