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Considering the possible impact of an open PS2

Sony isn't "opening" the PS2's format in the sense that they're …


When the EET reported on Sony's decision to "open" the format of the PS2 and begin selling the Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synth as common off the shelf (COTS) components, I was completely pumped. This was the most exciting news I'd heard all month, and as I sat back and imagined the possibilities that such a move would engender, I anxiously scanned the newsgroups and discussion boards to see if others were thinking along the same lines as I. What I found to my dismay was that others were misled by the use of the term "open" in the announcement, resulting in unfortunately misplaced excitement. That doesn't mean, however, that there isn't ample reason to be excited. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

What I want to do with this article is correct what I felt were some of the misconceptions about Sony's announcement and to offer some provocative suggestions about where this new platform announcement could possibly lead. And at the end of the article I'll show you some hard evidence that backs up many of the claims I'm going to make.

Not "open" as in
"Open Source"

Many folks saw the word "open" in the announcement and immediately thought that the vocabulary and criteria of the Open Source movement somehow apply to Sony's decision. This is a complete misunderstanding. Sony isn't "opening" the PS2's format in the sense that they're releasing the detailed specs of the system so that a community of "open hardware hackers" can make improvements to it, submit those improvements to Sony, and see them rolled into the next release of Sony's product. The PS2 also wasn't "opened" under the principle that many eyes catch bugs and defects. Here's a key section of the EET article that most seemed to have overlooked:

By Kutaragi's accounting, licensing the Playstation format could boost the installed base for the new version of the console far beyond the 73 million users of the original Playstation. Moreover, expanding the Playstation base could help Sony progress toward its corporate goal of morphing from a hardware to a communications company. If the growing pool of Playstation 2 systems were all connected, it would create an instant network platform, Idei said. Sony has not yet detailed how or when it will license the Playstation 2 format. However, the move is apparently a broad-based one.

Note the key word, "license," that appears a couple of times in that paragraph. Nobody knows how free Sony is going to be with the license, or any of the other details it will involve. Sony's "opening" of the PS2 (read, "their licensing of its design specs to third parties") means nothing more (and nothing less) than that Sony wants to see the EE and the GS become COTS components that can be used in the development of a variety of products, from workstations and servers to printers and televisions. In this respect, Sony wants the EE and GS to be just like the Athlon, the PIII, and even the PPC 750 (a.k.a., the G3) in that they're all COTS components that OEMs, hobbyists, etc., can mix and match with other COTS components in order to build systems for a variety of purposes and price/performance points. (Before you write in to correct me that not just anybody can build a system based on the PPC 750, read this.) In short, Sony is launching a whole new platform. There's the PowerPC platform, the PC platform, and now there's the PS2 platform.

The proposed "opening" of the PS2, then, is Sony's way of encouraging its primary goal, the selling of more EE and GS chips, as well as the software for those chips. Sony wants third parties to develop their own systems around the EE and GS. In order to jump-start the process of having these systems developed, Sony has to provide the industry with the specs of some sort of working prototype system that they can look at and use to base their own systems off of. PC makers have reference designs and a variety of chipsets, motherboards, etc., that work with x86 CPUs. Obviously, the only motherboard design that works with the EE is the PS2's. So the first system designs based on the EE and/or GS will have to be derivative of the PS2's design. Hence the proposed "opening" of the platform.

Imagine this scenario: Your company wants to develop a Linux-based graphics workstation using the EE and GS. Since Linux is the development environment for the PS2, you've got a head start in the software category. On the hardware side, you'd buy a load of EEs and GSes, license the PS2's design specs from Sony and use that as the basis for the mainboard of your workstation, modifying and adding in other COTS hardware as necessary.

So while Sony's PS2 specs could theoretically provide the basis for a PS2 emulator (Ha! I'd love to see the hardware you'd be emulating it on), or it could provide the pattern for a competitor to build a PS2 clone, it would more likely be used as a model for designing new systems around the EE and GS.

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