Silicon Valley's Awesome Look at New Sony Toy
By JOHN MARKOFF
AN JOSE, Calif. -- On a giant video screen, a lifelike rubber duck splashed about in a
bathtub fleeing from a pursuing submarine. Suddenly the drain opened and both were swept
into the resulting whirlpool.
What made this demonstration on Thursday by Sony Corp. notable was that the scene, rendered
with almost perfect realism down to each reflection in each ripple in the tub, was not a movie but an
interactive video game that signaled a new level of computing power for everyday consumers.
Sony's Playstation II, though still more than a year away from store shelves, is creating a stir here in
Silicon Valley because it is the first machine to deliver graphics that until now could be produced
only by supercomputers -- and at prices that will put it under Christmas trees in 2000.
Shown for the first time in the United States, to 1,000 software game
developers, the machine suggested that the state of the art in computing is
moving from the aisles of CompuUSA to the shelves of Toys "R" Us.
Playstation II, which Sony says it expects to sell for substantially less than
$500, is perhaps the most striking example yet of a coming generation of
powerful computer processors that are not designed for traditional
computers. Instead, they are engineered to concentrate all their
considerable power on performing highly specialized tasks.
The new Sony machine will not process text or calculate a budget, but it will take a generation of
youngsters to the threshhold of virtual reality.
"I think what you're seeing is the transition from people playing video games to a world where we
will create our own fantasies in cyberspace," said Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for
Supercomputer Applications, in Champaign-Urbana, Ill.
Playstation II was developed by Sony and Toshiba Corp. in a joint venture that adds up to an
estimated $2 billion gamble on the future of consumer electronics. Though the two companies are
playing down speculation that their new chip could catapult them into competition with makers of
personal computer hardware and software, many opportunities are obviously ahead for a machine
that generates graphics at more than twice the speed of the most powerful engineering work stations.
The brain of Playstation II is a microprocessor that the two companies have dubbed the Emotion
Engine. It is designed to draw tens of millions of tiny polygons, the building blocks of computer
graphics, on a television screen every second. As a result, it renders animated graphics with the
realism of the movie "Toy Story" but in what is known as "real time." That is, it creates movement,
characters and entire environments on the fly in response to the movement of a joystick or other
gaming device.
"Sony is clearly riding on a consumer mandate and delivering supercomputer graphics," said Richard
Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a computer industry consulting firm in Seaford, N.Y. "People
will buy the Playstation II just to get at the chip."
Sony executives said they intended the name Emotion Engine to
convey the hope that game developers would use the chip's
power to create virtual worlds rich in subtlety and nuance.
"We're hoping that you will go beyond driving and shooting and
killing people," Phil Harrison, a vice president at Sony Computer
Entertainment, told the developers. "We are looking for a new
generation of software that has the same impact on a person as a
great book or a great movie."
He said the new processor had enough power to begin to convey humanlike motions and abilities,
ranging from natural movement and facial expressions to artificial intelligence like the ability to learn
and to recognize speech.
The Emotion Engine is the most recent example of a reversal under way in technological
development. For decades, the most advanced consumer electronics were technologies that trickled
down from the world of supercomputing, the Departments of Defense and Energy and NASA. That
process has been turned on its head, mostly by the economics of the consumer electronics industry,
which has evolved from a beneficiary of cutting-edge computer engineering to its driving force.
Since the end of the cold war, increasingly powerful computer products have begun showing up first
in consumer applications. For graphics and related multimedia processing, for example, the Emotion
Engine is significantly more powerful than Intel Corp.'s newest Pentium III microprocessor and has
more than twice the graphics power of the most powerful Silicon Graphics work station, the
benchmark for graphics computing power.
Yet, benchmarks and flashy graphics do not guarantee success in a computer. Indeed, Silicon Valley
is littered with news releases from companies that promised to shake up the world with ever-faster
computers. The vast majority failed to leave the laboratory and "auger in" to the market, in local
parlance.
The Emotion Engine is unlikely to suffer that fate, if only because of the market muscle behind its
developers. Still, production in quantity awaits the completion of a modern semiconductor plant that
Sony and Toshiba expect to go online next year.
What is more, some analysts questioned Sony's announcing Playstation II before it is available. It will
arrive on the market later than its main competition, the Sega Dreamcast machine, which was
recently introduced in Japan.
Sony executives went to some pains on Thursday to
assert that their new machine was not a competitor to
Wintel, the combination of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows
operating system and Intel's Pentium microprocessors
that dominates the personal computer industry.
"There are certain things the PC does really well, such as
running as a server and displaying Powerpoint slides,"
said Harrison, the Sony Computer Entertainment
executive.
Still, the company has given every indication that it
envisions a new computing world that has little to do
with the office desktop. In this world, brilliant graphics
and mathematics-intensive tasks like voice recognition will matter most. And it is in this world,
Harrison said, that the Emotion Engine will excel.
But it is clear to computer designers that the potential for Sony's computer is enormous because its
graphics power will be coupled with high-speed connections to the Internet through cable and
satellite links.
While company executives were coy about that possibility, they did announce that the Playstation II
would incorporate ports for the two fastest communications channels available today -- Firewire and
the Universal Serial Bus. It is also noteworthy that the machine will ship with the industry-standard
slots for connecting peripherals like modems, network cards, hard drives and flash memory to laptop
computers. Firewire is evolving as the standard for connecting a new generation of digital video
cameras.
These features could make Sony a powerful competitor to Microsoft if software developers begin to
abandon the personal computer platform when creating their newest and most advanced
applications.
"This machine heralds the merger of film, television and the video game businesses," said Stewart A.
Halpern, a Wall Street analyst at ING Baring Furman Selz.
Others are already looking to take Playstation II beyond games.
"This is the first credible alternative to the PC for reaching people on the Internet," said Carl
Malamud, chairman of Invisible Worlds, an Internet software company in Redwood City, Calif.
|
