>invest in billions for R&D >IBM hypes it so much >"wow it's gonna be so powerful everyone's gonna shit in their pants" >"now I will put two of these into Playstation 3 that will do both CPU and GPU tasks" >sony developers try to come up with a "common" game engine to be used by all PS3 developers >sane people warn them about Cell's insufficient power, the idea is ditched immediately >shitty documentation about the CPU, nobody can write programs on it >meanwhile extremely low yields and very high power usage, impossible to put 2 cells in one PS3, manufacturing costs increase rapidly >contact NVIDIA as a last resort, increasing the console's prices like $150 per unit >couldn't break-even until 2013
>then microsoft just comes out of nowhere, with literally no investment into R&D, asks IBM "hey u got something for our new XBOX 360?" >"sure take the main part of Cell with 3 cores 6 threads" >gaymen run better
Is Sony the most cucked company in the world? Would they ever invest into any R&D anymore?
Don't forget packing Blu-Ray drives into the PS3 at a loss and then developing 100-GB Blu-Ray discs right before 4K streaming took off in popularity JUST
Adam Hernandez
>>"now I will put two of these into Playstation 3 that will do both CPU and GPU tasks" >>stupid people stuck in the past can't fathom how it would work fix'd. The SPUs on Cell are pretty much exactly how a modern GPU works (but not a GPU in 2005) It was literally the future and a great idea. Shortsighted idiots couldn't work that out and REEEEEed until an nVidia GPU was added.
>shitty documentation about the CPU, nobody can write programs on it Extremely wrong... Cell documentation is public... psdevwiki.com/ps3/Cell_Programming_IBM
Dylan Clark
You DO realize the Cellin the PS3 is more powerful in raw performance than it's sister chip in the Xbox 360? The only reason Xbox 360 often had better performance was because the it used unified memory instead of hard locking 256/256 for the CPU and GPU each.
This.
I remember how developers laughed (for both the PS3 and Xbox 360) that multicores and multithreaded games will NEVER take off back in 2006, just because they where too dumb themselves to utilise it all. Look where we are now, it's the de facto now.
They later removed the hard locking with firmwares, allowing games like Last of Us for PS3.
Bentley Campbell
>Shortsighted idiots couldn't work that out and REEEEEed until an nVidia GPU was added.
No, you can't compare 7 SPU cores with hundreds of GPU cores. Both don't have branch prediction, the only advantage of SPU was the transfer rate between the main CPU. It was simply not feasible to slam 2 Cells into one PS3, one of them was already enough to burn your house down, hence YLOD issues. Also manufacturing Cell turned out to be a costly operation due to low yields. Yes, gamedevs were shit at that time due to inexperience in multicore programming. However, Cell's problem is simply not about multicore programming. You had to divide tasks and distribute them into SPUs, each of them being 256KB at most, people just couldn't find a suitable scenario until very late times of PS3. They just used SPUs to process audio, and sometimes post processing. Basically most of the engines worked on single core. It was just too difficult to get things work properly, especially lack of documentation in the early ages was a mess.
Jeremiah Brown
It would have been nice to see a PS3 with 2 Cells and no Nvidia GPU. Microsoft spooked Sony.
Jonathan Parker
youtube.com/watch?v=TIm2pMXS5Q4 I really hope this fag publishes his work. PS3 lunix was always gimped because everything had to be rendered on the already crappy ppc64 cpu core.
>Would they ever invest into any R&D anymore? Nah now they just go with whatever amd puts out
Gabriel Perez
This story you wrote is completely inaccurate, it's so bad I wish you never post again. Do some research before posting. (sage)
Charles Young
>crappy ppc64 cpu The problem was on the software side not the CPU side.
Alexander Flores
>I really hope this fag publishes his work. There is no need, there already is GPU acceleration if you use older firmware and all those PS3s are now software jailbreakable allowing for easy downgrades. Ironic calling others fags.
Lucas Roberts
Must be shitty for new devs >hey here's this awesome new architecture >but it's kinda weird >what's documentation? >just figure it out lol Although to be fair, I'd love to fuck around with it and try to make a game engine that runs efficiently on such hardware. Multicore programming is a bitch but when it works it's so satisfying. Even more when you get idling on both CPU and GPU (or in the case of the Cell all the SPUs) down to a minimum. Total optimization fun time.
Landon Hernandez
The ppc64 core had Pentium 4-grade IPC. You had to make use of the SPE's to get anything resembling high performance from CELL.
>Must be shitty for new devs But it's pretty familiar for old ones. The PS3 is an evolution of the PS2. 1 big-endian main processor on both. 2 vector units for the PS2 and 6 (usable, 8 in total) on the PS3. And a small amount of very fast memory.
>because everything had to be rendered on the already crappy ppc64 cpu core Meanwhile this is the only core that most multi-plats used.
Jonathan Johnson
>The ppc64 core had Pentium 4-grade IPC. No, even POWER4 had better IPC than NetBurst. The Cell PPU was far from crappy at the time. >You had to make use of the SPE's to get anything resembling high performance from CELL. That was kind of the point, you know. It was built to utilize the SPEs. But this is irrelevant to the PPU.
I was developing for the PowerISA before the PS3 was even out.
Jaxon Turner
t. sony employee
Thomas Cox
so youre just suffering confirmation bias
Christian Howard
Doubtful, I'm not just using and developing for the PowerISA.
Justin Collins
/src/ for the img?
Eli Wilson
It broke the petraflop barrier tard. The only issue is that developers are so bad that they can't develop for anything other than x86
Jackson Jackson
Essentially this. The dev tools were shit for the PS3, but MS already had a huge development environment to throw at game devs when the XBox came out and software devs being lazy as fuck, they took the easy road.
Jeremiah Thompson
So what use does this have in current year? If I buy a PS3 now is there any use to it other than gaymen?
Christian Bailey
...
William Martin
Xbox releasing as soon as it did really crash Sony's plans, mostly with the backwards compatibility. The PS2 BC was supposed to be entirely in software instead of including EE+GS into the console, but since Toshiba couldn't make the GPU in time they had to go with last gen Nvidia that couldn't emulate the GS. It also didn't help that at that point they were no longer manufacturing standalone GS.
Joseph Miller
>shitty documentation about the CPU More like it was a shitty single core+HT POWER CPU with _no Altivec_, so it performed like burning dog shit.
Zachary Morales
Buy ones with older firmwares to get a cheap supercompooter
Jose Brown
imagine if microsoft had taken the same approach >a p4 netburst with hyperthreading without SSE
Jace Gray
You can downgrade all fats and ~50% of the slims through custom firmware even if you're on the latest official firmware.
yeah it only took until a handful of months until the ps4 came out
Christian Cruz
To be fair the blu ray drive was a good addition
Jaxon Sanchez
>then microsoft just comes out of nowhere, with literally no investment into R&D yeah that's wrong though nvidia teamed up with sony and put what they learned into the 8000 series ati did the same with microsoft and put what they learned into the HD 2000 series
it is very interesting to watch, Cerny talks about the history of the hardware and how and why they settled on the PS4 being what it is.
Jacob Moore
Really nice to see a vaio there
John Ortiz
The problem was DRM. You couldn't utilize the other cores without signing your code.
Thomas Brooks
Don't forget the proprietary SD card for PSP. Ruined that system for a lot of people.
Logan Ward
there were plenty of MicroSD to Memory Stick Pro Duo adapters on the market, some were even dual MicroSD.
Carson Ramirez
that demo was such a huge fucking tease
Juan Sanchez
this and FF13 (you know why) are major reasons why i never ended up getting a ps3
Carson Howard
>FF13 (you know why) for the tiddies I pressume
Nathaniel Carter
boy does he ramble a lot without going anywhere.
I see the newer consoles as the console creators sort of surrendering to PC/mobile innovations. Of course the APU thing made it cheaper as well, but they gave up on their wonky designs and just went with AMD and nvidia.
Nicholas Scott
they took way to long to release it, and it's generally regarded to be a disappointment i had a ff13 wallpaper in fucking 2004
Lincoln Anderson
First, Cell was a collaboration. Second, Cell was a huge success and is still used, it's not PS3 specific.
Alexander Richardson
imo switching from ppc to x64 was actually even worse idea as it completely removed last shred of backwards compatibility
Kevin Flores
then how did Microsoft do it with 360 titles on the Xbox One, which was also a PPC to x86 switch???
Ryan Cox
False on both accounts. Toshiba is just the dumb fabbers, sony just the contract makers, and IBM is the real creator. Cell is practically irrelevant today.
James Young
The main problem with the PS3's CellBE was it only used a single POWER control core for the remaining 6+1 SPEs. Developers had to run critical threads on the main core as well as scheduling work for the other 6 active units. This lead to the master core (the only real CPU in the whole unit) constantly being overloaded with the SPEs constantly waiting for commands and data. Let's not even talk about Sony's poor choice of RAM and awful storage connectivity.
Compared to Microsoft's 3-core-no-SPE decision, the PS3 had more theoretical throughput but it was constantly underutilized because of the nature of games compared to the application specific code it was actually designed for. Add to the mix Sony went with a gimped and feature deprived variant of a low end version of a GTX7600 and you have what became a monumental failure (from a technical standpoint) against the 360.
Daniel Fisher
Back-compat is just a function of time and resources. The original xbox was a 700Mhz pentium-III based celeron with some altered MMX registers, yet they were able to port games to the 360.
Aaron Clark
that last min nvidia addition was a real trainwreck.
Jaxon Sullivan
i was referring to 360 games running on the Xbox One.
Jack Parker
>tfw no comfy 3 core 6 thread cpu
Asher Jenkins
And I was pointing out how the complaint of backwards compatibility is moronic.
Xbox > X360 = x86 to PPC X360 > X1 = PPC to x86
It's no different in my book. Microsoft likely has a lot of retained documentation about the process.
Jacob Fisher
I'm fairly certain that there is a linux kernel+bootloader for the 360.
Jayden Morgan
>False on both accounts. >agrees that it's a collaboration >uses words like practically Kek, is this bait?
Josiah Russell
>cheap supercompooter are they "supercomputers" by todays standards?
Austin Edwards
they were called "supercomputers" when some dumbasses filled a whole room full of them
Jaxson Baker
It's slightly faster than a base PS4 in terms of peak compute.
>Kek No substantive argument. As expected from a clueless underage.
Parker Perez
>No substantive argument. See You didn't provide a valid counter argument in the first place.
1) It was a collaboration and you agreed with that, even brought out the companies. 2) Cell was used and developed for years after the PS3, used in varey of high end machines. As you said, only "practically".
