By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Gaming Discussion - games use just 10% of ps3's power + CELL benchmarks

baka on 24 February 2007

Jack said:baka the cell is designed to do DSP work I think it can do some video preprocessing before it is shipped to the GPU that is the plan anyways. Companies are never done with their compilers they are always finding ways to improve things, but at this time they do have one out. IBM would not handle the video game side of the Cell Sony is suppose to do the "compiler". IBM chip designer will talk to developers on how to better use the cell though.
They're really just lightweight processors, a DSP is not entirely dissimilar in that respect. However, a DSP is intended to take an input signal and apply a function, given the desired parameters. The Cell processor's SPU components are capable of running more fully featured programs on data, although everything has to fit in the SPU's local RAM. If an SPU program tries to use the PS3's main RAM while processing, it's going to be waiting a long time (for a processor.) That's not a very good use of the SPUs' processing power. As far as the compiler goes, IBM has indeed been developing their compiler for the Cell for quite some time, necessary due to the unusual architecture of the chip. It's called the Octopiler. Very interesting stuff, as it has to somehow determine what should go to an SPU and send the appropriate code, all at the compilation phase. This isn't work that Sony's going to want to take on by themselves without at least IBM's code as a starting point. Take a look at the following URLs if you have some familiarity with how compilers and processors work: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.index.html In particular, there's a nice discussion at the following URL as to how they intend to parallelize instructions at compiler time: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.simd.html



Around the Network
Sintinel on 24 February 2007

So does it play games too?



It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. -Mark Twain

2004 Lincoln LSV8 - ~$15,000

K&N Cold Air Intake - $300

Handheld ECU Reprogrammer - $400

The look on a ricer's face when they get their ass beat off the line by a Lincoln - Priceless

sieanr on 24 February 2007

reverie said: Pointless discussion. $599 and no games. Come back next year.
But you ignore the AWOSOME of the cell. It compare to Cray supercomputer. I know cause I looked at an article on Cell that is from. 2004 and. Ritten by a SONY fanboy.



Leo-j said: If a dvd for a pc game holds what? Crysis at 3000p or something, why in the world cant a blu-ray disc do the same?

ssj12 said: Player specific decoders are nothing more than specialized GPUs. Gran Turismo is the trust driving simulator of them all. 

"Why do they call it the xbox 360? Because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away" 

baka on 24 February 2007

Well, this thread is about CPU power. CPUs are an area of interest for me, at least, and the Cell has a particularly interesting architecture. It's at least as interesting as the Altivec and SSE SIMD instructions found in the G4 and x86 chips respectively. Certainly it can play games, the Z80 and 6502 played games, but this processor handles several programs executing at the same time, with their own RAM on chip. Even if most of the chips are lightweight compliments to the primary core, it provides good horizontal scalability assuming the code can be parallelized appropriately. That's good for computation at least, how good it will truly be for games (which have typically not been highly threaded in the past) remains to be seen.



Darc Requiem on 24 February 2007

Kwaad said: Darc Requiem said: Any IBM benchmarks for the sell processor do not apply to the PS3. IBM benchmarked the Cell with 8 SPUs. The Cell in the PS3 only has 6 available SPUs. Ok, so let's just take 20% off those benchmarks. That means the PS3 is capable of running at speeds 10x faster than a standard intel... still. *yawn* The processor on the PS3 is awosome. Stop being stupid and attacking stuff like that. These charts and stuff seem kinda useless to me. They have no revelance with the PS3. The Cell is under-used by the games right now. Once multi-threaded games start coming out, they will probially be optimized for the PS3, and then ported to the 360. (why? because the Cell is harder to program for, while the 360 is easier, so program it for the hard, and port to the easy. That way you can kinda optimize for the 360 as well) I hate to break it to you guys. But It's not funny anymore. You guys are a sad lot. Someone says the PS3 is awosome. You say "It's crap." Someone sends a link to how under-used the PS3 is. You say. "The PS3 is crap." Someone sends a link to how powerful the PS3 is. You say "It's crap. It's not that powerful." Your right. It is NOT that powerful compared to a Cray. It's only about 50% faster... Than a CRAY. Maybe the lot of you dont know what a cray is. But they had a computer running a 5Ghz, 17 years ago. Yeah, Back with PCs were running at about 66mhz. And if I'm not mistaken the cray was running on an entirely gold system. Each chip cost more most cars for sale. Oh, yeah. They also live in massive aquariums, with a bubbler to make the water flow move, because the temperature diffrence, wasnt enough to move the water. They had to have the water FLOWING. RAPIDLY. Welcome to a True Supercomputer. (they dont make'em like they used to) I agree. Games use about 5-15% of the power. I also am not sure what % of power games are useing on the RSX. As it's too early to be dumping extreme optimized code out yet.
When will people stop falling for the theoretical specs on chips? I mean did everyone forget about the Emotion Engine? The fact that both the 360 and PS3 use in order execution CPU's greatly reduces each chips real world performance.



Around the Network
washimul on 24 February 2007

sieanr said: reverie said: Pointless discussion. $599 and no games. Come back next year. But you ignore the AWOSOME of the cell. It compare to Cray supercomputer. I know cause I looked at an article on Cell that is from. 2004 and. Ritten by a SONY fanboy.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~samw/projects/cell/EDGE06_abstract.pdf right up there CELL beats the CRAY SUPERCOMPUTER. ps3 conatains CELL which has the 8th spe disabaled . The 7th is kept for error and redundancy handling by some progrmmers. However dont forget that the 8th spe could be enabled by a firmwaire update. SQUARE uses all 7 spes ..........4 of them is kept for just running the white engine . HAVOK 4.5 speeds up physics calculation by a factor of 10 ........ONLY ON THE PS3. it runs on other platforms too but not with efficiency. PARALELLIZATION is non existent..............however i have heard of terms like PARALLEL PROCESSING which refers to concurrent processing as you mentioned. RAPIDMIND and ISUPPLY both confirmed ps3 to be a supercomputer as well. here is what RD had to say:- http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12374 Said RapidMind CEO Ray Depaul, "It's exciting to imagine what will happen when you put a supercomputer-class PlayStation 3 with a great OS into the hands of developers. Developers are eager to take advantage of the Cell BE and the PlayStation 3 without the need to understand the underlying architecture of this complex multi-core processor. The RapidMind platform makes that possible."



sieanr on 24 February 2007

washimul said: sieanr said: reverie said: Pointless discussion. $599 and no games. Come back next year. But you ignore the AWOSOME of the cell. It compare to Cray supercomputer. I know cause I looked at an article on Cell that is from. 2004 and. Ritten by a SONY fanboy. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~samw/projects/cell/EDGE06_abstract.pdf right up there CELL beats the CRAY SUPERCOMPUTER. ps3 conatains CELL which has the 8th spe disabaled . The 7th is kept for error and redundancy handling by some progrmmers. However dont forget that the 8th spe could be enabled by a firmwaire update. SQUARE uses all 7 spes ..........4 of them is kept for just running the white engine . HAVOK 4.5 speeds up physics calculation by a factor of 10 ........ONLY ON THE PS3. it runs on other platforms too but not with efficiency. PARALELLIZATION is non existent..............however i have heard of terms like PARALLEL PROCESSING which refers to concurrent processing as you mentioned. RAPIDMIND and ISUPPLY both confirmed ps3 to be a supercomputer as well. here is what RD had to say:- http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12374 Said RapidMind CEO Ray Depaul, "It's exciting to imagine what will happen when you put a supercomputer-class PlayStation 3 with a great OS into the hands of developers. Developers are eager to take advantage of the Cell BE and the PlayStation 3 without the need to understand the underlying architecture of this complex multi-core processor. The RapidMind platform makes that possible."
You are such a fountain of knowledge. Thank you for showing the superiority of the supercomputer god we mere mortals refer to as PS3. I can know see the light of day - all thanks to you. I now know how meaningless a systems games are, and that all that really matters is the cost of the system. Well, not soo much cost, since you cant put a price on a supercomputer. What is really amazing is how the company that has the man god ken can sell such a powerful supercomputer that outclasses those joke of a computer crays so well for only $600. I guess it's the best thing ever that specs only matter, because SONY doesn't waste their time with s*** things like games. SONY knows whats best for me, so they don't let me play any good games on PS3 by not making any!!! Would the fools at Nintendo do that for you? Of course not, they too stupid!!!



Leo-j said: If a dvd for a pc game holds what? Crysis at 3000p or something, why in the world cant a blu-ray disc do the same?

ssj12 said: Player specific decoders are nothing more than specialized GPUs. Gran Turismo is the trust driving simulator of them all. 

"Why do they call it the xbox 360? Because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away" 

washimul on 24 February 2007

Darc Requiem said: Kwaad said: Darc Requiem said: Any IBM benchmarks for the sell processor do not apply to the PS3. IBM benchmarked the Cell with 8 SPUs. The Cell in the PS3 only has 6 available SPUs. Ok, so let's just take 20% off those benchmarks. That means the PS3 is capable of running at speeds 10x faster than a standard intel... still. *yawn* The processor on the PS3 is awosome. Stop being stupid and attacking stuff like that. These charts and stuff seem kinda useless to me. They have no revelance with the PS3. The Cell is under-used by the games right now. Once multi-threaded games start coming out, they will probially be optimized for the PS3, and then ported to the 360. (why? because the Cell is harder to program for, while the 360 is easier, so program it for the hard, and port to the easy. That way you can kinda optimize for the 360 as well) I hate to break it to you guys. But It's not funny anymore. You guys are a sad lot. Someone says the PS3 is awosome. You say "It's crap." Someone sends a link to how under-used the PS3 is. You say. "The PS3 is crap." Someone sends a link to how powerful the PS3 is. You say "It's crap. It's not that powerful." Your right. It is NOT that powerful compared to a Cray. It's only about 50% faster... Than a CRAY. Maybe the lot of you dont know what a cray is. But they had a computer running a 5Ghz, 17 years ago. Yeah, Back with PCs were running at about 66mhz. And if I'm not mistaken the cray was running on an entirely gold system. Each chip cost more most cars for sale. Oh, yeah. They also live in massive aquariums, with a bubbler to make the water flow move, because the temperature diffrence, wasnt enough to move the water. They had to have the water FLOWING. RAPIDLY. Welcome to a True Supercomputer. (they dont make'em like they used to) I agree. Games use about 5-15% of the power. I also am not sure what % of power games are useing on the RSX. As it's too early to be dumping extreme optimized code out yet. When will people stop falling for the theoretical specs on chips? I mean did everyone forget about the Emotion Engine? The fact that both the 360 and PS3 use in order execution CPU's greatly reduces each chips real world performance.
have you been sleeping all day...............IBM clearly said that the CELL BE in ps3 is the same as the CELLBE which is used by mercury systems as well as by IBM themselves to build the most powerful supercomputer in the world. look kid you havent been reading IBM's official statements regarding CELL.....It is based of a completely new architecture and is fully scalable and flexible. look at the performance sheets each SPE is wayyyyyyyyyy more efficient than pc cores....beaten only by ITANIUM. BUT with proper compilers u could get a 99% performance boost. RAPIDMIND SDK is teh solution to this prob:::



sieanr on 24 February 2007

washamule, I just wish more people were like you It's nice to see you no clime out of rock recently and no blueGL is powered by CELL BROADBAND ENGINE When will foolish masses see light at end of tunnel known as SONY?



Leo-j said: If a dvd for a pc game holds what? Crysis at 3000p or something, why in the world cant a blu-ray disc do the same?

ssj12 said: Player specific decoders are nothing more than specialized GPUs. Gran Turismo is the trust driving simulator of them all. 

"Why do they call it the xbox 360? Because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away" 

Kwaad on 24 February 2007

sieanr said: washamule, I just wish more people were like you It's nice to see you no clime out of rock recently and no blueGL is powered by CELL BROADBAND ENGINE When will foolish masses see light at end of tunnel known as SONY?
Your as dumb as ever. PS:You should be banned for your 1,363,993 byte signature. PS: Moderators should be changed because of sieanr's 1,363,993 byte signature that's been there for a week.



PSN ID: Kwaad


I fly this flag in victory!