(a tale from The Emotion Engine)
There really should have been a book written about the design of the Sony PlayStation 2, one of the most successful gaming consoles in history. I would have wanted to call it The Emotion Engine, which was the name of the main processor chip. I led the physical design of the R5900 CPU, which was about half of the Emotion Engine chip (the other half was graphics preprocessing), so I have some inside stories to tell. Here’s one of them …
In Japanese, there are two ways to say “I don’t understand”. The first one, wakarimasen, means “it isn’t clear” (to me). The implication is that, even though I have had everything explained to me, I still don’t get it. The responsibility for the lack of understanding is mine and mine alone.
The second way, shirimasen, means more like “I wasn’t informed” or “nobody told me”. It blames someone else for my lack of knowledge.
Depending on the context, shirimasen can be extremely rude even though it is in polite-form Japanese. For example, if a teacher asks you a question in school, and you say wakarimasen, it just means you don’t know the answer. But if you say shirimasen, it means that no one taught you. It means that the teacher is at fault.
The political structure of the Emotion Engine design team was a little strange. At the top was a group in Toshiba Kawasaki that was responsible for assembling the entire chip. Below them was our group in Toshiba San Jose that was doing the R5900. Below us was another group in Toshiba Kawasaki that had to deliver macro blocks (like register files) to us.
This led to some confusion about who was supplier and who was customer. Ideally, the top-level group should have been able to tell us what they needed and when, and we should have been able to tell the macro group what we needed and when. But sometimes, when we tried to do that, they would “change hats” and tell us that we didn’t need what we needed. It could be frustrating.
When we were just beginning the layout of the R5900, we needed to know what the global chip strategies were for power distribution and clock distribution. For our part of the chip to drop in smoothly and have the power grid match the rest of the chip, it was important for both groups to be following the same guidelines. And for there not to be serious timing problems at the interfaces, the total latencies in the clock networks had to match very precisely. Clearly this was a chip-level issue and had to be led by the top-level group. But even though I asked and asked, I could never get any answers.
Weeks dragged on with no resolution of this issue. It was starting to seriously affect my team’s ability to progress. I was getting pretty angry, but I couldn’t see what to do.
One day in a video meeting with Kawasaki, with Sony representatives present, someone asked me “So, what are you doing about power and clock distribution?” I nearly lost it. But I knew just enough Japanese to craft a short, polite-form but quite rude, response:
Mada shirimasen. Oshiete kudosai. “(I have) not been informed yet. Please instruct (me).”
There was total dumbfounded silence on the Kawasaki end for 45 seconds. Everyone had understood exactly what I said, and they all knew it was pretty rude, but they couldn’t be sure that I knew how rude it was. I just sat there and looked innocent.
Then the room exploded, with multiple people talking over each other. I couldn’t parse most of it, but I was pretty sure they were trying to verify that I in fact had not been told what the guidelines were, and determine who was responsible for (not) giving them to me.
I got what I needed 2 days later. 🙂
Energy and Time 