The PS3 GPU is not fast enough yet

SOME VERY INTERESTING tidbits have emerged about the PS3 GPU during my flight to Japan yesterday. It seems like the second gen dev kits were running nowhere close to full speed or spec. How close were they? Fairly.

Documents shown to us on the trip showed that there were two versions, labeled 'CEB' and 'DEH'. The earlier CEB has a chip called CBE (yes, I know) connected to main memory and to a south bridge. The SB is then connected to a chip labled 'NV4x' over a PCIe link. The upcoming version DEH has the CBE and main memory, but the NV4x/SB combo is replaced by the RSX. If you wanted to know what makes RSX more than a GPU, it looks like it is SB functionality.

The slightly more curious bit, encouraging and disturbing at the same time, is the current state of RSX. The disturbing part is that the slide I was shown had "Current DEH's aren't final spec or speed" in bold letters. Speed, OK, but not final spec at this point in time leaves precious little room for debugging before the console release. On a different note the current ones are running the RSX core at 420MHz with 550 expected for launch. Memory is set at 600MHz with 700 hoped for as final.

It looks like SoNVidia is most of the way there with RSX development, 80% of the clock, more for memory. One more spin, most likely another round of dev kits, and the code monkeys will know what they are facing. µ