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Been quiet here lately. Greg did some cool research on SONY below.

-Ian.

>Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1999 08:15:56 -0800
>From: Gregory Alan Bolcer
>Organization: Endeavors Technnology, Inc.
>X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win98; U)
>X-Accept-Language: en
>To: FoRK
>CC: Jim Berney , Denice Gibson
>Subject: Sony Stock & PSXN
>
>It’s probably a good point to buy a couple of shares of Sony stock. Too
>bad you can’t get Sony Entertainment and Sony Playstation stock explicitly
>without the Sony Music and other sectors. Sony is deep in the middle
>of manufacturing Sony PlayStation 2 and already they’ve released
>specs on PSX3 and beyond. PSX creator Ken Kutaragi plans on commercializing
>PlayStation2 Tool Development station. It’s a standalone graphics workstation
>that uses the same Emotion engine and graphics synthesizer chips found in
>PSX2, runs Linux, and is fast as all shit. The non-PlayStation Tool will
>be named the Creative WorkStation and will be marketed to high end graphics
>professionals and movie makers as an alternate to current workstations (look
>out Sun/SGI when you see the next generation add ons). Sony is willing to
>go to the mat with workstation vendors and are willing to lose huge sums
>of money on the product to build marketshare. At PSX2’s $300 projected price
>point, the ‘Tool’ can’t be much higher.
>
>Here’s a summary of their timeline below:
>
>2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
>
>March, PSX2 released
> Rollout of Tool in 2k or 2k2 & offers 10X the performance of
> PlayStation
> with faster clock, chips, etc.
> 100 times Tool performance using Emotion Engine
> & Graphics Synthesizers
> 3rd
> Generation Tool, 1000x performance
> PlayStation
> 3 released
>
>This, of course, begs the question, what can a thousand-times Playstation2
>deliver?
> o 66 Trillion calculations per second
> o On a 6400×4800 high def screen, that’s more than enough to update
> pixel-sized
> triangles 120 times per second
>
>That’s both better than movie resolution and a refresh rate faster than
>any human eye
>can detect which can be done by a mere 3.6 Trillion polys per second and
>’reality’ is supposedly only 800,000,000 polys per second. Somewhere in the
>next 2 years, reality is going to be renderable on a computer in
>real-time, if only
>the display technology keeps up.
>
>The article ends on this: “Don’t expect the traditional PC and workstation
>market (and
>the companies that supply the OSs for them like Microsoft and Sun) to roll
>over
>and hand the keys to the future to Sony, but lcearly, Kutaragi is very,
>very confident
>in the abilities of the chip his team has designed to lay down such a
>gauntlet.”
>
>Jack Lyon of C!Net says: “This could be a wake-up call to the rest of the
>industry, the way
>Sputnik was to the aerospace industry in the 1950’s.”
>
>Buy graphics stock is all I can say.
>
>Greg
>
>(The particular article isn’t online, but a related article yields
>some insight into their strategy).
>http://www.dailyradar.com/features/game_feature_page_21_5.html
>
>Will we see PlayStation2 hardware anywhere else?
>
>According to the morning edition of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, SCE proposes
>to adapt
>its existing technology to break into the alternative business computer
>market. The
>developments that the company has made in creating its next-generation
>console are to
>be directly ported into new machines aimed at the imaging business sector.
>
>PlayStation2 uses microprocessors developed by Sony in conjunction with
>Toshiba. The
>microprocessors are widely believed to be among the highest performers in
>the world,
>particularly in imaging. Sony now plans to utilize these components in
>high-specification
>workstations. The workstations will be of particular interest to
>broadcasting companies,
>film producers, and software developers, due to the image-processing
>features they will
>offer.
>
>SCE has further plans to develop even higher specification microprocessors
>in 2002 and
>2005. The company will also explore the digital-broadcasting equipment
>business. The
>Nihon Keizai Shimbun reports that SCE sees these fields as being potential
>major
>concerns behind its game system operation, and a possible source of
>significant income.
>
>Competitors in this field include companies like IBM and Silicon Graphics,
>the latter
>company having had the field almost entirely to itself in the last few
>years. A powerful,
>low-cost competitor would be very unwelcome news.