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[Nerevar]

I do not think SCE is even thinking of 128 MB, it is way too low and it would make Xbox 2 software very difficult to port to PlayStation 3 and with Xbox 2 coming out first...

Add 128 MB to the numbers you posted above and I think you would be closer to the jackpot.

how expensive is the memory they're going with? New tech from Rambus has a tendency to be, well, very expensive, to say the least.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Panajev, while i do think the final PS3 will be 256~512 MB, it would not surprise me in the least that Sony would initally try to get away with 128 MB. they have the history to do something like this. the original Playstation was going to ship with 1 MB of main memory. the PSP was orginally going to ship with 8 MB main memory. but when developers complain, Sony does tend to listen. so there is hope.

Do you know how much RAM the XMB GUI and the rest of the OS keeps to itself on PSP (that is, PSP games cannot directly use) ?

The answer is 8 MB.

Evidently the complaining started inside too as the OS must have not had enough space: if they were going to leave games any RAM.

I think that initially they hoped more developers would work on re-converting all data assets (without sharing directly PlayStation 2 material), use curved surfacesand streaming off the UMD which at one point might have seemed less of a battery drain before maybe actual experiments or neweer simulations were made... we will see what developers will be able to do streaming geometry from the disk, maybe they can be efficient enough to minimize the battery life hit.

SCE's R&D labs present initially what they belueve to be fast enough to do the job they wanted it to and then they propose it to internal developers and third parties once the specs are now a little bit more set in stone (before it all stays inside the Hardware group). Those specs are flexible in the sense that some areas like main RAM that can be changed without requiring major engineering resources unless there was a bug on their part or a huge oversight they made.

 

[Panajev2001a]

how expensive is the memory they're going with? New tech from Rambus has a tendency to be, well, very expensive, to say the least.

I do not have numbers about costs related to XDR. Sony is pretty much the single biggest customer RAMBUS have right now and they got burned once already by slapping license fees that were too high on a worthy technology (it killed its good qualities).

It surely is advanced technology that RAMBUS is offering though, it will not be extra cheap, but it should be worth the asking price and be competitive with what other manufacturers would hae asked (even though not many had something like FlexIO to ccome along a RAM solution like XDR) .

 

[nitewulf]

Panajev, while i do think the final PS3 will be 256~512 MB, it would not surprise me in the least that Sony would initally try to get away with 128 MB. they have the history to do something like this. the original Playstation was going to ship with 1 MB of main memory. the PSP was orginally going to ship with 8 MB main memory. but when developers complain, Sony does tend to listen. so there is hope.

i highly doubt an HD compatible next gen console would have only 128MB system ram.