Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Still smokin' crack

Sony today in Japan announced the PS3 pushout of the launch is official and is happening in November, world-wide.

Back in January, when one of my predictions was that the PS3 would not ship in ANY territory in 2006, some said I was "smoking crack".

Well, I'm still smokin' it. I still don't think it's going to happen this year. November is a short stint from 2007, and there's a lot that can happen in between now and then to force just a little slip. Hardware launches are complicated, designing your own silicon is complicated, learning to harness the power of a multi-threaded architecture is complicated, building games that can show a demonstrable difference from current competition is complicated, launching an online service is complicated.

Then again, Sony did build Aibo, so they are capable of amazing things. Still though, I think it's 2007. Guess we'll have to see if we have playable units at Tokyo Game Show in Sept, as that'd be a good indicator (and more or less a mirror of the 360 timeline of last year).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What I find a bit odd is that sony is blaming all the delays on the copy protection for the blue ray drive. If this were the case shouldn't we be seeing everything else nearly ready (like games, completed hardware, etc)? While it may truly be the bottleneck I'm sure there's a dozen other things holding up the release.

Saying the holdup is copy protection seems like the best excuse PR wise than saying there's another serious problem with the system. People don't mind if copy protection is weak, but they do care if the system 's graphics are poor.

KimPallister said...

Yeah, I'm sure that's a convenient scapegoat. May or may not be the problem, but sounds better than "the thing's too dang expensive to build right now", "the software isn't good enough or ready", or any other excuse that might be responsible.

Anonymous said...

Want to know how hard it is to code up a cell processor? How about getting a compiler to optimize for 9 concurrent processors?
Download the SDK and find out:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

But this isn't a unique situation. Console coders have had to deal with sychronizing multiple processors before, and did so with good results. However, the ramp-up time was at least the 2nd gen of games before things took off.

I guess it's like destop gc pixel shaders; people now have some BKM's and neat usage models - but we haven't even begun to really tap them like they could be used just yet.
-matt

adam lake said...

I was reading the release delay yesterday in the papers. got me to thinking, regardless of whether or not the blu-ray drive is an issue, which is pretty much the party line we all know is not the complete truth, the war between blue ray and hd-dvd is going to likely benefit online media distribution for movies and such. consumers will be confused by the choices, issues, etc. and will just download what they want when they want it. that's how i feel right now. so, blu-ray, hd-dvd, or iTunes? in a way, this is a bit off topic, but is related to the excuse sony is using and its larger industry effects. the confusion of the consumer is an opportunity for new media delivery mechanisms to dominate.

oh, and i previously predicted nov. 17th release :)

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