CSI and the new consoles
May 20
Posted: under General.
I watched the CSI season finale last night. It was a 2 hour episode that was directed by Quentin Tarantino (I believe he wrote it as well). It was pretty good and definitely a bit different. The characters were a little bit off. They were acting a bit more quirky than usual. It was fun, but it didn’t seem like we were watching the same people. The style was definitely different in general. The whole premise is that a member of the team gets buried alive and only has a certain amount of time to live. Everyone has to band together to try to try to save their co-worker’s life. It was very emotional and it came across well on that level. Also, with two hours there was plenty of room for unexpected twists and turns. Everything just gets worse and worse. It was great.
I’ve been looking at the new consoles this week. They look awesome. I’d love to get one when they come out, but I’m guessing that they’re going to start off around $500 or so�. To give a simple rundown if you haven’t been following E3, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 are going to be insanely powerful. Sony is using their new cell processor that they developed in cooperation with IBM. I don’t know that much about the cell, but I’m reasonably sure it’s a multi-core design. The new Xbox will use a tripple core PowerPC processor (which interestingly uses a water cooling system to cut down on noise and space requirements that you’d get from traditional cooling). From what I’ve heard, based on the numbers released by the manufacturers, the PS3 has much better FPU performance than the Xbox while the latter slightly outclasses the former in integer performance� The bottom line is that you could spend well over $1000 on the fastest CPU you can get your hands on (I believe that title belongs to the Athlon 64 4800+ just now�a dual core unit) for a PC and you’d still fall short of the performance being advertised by Sony and MS. Their video performance is just as awfully beautiful with the PS3 sporting an NVIDIA chipset with 256 megs of memory (on top of the system having 256 megs of it’s own�). The Xbox on the other hand is using something fancy made by ATI that has 10 megs of memory on die but otherwise shares the main memory that weighs in at 512 megs. In either case their performance outdoes anything available for PC’s just now.
That’s all kind of scary, but of course it’s somewhat normal too. First of all, the Xbox isn’t slated to be released until the end of the year (no dates�.MS just wants it out for the holidays) whereas the PS3 isn’t due out until early next year. That said, 6+ months from now the hardware won’t look quite as impressive (but it’ll still be droolworthy for sure). On the flip side, in 4 or 5 years when they start releasing specs for the 6th generation consoles, PC’s will far outclass these upcoming 5th gen units.
Beyond what I’ve already mentioned, both unit’s feature wireless controlers and hard drives. The PS3 will have a 160 GB HD while the Xbox will ship with a 20 GB removable unit that, from the sounds of it, will likely be increased in size as time goes on (and of course they’ll probably be willing to sell you a larger one). Also, the Xbox can access PC hard drives so you can farm out extra storage if need be. Both are focusing on online gaming stuff, though I think MS really has some nice big pictures in their mind. Basically, their idea is to have the console be this home entertainment center and they’ll feed up all kinds of content like movie previews and stuff. MS would love to be the center of that world�
Nintendo is also coming out with their Revolution early next year. It looks like it’s no so impressive as far as raw power goes. Nintendo claims that they’re focusing more on gameplay than power. While I’ll totally agree that in the end it all comes down to that and not so much the hardware you’re running, we’ll see if Nintendo can actually deliver. (Also of course, these units have other markets in mind than just games.) The Revolution will also feature wireless controlers and the unit should be even smaller than the gamecube.
The Xbox 360 will use a plain old DVD drive. It sounds like they’ll add support for a HD DVD drive later on, but at this point they don’t really know what format they want to go with. Go figure. No big surprise, the PS3 will have a blu-ray drive. The revolution will have some sort of a drive�..umm, yeah. I wasn’t exactly sure about that one. It’s supposed to be able to play DVD’s, but what I read made it sound like it would need some special addition or something in order to do so. It’ll read gamecube discs too.
As for backward compatibility, the PS3 should play PS2 and PS games. The Xbox 360 will emulate Xbox games. Basically, it’s going to be able to play some games. They’re working to get it to play as many as possible (the idea here is that if they can get it to play certain games, others that are similar will also become playable�..who knows how many it will support (MS has no clue at this point), though one can bet that Halo 1 and 2 will work just fine). The Revolution will be able to play games from EVERY console Nintendo has ever made�wow! It came read gamecube discs, and it sounds like they’ll offer up the older cartridge games (which it will emulate) online. It’s hard to say if/how much they’ll cost though.
Wow, that took too long to write� 
Now I’m just waiting for Thursday’s number for Star Wars to come out�. I’m stuck in the sad situation where I�m working all weekend so I can’t really see it at all, or so I thought. I guess they’re continuing to do midnight showings, which would work out perfectly for me. I wanted to just go last night, but Milenka has to work early today so that wasn’t really doable. We might go tomorrow.
Incidentally, if you haven’t heard, google will now show movie times. Just do a search for a movie’s name and it’ll pop up with show times at local theaters (google happens to know my zip code. If it doesn’t know yours or you want a different one, just append a “,
