Pandemic PS3 coder Tony Albrecht already has a unique unit of measurement, called the "Tony", for explaining the differences in processing power between the major consoles. He even went so far as to break it down for the less technically-minded.

Now, I think Tony units are great. Albrecht however felt a deeper understanding of where the consoles sit on the grunt scale was required, so he went and compared the latest generation of gaming platforms with the planet's fastest supercomputer - the IBM Roadrunner. His findings are fascinating:

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Game Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP) is probably the biggest annual event in the country aimed at both seasoned and budding developers. I know I'll be doing my best to get to Brisbane for the conference, even though it's not quite the show it used to be. And the warmer climate makes my fingers sweat.

Say you're an experienced dev. You'd like to go to GCAP and share your hints, tips and valuable advice. Heck, the reason people will be coming to the conference is to hear you, and many others, share your knowledge. Then you find out that, in addition to paying for admission to the conference, you have to pay to speak as well.

Pandemic coder (and part-time console performance judge) Tony Albrecht found himself in this situation. Here's what he had to say:

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Pandemic PS3 coder Tony Albrecht has made one of what we hope will be many posts on this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

According to Albrecht, San Fran's a bit like Adelaide. I actually found it more like Melbourne, or a colder Sydney (which would be Melbourne anyway). Mind you, I've never been to South Australia, so I can't really judge the comparison.

The programmer also mentioned that Oz is doing a fine job of making its presence known, and it doesn't involve guns, naked women or Bach:

Overall I've been impressed with the Aussie contingent - the number of companies that have representatives here and the talent of those individuals and their companies speaks highly of the Australian games industry and its future.

Hope you have fun in San Fran Tony, be sure to keep us in the loop if time allows.

If you're wondering about the choice of photo, it's a happy snap I took of the amusingly-named Coit Tower during my stay. It's okay to laugh, really.

GDC part 0 [Seven Degrees of Freedom]

We all know Midway isn't doing so well. A couple of bad games (okay, maybe a lot), accusations of insider trading (oh dear) and the closing of several studios (RIP Ratbag) have left the company in a bit of a spot.

It also doesn't help that its stock has gone from a healthy $US 22 in mid-2005 to the anorexic $US 4 price it wallows in now.

A couple of days ago Pandemic coder Tony Albrecht made a post on his blog, Seven Degrees of Freedom, detailing how Midway ended up in the position it's in. It's mostly to do with the company's CEO, David F. Zucker and his stock market dealings.

Albrecht does an excellent job of breaking Zucker's story down into neat, digestible facts:

Every available day (excluding weekends and Xmas and New Years) Zucker would buy 50,000 shares at a discounted price (about half the going rate) and then sell them immediately. You can see the full details here and the graph above gives you an idea of the amounts involved - black is earnings, and red is expenditures. All in all, Mr Zucker ended up with about $8.5Million in his pocket.

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Over at his blog Seven Degrees of Freedom, Pandemic programmer Tony Albrecht has posted an explanation of the mathematics behind the "Tony" unit. If you missed the post from two weeks ago, Tony came up with a new unit of measurement to quantify the power of the three major consoles. It was all in good fun, mind you, so don't take this as Tony's official stance on how the consoles rank.

From the post:

The numbers I gave were;

• X360: 6 Tony units
• PS3 : 14 Tony units
• Wii : 0.2 Tony units

Basically, I took my personal brain power (3.2GHz - which just happens to be the same as a single HW thread of the X360) as a base unit. So, the X360 with 3 cores, each with 2 HW threads gets 3*2 = 6 Tony units.

I hope Tony doesn't mind all the attention. This is the last of it man, I promise. Unless, of course, you make something else up that's cool.

Tony Units [Seven Degress of Freedom]
Tony Albrecht Debuts "Tony" Units At Game Connect [Kotaku AU]

Pandemic's Tony Albrecht decided to invent a new unit of measurement to compare the processing grunt of the major consoles, in an effort to simplify the concept during Game Connect's "Great Debate".

It's called the "Tony". Yes, he made it up.

Before the fanboys get themselves worked up, the debate was an exercise in humour.

Well, mostly. Although many of the points brought up during the verbal sparring were legitimate, they were often exaggerated or stretched. Mind you, Tantalus' David Hewitt did an excellent job of combing the real with the funny as he defended the Wii, and it came as no surprise when he won the debate.

But back to Albrecht:

The 360 has three cores and two hardware threads on each ... so you have six units of Tony power. The PS3 [has SPUs] ... you can port your code across onto the SPU and it's around four times the speed - six of those for you to play around with, so you have around 14 Tony units.

The Wii has about .2 Tony units.

Can we please have the Tony added to the metric system? It'd make writing all those technical articles on the consoles so much easier.