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"so he built an empire" -- emperor Kaz Hirai
An epic feat that saw the near improbable defeat of Nintendo and Sega at the height of their power, forever changed gaming's landscape and with it, Sony Group Corp.'s fortunes. So influential was his empire, that it drew in ~60% of the Sony's revenue at one point; but Kutaragi's tale isn't just one about how he led a small cadre into lands ruled by Nintendo and Sega to wage war for console supremacy and vanquished them in his quest to change the world. His is also a tale of him making legacy provisions before passing the scepter to Hirai that continue to guide the empire's direction and sustain the empire's vigor across various interests:
Hardware -- After witnessing System G's brilliance, Kutaragi embraced a real-time philosophy for 3D CG that his PS1 would be first to establish in the industry as "graphics synthesis". For PS2, he extended the philosophy to physics/simulated expressions, which he dubbed "emotion synthesis". His PS3 unified the two concepts (actually three, "sound synthesis" came first; PS3 refined the concept) with stereoscopic 3D and presented it as "reality synthesis", which brought about the prospect of VR on PS4. The emphasis he placed on high-speed real-time performance drove him to architect uncommon hardware. None more uncommon and special than PS3. It embodies all four real-time concepts and has been the source of inspiration behind every PS console since. Kutaragi took a big risk when he traded ease of development for a chip faster than Moore's Law, but that trade handed PS3 and successive generations of PS consoles an ingenious weapon with which to combat more powerful systems in the real-time computing arena. SPURS, the SPU Runtime System enhanced with STM was the weapon. It was forged in the fire of CELL's asynchronous compute engine architecture; specifically, in the fire of SPU direct memory access (DMA). Such was the weapon's effectiveness that ranger Mark Cerny (helped forge it and knows it well) sought to arm PS4's GPU with it. SIE struck a deal with arms dealer AMD to equip PS4, and in exchange AMD got to market SPURS as 'ACE' for their GPUs. A fair deal; but AMD's GPUs can't "replicate the SPU Runtime System (SPURS) of the PS3" in the same that PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5's GPUs can because AMD GPUs lack a hardware implementation of STM. SPU task management (STM) makes SPURS highly efficient (entries [0012], [0015] and [0016] explain what and why; [0070], [0071] and [0072] touch on non-CELL implementations and STM results). It allows an SPU to treat it's local store (i.e., memory) like cache, and select only the tasks that match its current program code as a way to minimize costly context switching/"cache flushing". PS4/PS4 Pro's GPUs imitate this process by means of a "volatile bit" that selectively invalidates cache lines to reduce cache flushing when L2 is used for compute and graphics at the same time. PS5 keeps with the volatile bit process and has a similar process for its I/O complex. Coherency engines in the complex tell cache scrubbers on the GPU which address ranges to scrub away so as to avoid full cache flushes when the SSD is read. SPURS/STM is the source of PS hardware might. With it, PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5 are forces to be reckoned with. Without it, PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5 are easy marks for One X and Series X and have no effective counter against their brute-force GPU asynchronous compute or Series X's Velocity architecture. That despite D3D12's Multi-engine Resource/Enhanced Barrier hobbling both Xbox GPUs by requiring full cache flushes after they complete their work. The popular opinion is that PS3 was a failure, but profitability and market share aren't the only measures of success. The unpopular fact is that PS3 was a triumph of engineering and has become the saving grace of current/future PS consoles. They are Kutaragi's standard-bearers. His due honor for attempting to make CELL a fixture in the world of computing, which unintentionally yet consequently gave Cerny/SIE the privilege of putting certain CELL related features on AMD's GPU roadmap for the benefit of AMD, SIE and industry. 'The Road to' began with CELL.
Software -- Kutaragi's crucible (i.e., a precursor CPU that's GPU-like) tested the mettle of PS Studios' ranks and steeled them for battle in the age of GPU asynchronous compute programming years before the dawn. For two generations, Redmond's assaults have been repelled by happy warriors (e.g., the ICE Team) highly skilled in the art of PS3. Mastery of Packing fp16 shader operations on SPUs and checkerboard MLAA on SPUs were trials for fp16 'Rapid Packed Math' usage and checkerboard rendering on PS4 Pro. PS3 pushed PS Studios' elite to be the most cunning at their craft. The evidence of history gives credence to the claim. Kutaragi is the only CEO (or system architect for that matter) to ever assure SIE's hardware and programmer competence ahead of future trends. The grateful warriors salute him.
Network -- As SCEI's emperor with broad authority inside Sony Group Corp.'s empire, Kutaragi the Great commissioned the PSNP's construction to finally erect a network that would commune PS users, traffic billions of dollars in e-commerce and provide a foothold in network services across platforms for generations to come. It was his long-held vision brought to emperor Jim Ryan's remembrance in later years: "I think he foresaw the network era and was talking about the network era many, many years before it became reality"... "he talked about this before we could really comprehend what he was saying". His visionary leadership and persistence (he tried with PS BB in Japan, but it failed to gain traction; then he tried with PSN) are the reasons for PSN's appearance on SIE's timeline. The network's impact can't be fully appraised, but a partial appraisal is that PSN has been vital to most growth vectors. The platform has generated billions in profit since operation and is the enabler of SIE's expansion into cloud, PC and mobile gaming, which will generate billions more in perpetuity. In the Web3 era, PSN will host P2P transactions and records of interoperable distributed ledgers (i.e., blockchains). The latter is an inevitability that Kutaragi didn't foresee, but he foresaw the former and it ties into the latter. CELL was conceived to be "a bus for peer-to-peer computing" (translated by DeepL) on a network; which a scribe worded as 'a peer-to-peer web that would transform every home into a kind of domestic (and legal) Napster'. Kutaragi had an uncanny intuition about the future of PS3's tech, but 7 years wasn't enough time for that future to emerge. Though he's no longer emperor in the seat of power, he still speaks of the P2P model; as it relates to blockchain and NFTs. PS3 couldn't bring it to pass, but a future PS console will.
Multimedia-as-a-Service/Transmedia -- As a point of clarity, Kutaragi declared SCE/SIE an entertainment company and laid out a timeless '21st Century Entertainment' strategy that draws from all corners of Sony Group Corp. to widen PlayStation's appeal beyond gaming. His vision was to wield popular entertainment as an instrument with which to further spread PS's influence, under the declaration that PlayStation is for entertainment, not just games. A scribe privy to Kutaragi's declaration noted: 'games and other services for PlayStation. His goal is to establish the PlayStation as a separate brand, not part of a dedicated Sony network for the online distribution of music, movies, and TV shows'. SIE's latest proposal to transition PS Plus into "Services 3.0" and scale it out in partnership with leading subscription service providers is testament to his declaration and a re-commitment to his entertainment strategy. It's also part of a larger aim to transform SIE into a transmedia powerhouse through collaboration with other Sony Group Corp. divisions, in accordance with his strategy.
GaaS/Live Service -- As the scribe noted, GaaS was always an objective of Kutaragi's entertainment services ambition; and live service is dead without PSN support.
GaaS/Game Streaming -- Kutaragi saw 'the Cloud' gathering from afar and readied PS3 for a ubiquitous game streaming future before it made sense to the masses. Prior to PS2's US launch, he riddled that PS3 would "totally disappear as a console, as a shape". At 9:51 - 9:52 Tokyo time (2:51 - 2:52 BST if Tokyo time isn't shown) of his final keynote as emperor, he predicted that networks would become fast enough to reliably stream video for services by 2016. He then justified PS3's gaming hardware as necessary to take advantage of a speedier future network. PS Now launched in major territories from 2014 - 2016 as a nebulous PS3 requiring a 5mbps connection speed for 720p streaming. As it turns out, one SPU can encode a 720p stream at 5mbps. By this metric, every initial PS Now subscriber and every PS3 game that's ever been streamed via Plus Premium is a credit to him. Premium's underlying streaming tech is as much a credit to him as it is to David Perry, Steve Perlman and the noble scout, Eric Lempel. SIE was first to act on Gaikai (stream to any webpage/browser), OnLive (perceptual tweaks to mask latency) and iSIZE (AI-based perceptual pre-coder to mask latency) because Kutaragi was first to know: "In the future, broadband will connect all appliances - console, TV, phone, PC, everything. Then exclusivity means nothing".
PC -- Kutaragi considered PC neither friend nor foe to PS consoles; but his notion that PS exclusives would come to PC in the then-future via streaming means he knew that PC would have a role in the empire's scheme to seize greater mind share. The eventuality of letting Plus Premium members stream first-party titles they purchase for PC (e.g., Helldivers 2 via Steam Cloud Play developer opt-in) to a TV, phone, tablet or PS Portal follows his logic.
Mobile -- With the threat of mobile's march into gaming looming large on the horizon, Kutaragi began work to fashion a shield that PS consoles could use in the inevitable fight. Scrolls from the period reveal that before he relinquished the throne, a PSP DualShock dock and remote play controller (under his name) that served up music, movies, TV shows, mini games (possibly PS Mobile for Android games) and e-mails were contemplated. The remote play controller arose out of his suspicion that mobile phones would eventually be an 'enemy' of PS consoles. In his absence, the remote play controller scroll was lost to time in the archives; until it was publicized as a new USPTO filing in 2019. PS Portal is the remote play controller of the once lost scroll, but pared-down. For now it's touted as just a remote player, but despite having ~6GB storage (guessing here, I think it's that small because SIE plans to update Portal with a ML downloader that "cloud delivers"/auto deletes individual mobile game levels and areas as necessary so that Portal can store segments of multiple titles for local play; hence Portal's rumored codename: 'Q' 'Lite'), it's only a few approved media and VoWifi apps away from also being the single entertainment/communications device he warned of in the '90s (emperor Andrew House recalled: "I remember him talking about there was going to be a convergence between all forms of media and entertainment into a single communications device"). The head craftsman Hideaki Nishino and his smiths crafted Portal's appearance from a DualSense perspective, but Kutaragi hammered out the specifics of Portal's motion sensing, remote play, cloud and mobile gaming aspects years in advance.
AI -- Long before AI became a hot topic of discussion, Kutaragi's take was that "one Cell or cluster of Cells can also function as a server; but whereas the present Internet mainly handles characters, applications on the Cell network will also handle semantics and reasoning". He always thought ahead and occasionally pushed to do more than necessary for the glory of the empire. CELL was a push, done to spark an AI revolution within SIE. A couple years after PS3's launch, the neighboring state of IBM presented its approach to training neural networks on CELL processors and a workaround for SPEs to compute training functions when bandwidth is limited. The work didn't yield anything tangible for PS3 games, but that doesn't negate the fact that CELL foreshadowed AI accelerators. Its array of SPEs are SIMD dataflow units with support for 8-bit operations and SRAM connected to a high-bandwidth on-chip network that allows SPEs to access each others SRAMs directly. These are attributes of dedicated AI accelerators from IBM, Graphcore and others (last paragraph). "Enormous applications that require image processing and large-volume computing" were other CELL use cases he considered. A real-world example is Toshiba's SpursEngine variant that was used for Super Resolution video up-conversion in the image processing domain. Almost two decades later, here comes PS5 Pro with talk of 8-bit computation for ML-based upscaling. Kutaragi would probably giggle inside at the news. What was old is now new. PS5 Pro's AI acceleration hardware will probably be Tempest Engine-like, which means it will trace back to the new age chip Kutaragi envisioned, too. CELL continues to prove itself a valuable resource and wise expenditure of the empire's treasure.
Metaverse -- Ryan saw PS Home as "a very early manifestation of a platform metaverse". Ever the visionary, Kutaragi saw it as "only the beginning of what will come". In his mind's eye, what was to come (and still is) was a realm of "make.believe-as-a-service" illusions and spectacles to enchant the people. This realm wasn't a metaverse experience, it was a blended 'Cyber Society' experience. A mixed realm that "combines the real and the imaginary" with music, movies, games and other entertainment. The power to muster the realm's alchemy in cyberspace was to come from a CELL network. Likely, a network of petaFLOP class CELL supercomputers running ML, MR and other applications in conjunction with PS3 consoles distributed across the land. His was a grand vision that now aligns with emperor Kenichiro Yoshida's perception of the so-called "metaverse" and Sony's approach to it (Q2., Q3. and Q4). Kutaragi wasn't "krazy", he was clairvoyant and well-versed. One of his earliest insights into a MR cyberverse was recorded by a scribe who wrote that while he was waving his arm, he said: "This, this is the real broadband interface" (last sentence of the article Onslaught posted). Reality interfaces and the alchemy of reality synthesis have come in phases throughout the empire's existence. Phase 1 was Play, Groove, Chat and Kinetic for EyeToy, PS Eye with EyePet in S3D, PS Move and the PS3 Reality Synthesis (i.e. Stereoscopic 3D worlds rendered in real-time by CELL SPUs and the RSX GPU) VR experiments that gave rise to PS VR. Social VR experimentation, PS Camera and its associated Asobi/AR Bots, PS HD Camera and PS VR2/Sense controllers were Phase 2. Phase 3 is in follow ups to these experiences and peripherals. In particular, the next PS HMD (PS XR?) which the upcoming Sony XR HMD already solves for. In that day, Kutaragi's 'Cyber Society' will no longer be a concept of his imagination; rather a reality that his consoles (PS2/PS3) encouraged Magic Lab's magicians and Sony Corp.'s wizards to formulate.
Frankly, Kutaragi was wise beyond his years on the throne. The passage of time, brand/IP maturation and tech advancement across industries affirm his sweeping vision; and have allowed his successors to see what he saw decades earlier as they look to further build on the foundation he laid, while moving to extend the empire's reach into areas of interest he identified beyond the traditional pillars he set in place during his rule.
His greatest success is that he made the success of every SCE/SIE emperor before (Toshio Ozawa, Shigeo Maruyama, Teruhisa Tokunaka et al were largely titular heads, Kutaragi was at helm) and after him possible. Those who came before are beneficiaries of his gamble to build an empire. Those who came/come after are inheritors of provisions he made to ensure the empire's survival and competitiveness.
Past and present emperors can say that they cut costs, streamlined operations, consolidated silos, improved communications, avoided pitfalls, forged partnerships, made exclusive deals, approved major acquisitions, pivoted to other areas for growth and led the empire through challenging circumstances on the way to greater expansion and wealth. Kutaragi can say he did most if not all the same; but not one of them can say that they defined PlayStation's past, present and future.
Here's to Ken Kutaragi, the man, the myth, the legend, the visionary, "the Oracle", The G.O.A.T. May he continue to live long.
Long live the empire.
An epic feat that saw the near improbable defeat of Nintendo and Sega at the height of their power, forever changed gaming's landscape and with it, Sony Group Corp.'s fortunes. So influential was his empire, that it drew in ~60% of the Sony's revenue at one point; but Kutaragi's tale isn't just one about how he led a small cadre into lands ruled by Nintendo and Sega to wage war for console supremacy and vanquished them in his quest to change the world. His is also a tale of him making legacy provisions before passing the scepter to Hirai that continue to guide the empire's direction and sustain the empire's vigor across various interests:
Hardware -- After witnessing System G's brilliance, Kutaragi embraced a real-time philosophy for 3D CG that his PS1 would be first to establish in the industry as "graphics synthesis". For PS2, he extended the philosophy to physics/simulated expressions, which he dubbed "emotion synthesis". His PS3 unified the two concepts (actually three, "sound synthesis" came first; PS3 refined the concept) with stereoscopic 3D and presented it as "reality synthesis", which brought about the prospect of VR on PS4. The emphasis he placed on high-speed real-time performance drove him to architect uncommon hardware. None more uncommon and special than PS3. It embodies all four real-time concepts and has been the source of inspiration behind every PS console since. Kutaragi took a big risk when he traded ease of development for a chip faster than Moore's Law, but that trade handed PS3 and successive generations of PS consoles an ingenious weapon with which to combat more powerful systems in the real-time computing arena. SPURS, the SPU Runtime System enhanced with STM was the weapon. It was forged in the fire of CELL's asynchronous compute engine architecture; specifically, in the fire of SPU direct memory access (DMA). Such was the weapon's effectiveness that ranger Mark Cerny (helped forge it and knows it well) sought to arm PS4's GPU with it. SIE struck a deal with arms dealer AMD to equip PS4, and in exchange AMD got to market SPURS as 'ACE' for their GPUs. A fair deal; but AMD's GPUs can't "replicate the SPU Runtime System (SPURS) of the PS3" in the same that PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5's GPUs can because AMD GPUs lack a hardware implementation of STM. SPU task management (STM) makes SPURS highly efficient (entries [0012], [0015] and [0016] explain what and why; [0070], [0071] and [0072] touch on non-CELL implementations and STM results). It allows an SPU to treat it's local store (i.e., memory) like cache, and select only the tasks that match its current program code as a way to minimize costly context switching/"cache flushing". PS4/PS4 Pro's GPUs imitate this process by means of a "volatile bit" that selectively invalidates cache lines to reduce cache flushing when L2 is used for compute and graphics at the same time. PS5 keeps with the volatile bit process and has a similar process for its I/O complex. Coherency engines in the complex tell cache scrubbers on the GPU which address ranges to scrub away so as to avoid full cache flushes when the SSD is read. SPURS/STM is the source of PS hardware might. With it, PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5 are forces to be reckoned with. Without it, PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5 are easy marks for One X and Series X and have no effective counter against their brute-force GPU asynchronous compute or Series X's Velocity architecture. That despite D3D12's Multi-engine Resource/Enhanced Barrier hobbling both Xbox GPUs by requiring full cache flushes after they complete their work. The popular opinion is that PS3 was a failure, but profitability and market share aren't the only measures of success. The unpopular fact is that PS3 was a triumph of engineering and has become the saving grace of current/future PS consoles. They are Kutaragi's standard-bearers. His due honor for attempting to make CELL a fixture in the world of computing, which unintentionally yet consequently gave Cerny/SIE the privilege of putting certain CELL related features on AMD's GPU roadmap for the benefit of AMD, SIE and industry. 'The Road to' began with CELL.
Software -- Kutaragi's crucible (i.e., a precursor CPU that's GPU-like) tested the mettle of PS Studios' ranks and steeled them for battle in the age of GPU asynchronous compute programming years before the dawn. For two generations, Redmond's assaults have been repelled by happy warriors (e.g., the ICE Team) highly skilled in the art of PS3. Mastery of Packing fp16 shader operations on SPUs and checkerboard MLAA on SPUs were trials for fp16 'Rapid Packed Math' usage and checkerboard rendering on PS4 Pro. PS3 pushed PS Studios' elite to be the most cunning at their craft. The evidence of history gives credence to the claim. Kutaragi is the only CEO (or system architect for that matter) to ever assure SIE's hardware and programmer competence ahead of future trends. The grateful warriors salute him.
Network -- As SCEI's emperor with broad authority inside Sony Group Corp.'s empire, Kutaragi the Great commissioned the PSNP's construction to finally erect a network that would commune PS users, traffic billions of dollars in e-commerce and provide a foothold in network services across platforms for generations to come. It was his long-held vision brought to emperor Jim Ryan's remembrance in later years: "I think he foresaw the network era and was talking about the network era many, many years before it became reality"... "he talked about this before we could really comprehend what he was saying". His visionary leadership and persistence (he tried with PS BB in Japan, but it failed to gain traction; then he tried with PSN) are the reasons for PSN's appearance on SIE's timeline. The network's impact can't be fully appraised, but a partial appraisal is that PSN has been vital to most growth vectors. The platform has generated billions in profit since operation and is the enabler of SIE's expansion into cloud, PC and mobile gaming, which will generate billions more in perpetuity. In the Web3 era, PSN will host P2P transactions and records of interoperable distributed ledgers (i.e., blockchains). The latter is an inevitability that Kutaragi didn't foresee, but he foresaw the former and it ties into the latter. CELL was conceived to be "a bus for peer-to-peer computing" (translated by DeepL) on a network; which a scribe worded as 'a peer-to-peer web that would transform every home into a kind of domestic (and legal) Napster'. Kutaragi had an uncanny intuition about the future of PS3's tech, but 7 years wasn't enough time for that future to emerge. Though he's no longer emperor in the seat of power, he still speaks of the P2P model; as it relates to blockchain and NFTs. PS3 couldn't bring it to pass, but a future PS console will.
Multimedia-as-a-Service/Transmedia -- As a point of clarity, Kutaragi declared SCE/SIE an entertainment company and laid out a timeless '21st Century Entertainment' strategy that draws from all corners of Sony Group Corp. to widen PlayStation's appeal beyond gaming. His vision was to wield popular entertainment as an instrument with which to further spread PS's influence, under the declaration that PlayStation is for entertainment, not just games. A scribe privy to Kutaragi's declaration noted: 'games and other services for PlayStation. His goal is to establish the PlayStation as a separate brand, not part of a dedicated Sony network for the online distribution of music, movies, and TV shows'. SIE's latest proposal to transition PS Plus into "Services 3.0" and scale it out in partnership with leading subscription service providers is testament to his declaration and a re-commitment to his entertainment strategy. It's also part of a larger aim to transform SIE into a transmedia powerhouse through collaboration with other Sony Group Corp. divisions, in accordance with his strategy.
GaaS/Live Service -- As the scribe noted, GaaS was always an objective of Kutaragi's entertainment services ambition; and live service is dead without PSN support.
GaaS/Game Streaming -- Kutaragi saw 'the Cloud' gathering from afar and readied PS3 for a ubiquitous game streaming future before it made sense to the masses. Prior to PS2's US launch, he riddled that PS3 would "totally disappear as a console, as a shape". At 9:51 - 9:52 Tokyo time (2:51 - 2:52 BST if Tokyo time isn't shown) of his final keynote as emperor, he predicted that networks would become fast enough to reliably stream video for services by 2016. He then justified PS3's gaming hardware as necessary to take advantage of a speedier future network. PS Now launched in major territories from 2014 - 2016 as a nebulous PS3 requiring a 5mbps connection speed for 720p streaming. As it turns out, one SPU can encode a 720p stream at 5mbps. By this metric, every initial PS Now subscriber and every PS3 game that's ever been streamed via Plus Premium is a credit to him. Premium's underlying streaming tech is as much a credit to him as it is to David Perry, Steve Perlman and the noble scout, Eric Lempel. SIE was first to act on Gaikai (stream to any webpage/browser), OnLive (perceptual tweaks to mask latency) and iSIZE (AI-based perceptual pre-coder to mask latency) because Kutaragi was first to know: "In the future, broadband will connect all appliances - console, TV, phone, PC, everything. Then exclusivity means nothing".
PC -- Kutaragi considered PC neither friend nor foe to PS consoles; but his notion that PS exclusives would come to PC in the then-future via streaming means he knew that PC would have a role in the empire's scheme to seize greater mind share. The eventuality of letting Plus Premium members stream first-party titles they purchase for PC (e.g., Helldivers 2 via Steam Cloud Play developer opt-in) to a TV, phone, tablet or PS Portal follows his logic.
Mobile -- With the threat of mobile's march into gaming looming large on the horizon, Kutaragi began work to fashion a shield that PS consoles could use in the inevitable fight. Scrolls from the period reveal that before he relinquished the throne, a PSP DualShock dock and remote play controller (under his name) that served up music, movies, TV shows, mini games (possibly PS Mobile for Android games) and e-mails were contemplated. The remote play controller arose out of his suspicion that mobile phones would eventually be an 'enemy' of PS consoles. In his absence, the remote play controller scroll was lost to time in the archives; until it was publicized as a new USPTO filing in 2019. PS Portal is the remote play controller of the once lost scroll, but pared-down. For now it's touted as just a remote player, but despite having ~6GB storage (guessing here, I think it's that small because SIE plans to update Portal with a ML downloader that "cloud delivers"/auto deletes individual mobile game levels and areas as necessary so that Portal can store segments of multiple titles for local play; hence Portal's rumored codename: 'Q' 'Lite'), it's only a few approved media and VoWifi apps away from also being the single entertainment/communications device he warned of in the '90s (emperor Andrew House recalled: "I remember him talking about there was going to be a convergence between all forms of media and entertainment into a single communications device"). The head craftsman Hideaki Nishino and his smiths crafted Portal's appearance from a DualSense perspective, but Kutaragi hammered out the specifics of Portal's motion sensing, remote play, cloud and mobile gaming aspects years in advance.
AI -- Long before AI became a hot topic of discussion, Kutaragi's take was that "one Cell or cluster of Cells can also function as a server; but whereas the present Internet mainly handles characters, applications on the Cell network will also handle semantics and reasoning". He always thought ahead and occasionally pushed to do more than necessary for the glory of the empire. CELL was a push, done to spark an AI revolution within SIE. A couple years after PS3's launch, the neighboring state of IBM presented its approach to training neural networks on CELL processors and a workaround for SPEs to compute training functions when bandwidth is limited. The work didn't yield anything tangible for PS3 games, but that doesn't negate the fact that CELL foreshadowed AI accelerators. Its array of SPEs are SIMD dataflow units with support for 8-bit operations and SRAM connected to a high-bandwidth on-chip network that allows SPEs to access each others SRAMs directly. These are attributes of dedicated AI accelerators from IBM, Graphcore and others (last paragraph). "Enormous applications that require image processing and large-volume computing" were other CELL use cases he considered. A real-world example is Toshiba's SpursEngine variant that was used for Super Resolution video up-conversion in the image processing domain. Almost two decades later, here comes PS5 Pro with talk of 8-bit computation for ML-based upscaling. Kutaragi would probably giggle inside at the news. What was old is now new. PS5 Pro's AI acceleration hardware will probably be Tempest Engine-like, which means it will trace back to the new age chip Kutaragi envisioned, too. CELL continues to prove itself a valuable resource and wise expenditure of the empire's treasure.
Metaverse -- Ryan saw PS Home as "a very early manifestation of a platform metaverse". Ever the visionary, Kutaragi saw it as "only the beginning of what will come". In his mind's eye, what was to come (and still is) was a realm of "make.believe-as-a-service" illusions and spectacles to enchant the people. This realm wasn't a metaverse experience, it was a blended 'Cyber Society' experience. A mixed realm that "combines the real and the imaginary" with music, movies, games and other entertainment. The power to muster the realm's alchemy in cyberspace was to come from a CELL network. Likely, a network of petaFLOP class CELL supercomputers running ML, MR and other applications in conjunction with PS3 consoles distributed across the land. His was a grand vision that now aligns with emperor Kenichiro Yoshida's perception of the so-called "metaverse" and Sony's approach to it (Q2., Q3. and Q4). Kutaragi wasn't "krazy", he was clairvoyant and well-versed. One of his earliest insights into a MR cyberverse was recorded by a scribe who wrote that while he was waving his arm, he said: "This, this is the real broadband interface" (last sentence of the article Onslaught posted). Reality interfaces and the alchemy of reality synthesis have come in phases throughout the empire's existence. Phase 1 was Play, Groove, Chat and Kinetic for EyeToy, PS Eye with EyePet in S3D, PS Move and the PS3 Reality Synthesis (i.e. Stereoscopic 3D worlds rendered in real-time by CELL SPUs and the RSX GPU) VR experiments that gave rise to PS VR. Social VR experimentation, PS Camera and its associated Asobi/AR Bots, PS HD Camera and PS VR2/Sense controllers were Phase 2. Phase 3 is in follow ups to these experiences and peripherals. In particular, the next PS HMD (PS XR?) which the upcoming Sony XR HMD already solves for. In that day, Kutaragi's 'Cyber Society' will no longer be a concept of his imagination; rather a reality that his consoles (PS2/PS3) encouraged Magic Lab's magicians and Sony Corp.'s wizards to formulate.
Frankly, Kutaragi was wise beyond his years on the throne. The passage of time, brand/IP maturation and tech advancement across industries affirm his sweeping vision; and have allowed his successors to see what he saw decades earlier as they look to further build on the foundation he laid, while moving to extend the empire's reach into areas of interest he identified beyond the traditional pillars he set in place during his rule.
His greatest success is that he made the success of every SCE/SIE emperor before (Toshio Ozawa, Shigeo Maruyama, Teruhisa Tokunaka et al were largely titular heads, Kutaragi was at helm) and after him possible. Those who came before are beneficiaries of his gamble to build an empire. Those who came/come after are inheritors of provisions he made to ensure the empire's survival and competitiveness.
Past and present emperors can say that they cut costs, streamlined operations, consolidated silos, improved communications, avoided pitfalls, forged partnerships, made exclusive deals, approved major acquisitions, pivoted to other areas for growth and led the empire through challenging circumstances on the way to greater expansion and wealth. Kutaragi can say he did most if not all the same; but not one of them can say that they defined PlayStation's past, present and future.
Here's to Ken Kutaragi, the man, the myth, the legend, the visionary, "the Oracle", The G.O.A.T. May he continue to live long.
Long live the empire.
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