Gamers Outlook "When Sony first released the PS3, many people underestimated the power of the console, particularly the processor. In a recent article I stated the cell processor was the PS3's most important feature, and now I'm going to explain why."
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Link is broken. :(
Not so much of a big deal really, IBM has all but dropped the Cell project and Sony does not have the resource to developer it.
IBM have developed two different version of the same chip plus done a couple of die shrinks, that's it really, Sony was not the architects/designers in this partnership, they just helped to fund it.
Sony will most likely run with the Cell till PS4 and then there is no guaranty of it being there even for BC.
Not sure of all this hype really about the Cell, developer are just make use of what they have got. The days of the CPU rule has gone since late 2007, its all about parallel processing on the GPU now.
"The Cell processor allows most of a games physics and graphics to be rendered on its SPE'S so that less data and calculations is loaded onto the RSX; The RSX mostly adds post-processing effects. This (and Blu-Ray) is the reason PS3 exclusives, like uncharted look so technologically advanced, however some games are not being programmed to take advantage of the Cell's unique architecture. Either they are lazy ports, or the programmers are still learning to optimize their code."
False.
The RSX does most of the graphical work. Developers front-load post-processing to the SPEs.
Uncharted 2 looks good because the developers used hand-drawn surfaces rather than procedural surfaces. This allows the GPU to wrap around pre-fabricated textures to objects with less calculations.
The GPU does the basic graphical work. The SPEs are responsible for post-processing effects (camera motion blur, animation physics, sound, etc). It's all in the video that is conveniently posted in the article. The video contradicts the article very nicely.
Intel and Nvidia are competing currently to develop GPCPUs or GPGPUs that will be powerful enough to eliminate the need for discrete graphics processors or discrete CPUs.
Does this article writer believe that Sony and IBM have already achieved this with the Cell? Because the Cell is really not as good at graphical processing as it is made out to be. It is very good at running calculations that have historically been loaded onto the GPUs by developers.
The Cell does a lot of the work that that in general GPUs do, but nothing too graphics heavy because it is designed to run basic calculations at top speeds. Some of the work that in general GPUs do is basic enough for the SPEs to accomplish. This is the silver lining that the Cell provides.
The 360's conventional tri-core set up is not as exotic as the Cell, but at the same time it is not as tedious to work with and was one of the first setups with hyperthreaded cores. The GPU of the 360 is slightly more powerful than the RSX and is forced to handle the basic calculations of a graphics while the Xenon handles the CPU work.
That's why the PS3 is more powerful in raw power than the 360 is. But over time developers on the 360 have taken a page from Naughty Dog's book and are trending towards hand-drawn textures to ease the GPU. The pooled RAM in the 360 is not as fast as the 256 megs of XDRAM in the PS3. This is another reason why the Cell can handle a ton of basic calculations. It does it much faster.
Nevertheless, both consoles display glaring bottlenecks. The PS3 could have used pooled, uniform RAM, both consoles should have had a gig of RAM to work with, but neither company foresaw or even cared that PC games in 2007 would start relying on more RAM to operate.
Sony's decision to use the Cell was clever at the time because Microsoft didn't know about the XDRAM that Sony would be using. MS just assumed that the Cell was a collection of Digital Signal Processors and thought the PS3 was a fail from the get-go.
But the Cell is no longer important. It's tedious to split data work into multiple SPEs. Gabe Newell expressed his hatred of it for good reason. Valve is a small studio so they were upset that Sony was making them learn difficult architecture. Developers are more at risk of layoffs or shutdowns than corporations, so Valve was upset that SCE didn't have developers in mind when they decided to go with the Cell.
Today, hyperthreaded, multi-core CPUs are better than the Cell, so I believe the Cell is no longer good for traditional processing.
This is a terrible article. Seriously. Let me tl;dr it for you:
"It's cool because it's powerful. And.. it does sound stuff? Here'a video about Uncharted 2."
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