“When designers imagine a new game environment, they have an eye on the experimental technology of the future.” D. Michael Ploor

 A dedicated video game console is engineered for the primary purpose of video game playing.  An Xbox 360 or PS3 can cost more than $500 million in research and development to bring the system to reality.  All of this money is spent to create a USP (Unique selling point) for that console.  Getting to market first with the right system can make the difference.

 Market leaders in game console manufacturing.  Generation 8 systems will include experimental technology that will be a huge leap forward in design and use.  The amount of money needed to improve a single component and assemble a system is HUGE. This cost causes a “barrier to entry” for new game systems and competition. Technical knowledge is another barrier.

 View computer hardware video (3:24)video

The motherboard is a PCB (printed circuit board) with tiny wires printed on a piece of plastic wafer board. Quick quiz….. What do CPU and GPU stand for? What does FLOPS (floating-point operations per second) mean?

 Answers:  CPU stands for Central Processing Unit – the “brain” of the computer, the most important computer chip in the computer.  GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit – advanced video cards that have computer chips that allow 3D acceleration.  FLOPS is a scale to determine the speed of a computer; the greater number of FLOPS the faster the computer.

 The two biggest loads on the CPU are system operations and graphics processing.  3D graphics require a lot of processing power to render.  High-end graphics also require a 3D accelerator graphics card to interpret the information from the CPU core onto the screen. The 3D accelerator allows the 3D objects to move realistically on the screen and not appear jerky or slow.

 Parallel processing on the PS3 board allows:  Pixel shading to render objects while accounting for the direction of the “virtual light source” or lamp  WHILE at the same time….  The GPU on the PS3 has a dedicated portion to perform the vertex shading tasks.  This dual process gives images a very clean, high-definition look.

 Blu-Ray discs are the same size as a standard DVD but hold almost six times as much data  Data lines, or pits, are thinner and closer together on a Blu-Ray so more info can be written to the disc.  The laser that reads the data on a Blu-Ray is 405 nanometers in width compared to the 650 nm of a DVD reader  The blue-violet color of the laser is where the name “blu ray” came from.

 It is a multimedia platform: play games, watch movies, shop, surf the net, download music, etc.  The console was designed with the USP (unique selling point) of being the fastest system with the best graphics.

 If 10 million game systems sold and 1 million of those were PS3’s, then the PS3’s would have a 10% market share.  Outside Game Designers didn’t want to develop for the PS3 because it was too expensive to invest in the technology needed. They would rather build for Xbox 360 and then port those games to the PS3.  What does it mean to port?

 Porting means to convert the computer code from one system to work on a different system:  Xbox 360  PS Easy  PS3  Xbox Very difficult

 Sony lowered the price  people bought the consoles and sold the parts; some changed the OS to Linux and made superfast PC’s; some linked 3 or more PS3s together to make a small, superfast mainframe computer or server.