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:

For its processors its using 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron chips as well as 12,240 Cell chips all feeding off of 98 terabytes of memory and is running Red Hat Linux.

Yup, you heard right, this baby is running off of what is effectively 12,240 souped up PS3s.

Tony goes on to say that the Roadrunner consumes one watt for every 437 million calculations, making it “incredibly energy efficient”. This isn’t exactly something the PS3 can boast about.

Albrecht also went to the trouble of figuring out the processing power of the “Xbox 1040″ and “PS4″, based on previous consoles and supercomputers. He reckons 4-8GB of RAM and 64, or even 128, processors is not out of the question (the 360 has three and the PS3 eight). Hit the link below to see Tony’s full analysis, which includes pictures, graphs and, if you’re brave, strings of numbers.

Parallel future [Seven Degrees of Freedom] [Pic]

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:

So, if I want to speak at this conference, I have to pay full conference registration and I have to pay up front part of that registration for the privilege. Now, I understand that this is to prevent people from dropping out after they’ve committed to speaking, but is this really the right way to do it? Threaten us?

If you want good speakers, provide good benefits. Make people want to donate a considerable amount of their own time in order to present a good session. Yes, it means that you won’t get registration fees from those 20 or so speakers, but if so few people are registering that you really need the fees from those people that actually make the show worth attending, then I think you’ve got greater problems than just financial ones.

I agree – GCAP would be largely pointless without speakers. In fact, the sessions are a highlight!

Albrecht doesn’t finish without providing his own ideas as to how the GDAA can get speakers to come without insulting them. He also throws in a few suggestions as to how the event as a whole can be improved to get attendence numbers up.

What? I have to PAY to speak? [Seven Degree Of Freedom]

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.

While the mothership is doing a good job of covering the event, there’s nothing like a local perspective, especially that of a developer.

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]

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.

It almost smells like an intricate pump and dump scheme. Just replace the dodgy pharmaceuticals with crappy games.Albrecht is also unimpressed with Midway’s choice of engines. Not because the engines are bad – just Midway’s decision-making skills:

Don’t get me wrong, Unreal 3 is a great engine for PC FPS’s and has been ported to and is working on the PS3 and 360, but its not much good for the types of games that Midway is trying to specialise in.

Tony ends his post declaring that “Midway is screwed” and that Unreal Tournament 3 will be the publisher’s last high-profile title.

The Nefarious Mr Zucker [Seven Degrees of Freedom]

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.

More specifics on the PS3 and Wii can be found at the original post.

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]

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.

How about Nintendo’s effort, Tony?

The Wii has about .2 Tony units.

It should be noted that Albrecht doesn’t own a 360 or PS3. But he does have a Wii.

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.