Game Machines Rob PCs
of Technology Driving Role (Special Report) 15 Dec 99
Personal computers are losing their position as dynamos for technology, because consumers are beginning to stress factors such as design and low price over sheer performance. The successor to this role seems to be the game system.
For the last dozen years or so, the personal computer (PC) has been the driving force for technology within the electronics industry. However it is losing its momentum, as home game systems like the PlayStation 2 come to the fore. Today, the electronics industry is evolving in line with the endless demands of general consumers, and the increasing scale of the game system market.
From the mid-1980s, the PC provided the main support for the electronics industry, but from 2000 the prime driving force will be the home game system. A current outstanding example of innovation is the PlayStation 2 from Sony Computer Entertainment Inc (SCE) (Fig 1). In the past, the PC market showed great excitement every time Intel Corp released a new microprocessor. As microprocessor performance improved, operating systems (OS) and applications grew larger in scale, spurring demand for large-capacity main memory and hard disk drives (HDD). High-performance microprocessors were demanded to execute these OSs and applications at high speed. Eventually, the chips offered the performance needed to provide a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) even for novice users, and the PC market entered a period of explosive growth.
Against this background, there was phenomenal growth in a wide range of technologies related to PC components and peripherals, including semiconductors, HDDs, liquid crystal display (LCD) panels and network equipment. Over the past dozen years or so, the PC has held an unchallenged role as a leading force for technology.
Losing Speed
An analysis of how the PC supported the development of the electronics industry reveals two key conditions for dynamism. The first is the never-satisfied demand for better performance. The second factor is a market scale that is sufficiently large enough to assure the recovery of investment in technology development.
The role of the PC as a driving force for technology, however, has diminished rather suddenly over the last few years. The primary reason for this change is that more consumers are now focusing on cost and design rather than on high performance or a rich selection of functions. One representative example is HDDs, a few years ago, a PC's HDD generally had two or three platters and four to six heads. Recent pressure to slash costs, however, has led to the appearance of drives with only one platter and one head.
A trend among consumers has been to assign higher priority to low cost rather than to storage capacity. The new drives assure the minimum required capacity by utilizing the same state-of-the-art technology used in the high-end models: advanced heads and high recording densities. If the emphasis on low cost becomes greater, however, there will no longer be any need to boost recording density, because costs cannot be slashed any more by reducing the heads and platters below current levels. This event will mark the end of the PC as the driving force for the HDD market.
The same phenomenon can be found in microprocessors. In 1998, Intel released the Celeron microprocessor for low-priced PCs, deliberately paring performance. It seems that even Intel has come to realize that the era in which any new microprocessor with higher performance would sell has come to an end.
Game Systems Focus
Home game systems are emerging to replace PCs as the new dynamo for electronics technology. Home game systems now fulfil the same two key conditions necessary to influence technology that the PC did years ago.
The first is strong consumer demand for performance and function. For example, home game systems must provide improved three-dimensional (3D) graphics performance with better definition. This requires high processing performance, and is demonstrated by the fact that the circuit scale of the microprocessors used in home game systems is increasing faster than those bound for PC use. The Emotion Engine, the microprocessor used in the PlayStation 2, integrates 13.5 million transistors, well over the 9.5 million in the Pentium III processor from Intel (Fig 2).
There is also demand for large-capacity recording media capable of holding all of the software for a major game application. This need is being addressed by the gradual adoption of digital video disk read-only memory (DVD-ROM) drives. DVD-ROM drives will be found not only in the PlayStation 2, but also in the next-generation Dolphin game machine being developed by Nintendo Co Ltd, which will use a DVD-ROM drive under development by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd. The situation here is quite different from that in the PC market: one DVD-ROM drive component engineer complained that few manufacturers have switched to DVD-ROM drives in spite of high hopes for a transition from compact disk-ROM (CD-ROM).
The second condition is the market scale. Total shipment of home game related machines and software for Japan in 1998 was US$4.39 billion, which is a quarter of the US$14.96 billion that domestic consumption of PCs tallied. If PlayStation 2 sells as explosively as SCE expects – the sale of one million units in the first two days after release – home game machines can expect a much larger market.
The Ripple Effect
The effects of the PlayStation 2 on the electronics industry as a driving technology force will be widespread (Fig 3). The technologies affected can be broadly grouped into two categories.
The first category covers technologies required to implement the PlayStation 2 main unit itself. These include technologies needed for the design and manufacture of high-performance microprocessors and mixed-dynamic random access memory (DRAM) integrated circuits (IC), the development of DRAM with high-speed interfaces, and the development of inexpensive optical pick-ups for DVD-ROM drives.
The second category includes technologies related to the peripherals connected to the PlayStation 2, or to the system overall. This group covers technologies involved in the development of large-capacity HDDs for consumer electronics and digital audio-visual (AV) equipment, as well basic technologies for tasks such as content distribution.
Designing Monster Chips
One technology required to implement the PlayStation 2 is the Emotion Engine, designed jointly by Toshiba Corp and SCE. This microprocessor offers not only more transistors than a PC microprocessor, but also greater number-crunching performance. The floating-point operation performance of the Emotion Engine at 300MHz will be two to four times higher than a Pentium III at 600MHz (Fig 4).
This increase in performance was made possible by 10 multiply-accumulators and four dividers (see Table 1).
As a result, the footprint of the Emotion Engine is 226mm2 – exceptionally large for an embedded microprocessor. “It was the largest and also the fastest chip we had ever worked on,” said Mitsuo Saito, general manager, System LSI Engineering Laboratory, Toshiba. “The knowledge we gained through the design and manufacture of the Emotion Engine will be very useful in other IC products.”
Workstation Applications
SCE plans to use the Graphics Synthesizer rendering IC and the Emotion Engine, both developed for the PlayStation 2, to enter the graphics workstation market. The DTL-T10000 game software development tool, announced at the same time as the PlayStation 2, is positioned as the first step. The firm hopes to use the ICs in volume production to make it possible to produce a graphics workstation with an excellent cost-to-performance ratio. The second product for 2000 will be a product offering about 10 times the speed of the DTL-T10000. It will probably offer higher Emotion Engine operating frequencies, and mount multiple Emotion Engines and Graphics Synthesizer chips. In 2002 a new model will offer 100 times present performance, with another 10-fold increase slated for 2005.
These workstations are intended for use not only by game developers, but also in the movie development workplace. Contents created on them will be sent to homes where PlayStation 2 machines are used as terminals. “We plan to apply the technologies gained through the development of the graphics workstation to the PlayStation 3,” said Ken Kutaragi, president & CEO of SCE.
Applying Mixed-DRAM
The Graphics Synthesizer has 4 Mbytes of internal DRAM. Sony Corp, which handled design and manufacture, has successfully ramped-up a mixed-DRAM line for the Graphics Synthesizer with a 0.25µm rule. Under commission from SCE, it will ramp up a 0.18µm manufacturing line in the spring of 2000 (Fig 5).
The company has been manufacturing ICs with DRAMs ranging from several hundred kbits to several Mbits since 1994. SCE's Kutaragi commented, “Basically it was used as a replacement for low-capacity external DRAM, which was hard to get hold of at the time. There was really little profit in it as semiconductor business.” With the Graphics Synthesizer, the firm developed a technology linking internal DRAM and logic by a wide (2,048-bit) databus, and felt more confident about entering the mixed-DRAM IC business. The technology developed through the Graphics Synthesizer will likely be applied to a range of IC products for digital consumer electronics, according to many IC manufacturers (Fig 7).
The PlayStation 2 is already speeding the development of the Direct Rambus specification for DRAM, to implement its peak data transfer rate of 1.6 Gbytes/s per channel. Direct Rambus DRAM (DR-DRAM) has spread little in the market even though it was cited by Intel as the outstanding selection for PC main memory. One of the reasons is that the price of DR-DRAM was just too high compared to synchronous DRAM (SDRAM). With an expected global shipment volume of tens of millions of the PlayStation 2, however, volume-production experience gained from using DR-DRAM might well make it possible to slash prices close to those of SDRAM.
This point affects the volume-production stance as well. “We are currently being supplied by Toshiba, but we really want a second source,” revealed a source at SCE. “We are pushing other DRAM manufacturers to assure us supplies.”
If a price competition can be sparked off by procuring the chips from multiple manufacturers then it seems possible that the development cycle for DR-DRAM will be shortened even further.
Dual-Wavelength Chip
The PlayStation 2 is also likely to help push down prices for DVD-ROM drives. Sony has developed a laser module for the PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM drive (Fig 6). It mounts a newly-developed laser diode that is capable of emitting two wavelengths: the 650nm needed to read DVD-ROM media, and the 780nm used in CD-ROM media. This laser module means that a single optical system can probably be used for both (Fig 8), which would slash the number of components in the optical pickup by roughly half.
The concept of a dual-wavelength laser diode has been around for some time, but it was never really worked on because there was no product which offered a likelihood of recovering development investment. “We decided to go ahead with development for the PlayStation 2, because we can be pretty sure of a high volume,” explained Kazuhiko Nemoto, assistant manager, Semiconductor Laser Division, Semiconductor Company, Core Technology & Network Company at Sony.
Lowering the Threshold
The PlayStation 2 is driving more than the technologies used in the main unit, though. It is also propelling development of the peripheral equipment it will use, and of systems and software designed to use it as a content receiver. As more and more peripherals and systems become available, the scale of the PlayStation 2-related market will expand. The larger the market is, the more manufacturers will be interested in entering it, thus perpetuating the circle.
The PlayStation 2 has a framework that encourages the entry of new peripheral manufacturers: general-purpose external interfaces like the Universal Serial Bus (USB), IEEE1394 and the PC card slot used in PCs. Most existing home game systems use dedicated interfaces. Providing a general-purpose external interface makes it much easier for peripheral equipment manufacturers to develop new devices for use with the PlayStation 2.
For example, take HDDs. SCE has already announced that it will provide an external HDD for the PlayStation 2, in preparation for the content distribution service slated to start in 2001. In response, at least one HDD manufacturer has already established detailed design evaluations for the PlayStation 2 host. SCE has said it expects the drives to use the PC card interface, which conveniently functions like the AT-adapter (ATA) interface – the most commonly used interface in PC HDDs. As a result, the interface technologies of PC HDD manufacturers can be applied directly.
The development of HDDs for the PlayStation 2, with the high expectation for its massive shipment volume, provides the ideal opportunity to refine HDD technology for use in consumer electronics. The developed HDD would be able to be used in digital recording systems targeted at replacing video cassette recorders (VCR).
The same technical trend also makes it possible to have a faster transition to digital broadcast television (TV) receivers. SCE plans to add a lead to future versions of the PlayStation 2 to output imagery to digital TV. The Graphics Synthesizer already comes with a display output circuit that supports video graphics array (VGA) progressive-signal output at 640 pixels x 480 pixels. If the PlayStation 2, with a progressive signal output lead, does achieve widespread popularity, then it will stimulate TV manufacturers to produce digital TVs with lower price ranges.
Content Distribution
The PlayStation 2 is also likely to have an effect on the development of content distribution technology. The most obvious technology of this type is copyright protection of the sort applied to video and audio data. The PlayStation 2 will use a copyright protection technology called OpenMG, developed by Sony, to prevent unauthorized copying of data downloaded via a network, or from other sources. While the technology was originally developed with PCs in mind, it now seems possible that it may evolve primarily through the PlayStation 2, instead.
When the PlayStation 2 finally enters the home, it seems destined to drive the development of technologies in a host of other fields as well: network technologies for low-cost communications such as cable TV (CATV) and wireless, and technologies needed to construct home networks.
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