SONY PlayStation Vita (PS Vita)


I know I said it earlier in the year, but I can't help feeling Sony have their work cut out for them here, phones really do seem to have replaced a big section of mobile gaming, and that only seems more evident now.


I would not be surprised if this will be Sony's last roll of the dice, I just can't see them getting a 4-5 year lifetime out of this, cheap phones will usurp it within months in terms of power.
 
I know I said it earlier in the year, but I can't help feeling Sony have their work cut out for them here, phones really do seem to have replaced a big section of mobile gaming, and that only seems more evident now.

I would not be surprised if this will be Sony's last roll of the dice, I just can't see them getting a 4-5 year lifetime out of this, cheap phones will usurp it within months in terms of power.

I am inclined to agree but for the sake of a good console im hoping this is not the case.
 
Ya, I'm bias as well as I HOPE you're wrong Craig.


That being said, I honestly think that Nintendo DS/3DS users might be hurt more.


This seems like a really flawed statement, but Nintendo handhelds are more apt to pull in the casual gamer, which is what I view 90% of phone-only gamers to be. Even though the Vita has more options/abilities similar to a phone --- I consider the stereotype of Sony gamers to be more hardcore, to be true.


I hope my statements make sense, but dont get me wrong, I see the possible flaws in my argument (hopes).
 
3 months and 2 days till I get my PSVita.
Gonna wait until it comes out in the US, I keep buying things from japan and I keep struggling to understand what the hell is going on half the time.


So for now I just spent my hard earned pennies on the mini metal pandora :)
 
If Sony would just support Android on Vita they'd compete much more decisively against phones. :/
 
Along the line of Craig's statement and PS Vita competition. A lot of people on the Gamefaqs forums feel that the Vita and the PS3 are going to hurt each other. Others say "oh no, they'll help each other, because they're like a Wii U and they do all that intertwined stuff!" but I'm starting to worry that the PS3 is competition for the Vita.


Dragons Crown? PS3


SF X Tekken? PS3


Disgaea 3? PS3


MGS HD Collection? PS3


and now FF 10 Remake? YAYAYAYAY ..oh wait. PS3.


Now I realize some people are gonna be like "no way, Vita is for on the go" and others may say "well I dont have a ps3" and both of these are correct statements, but I can only imagine how many are in the same boat as me, and will prefer to play on their couch with surround sound and 40-60inch HD screen instead of on the Vita.


So, although the Vita is still looking attractive to me and I think I'll get one --- some of the games I would have bought, I'll just get on the PS3 instead.
 
Looks like it uses proprietary memory... And it'll cost ya.

  • Memory Card 4GB ¥2,200 $29
  • Memory Card 8GB ¥3,200 $42
  • Memory Card 16GB ¥5,500 $71
  • Memory Card 32GB ¥9,500 $124
 
I would not be surprised if this will be Sony's last roll of the dice, I just can't see them getting a 4-5 year lifetime out of this, cheap phones will usurp it within months in terms of power.
It shouldn't play out quite like that.

They're supposedly going for a SGX543MP4 and a quad core A9 on 45nm process. The Apple A5 is running a SGX543MP2 and dual core A9 with a 122mm^2 die on 45nm, meaning the NGP's die should be along the lines of 244mm^2 putting it in the realm of being a really big die. A 28nm die shrink should still leave Sony's die at around 100mm^2, which is larger then most ARM producers prefer and more inline with something intended for tablet rather then smart phone platforms. The 20nm node will put it at 48mm^2 which is more along the lines of what you expect in cheap smart phones.


OMAP 5 is also as far as I know slated to use the SGX544 GPU, which is basically the SGX543 with DirectX compatibility, and nVidia's Kal-El is not that big a die. Qualcomm might be able to beat it with the Adreno 3xx, but like Apple did with iPad 2 Sony has bet on their competition not being interested in paying for that much processed silicon. That in turn should keep the smart phones off their back until 2013-14 when the 20nm node hits.


Now Sony is going to pay through the nose in the battery department for pulling this gambit, but they can probably stay king of the handsets in terms of processor logic bandwidth. The fact they, and Microsoft, are not averse to taking advantage of node shrinks will at the very least not hurt them.


I see the question as being whether something with that kind of power with a battery life that makes the 3DS' look quite long will fly with customers. That's a pretty severe compromise and doesn't play to their strengths given short punchy games are not something Sony has shown a lot of strength with.
 
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Heh, 244mm^2. I have a feeling you're way off because:


a) We don't know that PSV is being manufactured on 45nm and not 40nm, and we don't know who is manufacturing it


B) L2 cache takes much more space than Cortex-A9 cores which, even with NEON, will take under 5mm^2 each. And PSV probably has 1MB of L2 like the other high end A9 SoCs.


c) They probably have roughly the same uncore, memory controller et al


d) And video engine which takes a lot of space (look at a floorplan of the original A4 for instance)


e) I'm told by private sources that A5 includes copious amounts of dedicated RAM for the SGX543MP2 (this could be texture cache, tile memory, parameter queues, whatever)


Don't be too surprised if the PSV SoC is closer to 1x the size of A5 than 2x. Of course we might not know if no one bothers to dissect it.


In the real world density is not a simple function of what metric the process is advertised as. If you compare say, Apple's original A4 on Samsung 45nm with Tegra 2 on TSMC 40G or whatever you'll see that the densities don't add up using a simple numerical comparison. Similar story for Zacate cores which, going by transistor counts, look something like twice as dense on TSMC 40G as Atoms on Intel's 45nm SoC process. Of course, what you're actually manufacturing plays a large role as to how dense it is, but there are tons of parameters in the process which affect this too.


Mind you, die size is not the only factor for price. Yields have an obvious impact too, which both process and design impact.


OMAP5 is going to be SGX544MPx, where I hear that the x will be available as both 2 and 4 (possibly not both initially) - and it's expected to clock pretty damn high, probably much higher than Vita can be clocked to. I also think the 2 Cortex-A15 cores will have little problem giving Vita's 4 A9 cores a run for their money, especially since I'm hearing that the A9s in Vita won't even hit 1GHz, while OMAP5 will be available in excess of 2GHz. And on Vita the OS is hoarding one of the cores, as usual.


This is completely ignoring ST Ericsson's upcoming Nova Thor with Series 6 Rogue GPU. Hardware-wise I don't think it's going to take long at all for other devices to beat Vita, certainly not needing 20nm (not that I really think anything ~20nm will be available in 2013, not counting 22nm products from Intel)


Everyone is going on about how huge A5 is but the only real datapoint for comparison that has been used is nVidia. nVidia who is so cheap with die space that they didn't even give their Tegra 2 cores NEON. There's no information on how large TI, Samsung, or Qualcomm cores are (for starters). We do have some information on Atom SoCs and they sure aren't small, although I guess that's not too relevant given what margins Intel sells those for.
 
wow i love reading you two arguing.


but if all these devices that will make the vita outdated have a single game that actually takes advantage of the power, i will shit in a hat, roll it up in a burrito, and eat it myself. angry birds on 2ghz is still angry birds
 
Go take another look, there's more than Angry Birds available for these platforms these days... Not a lot of original assets but PS3/XBox 360 leftovers is enough to push the boundaries. I'm sure PSV will be getting plenty of leftovers itself.


And not that it's my thing or anything but I'm totally looking forward to you eating that hat-shit burrito.
 
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The battery life I've seen in recent reports makes me a sad puppy. I'm officially on the fence about buying one now, and I'm usually an easy sell for portables.
 
Heh, 244mm^2. I have a feeling you're way off because:
Maybe. It is a back of the envelop calculation, but there are reasons the associated reasoning should tend to hold up.
a) We don't know that PSV is being manufactured on 45nm and not 40nm, and we don't know who is manufacturing it
In the same sense we don't know there will even be a iPhone 5 this year, because officially there is no iPhone 5, yes. In terms of the rumor mill 45m via Samsung is pretty consistently claimed.
B) L2 cache takes much more space than Cortex-A9 cores which, even with NEON, will take under 5mm^2 each. And PSV probably has 1MB of L2 like the other high end A9 SoCs.</p>
And OMAP 5 has 2MB of L2 cache, as per Anandtech, which I have no reason to doubt in this case.
e) I'm told by private sources that A5 includes copious amounts of dedicated RAM for the SGX543MP2 (this could be texture cache, tile memory, parameter queues, whatever)
This product is going to live or die on GPU performance a lot more then Apple's iPad 2 needed to. If this is an issue for Apple's platform why would Sony blow it off? Unlike Apple they're not focussed on having a gimmick, they're trying to go for the dominant position in terms of pure power.
In the real world density is not a simple function of what metric the process is advertised as.
No, but we're talking identical processor and GPU designs rumoured to be handled by the exact same fab company on the same process. As back of the napkin calcs works, this isn't bad.
OMAP5 is going to be SGX544MPx, where I hear that the x will be available as both 2 and 4 (possibly not both initially) - and it's expected to clock pretty damn high, probably much higher than Vita can be clocked to. I also think the 2 Cortex-A15 cores will have little problem giving Vita's 4 A9 cores a run for their money, especially since I'm hearing that the A9s in Vita won't even hit 1GHz, while OMAP5 will be available in excess of 2GHz. And on Vita the OS is hoarding one of the cores, as usual.
You're hearing a lot more then any of the normal sources then. If what you've heard is true I'm not sure why you're neglecting TI's emphasis on the Cortex A15 being 50% faster per clock then the Cortex A9 meaning if Sony has taken one core out of the equation that a OMAP 5 dual core will tend to perform as well as Sony's de facto tricore clock for clock.Sony is insane if this is the case, particularly given the strengths of TI's OMAP designs in areas critical to such devices. The Vita is more or less confirmed as having no battery life to speak of and only being pocketable in the most loose jacket involved terms. If it's tending towards the gutless side this is going to make this device a hard sell even if they get the ergonomic design perfect. Epic games don't work to well when they need to be played on tether, and punchy games are not an area of strength for them.
This is completely ignoring ST Ericsson's upcoming Nova Thor with Series 6 Rogue GPU.
Point taken. I wasn't aware those were coming out. Although to be fair until the rest of the playing field responds to series 6 Imagination Technology GPUs those won't be in the cheap smartphones.
 
Who knows why Apple made the design decisions they did with A5.. if they packed it with an unusually large amount of RAM per core it wasn't necessarily simply a move to get as much performance as possible in all cases. It could be more important for Apple than Sony because of OS requirements or because Apple wants to put A5 in devices with higher resolution than Vita. It's not necessarily vital for Vita to have the same parameters.


Yes OMAP5 will have 2MB of L2 cache, not sure what relevance this has though! An increase in cache is natural/to be expected with a process shrink.. but Vita will probably have 1MB of L2 just like Kal-El. I also wouldn't be very surprised if it only had a 32-bit DDR interface (also like Kal-El) due to having the GPU connected to dedicated RAM.


I'm not neglecting Cortex-A15's IPC improvement over A9, quite the contrary, I simply thought it went without saying (it's implied when I said that 2 A15 cores will beat Vita's 4 A9 cores before even mentioning clock speed) - I want to paint a very clear picture of how easily high clocked A15s (or even low clocked ones, for that matter) will beat the CPUs in PSVita. And that these will probably show up in devices before 2013 and well before 20nm. Similar things can be said about Krait.


Tablets and even phones will surpass Vita in CPU power very quickly and GPU power not that much longer. Vita will have the software advantage, like Carmack says I'm sure it'll be substantial. More than that, it'll compete because it'll be compared with the 3DS, not phones. Phones have the problem of companies not wanting to do original high end games for them because it's taboo to sell phone games for more than $10 or so. A lot of people think handhelds are coming to an end and that consoles will soon follow them - if that's true then high budget games may be coming to an end too.
 
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I think its easy ..


Theres definately a market for mobiles in the non-casual segment; theres a marget for real consoles; theres a market for PC games and of course a market for casual and medium-core (say) mobiles.


The real story is .. when you have a market dichotomy (PC and console, or even think soft drinks or other things entirely), and the introduce a third .. it'll steal away some group of folks who were previous happy or marginally happy in the existing segments; its not common for a new thing to devestate an old thing, but it is common for a new thign to eat into what was previously considered safe; and then mthewre are disriptive techs that do just come in and wipe stuff out.


So the question is .. can an industry be happy on _less_ of the pie, or _same_ (if the pie is growing, but something else eats into it, you are perceived as failing yet are actually at same level.. but if perception goes against you, _then_ you're in trouble.. so hence the marketing game.)


So the Vita undoubtedly has a market; is it as big as PSP was at some measurement of peak, or smaller, or larger (due to segment overall growth)? And are they happy to play there?


I shoudl think a company woudl be happy turning a profit, but thats not how it works; someone like Sony typically wants to dominate, or get the hell out. If Vita is profitablne on 10% of market instead of 30% or whatever say PSP might have had, they shoudl be happy, but they'd probabyl just cancel it.


Phpones certainly stole away a lot of people who just wanted casual systems in their pocket, and phones are there; but that doesnm't mean we dont' still want something, just .. smaller size of 'us'.


I sort of want a Vita myself, since might be handy with screaming babies keeping me up all night, and I'm sort of intrigued by the idea of the rear-surface touch and so on; best to wait for games and see how it pans out though.. buying early on seems risky (very high price, not many games, and unsure marketplace...). And well, its _Sony_, they've been such assholes for the last 10 years, I don't really want to buy any Sony product. But I've always been a fan of their mobile team, despite UMD and memstick.


jeff
 
Homebrew enabled? When hell freezes over, maybe...

Homebrew was already confirmed for the PS Vita via PS Suite... I just hope it isn't taken away like Other OS...


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-15-android-gaming-coming-to-vita


Anyway, The PS Vita is looking really good right now. I can't wait to get one of these things... Hopefully MGS4 gets ported but I doubt it. It already has MGS1, 2 and 3, which includes MG 1 and MG 2: Solid Snake... It's also very possible the Vita will get Metal Gear Solid: Rising... So 4 would just be icing on the cake...
 
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I'm actually considering importing a PSV. It really depends on how long the US wait will be, and how much it will cost. I'm expecting import cost to be around 500 or so. If the US gets a relese date in january of 2012, I'll probably wait, but if it doesn't come out until late march or april, I'll import if my funds are right at the time.


This thing is just a monster, plain and simple. You can really see that Sony is trying to make sure that if this unit fails, it won't be on their shoulders. The price is right, the hardware is top notch, the software is killer, and hopefully they step it up in regards to online, and proper ps1, ps2, and psp software downloads. These 3 systems have a library that is second to none in the history of video games.


I'm sure they are planning to run homebrew in the same way that it is currently allowed in the commercial market place. Developers will have to submit software for proper approval, so I don't know if this will be a great classic gaming machine unless it gets hacked, but if it does, I may have to retire my Pandora at some point ;) , but not yet! :lol:


Chris
 
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