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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Why did Sony use the Cell processor in the PS3?

There were many other processors that would have been cheaper for them to use and wouldn't have caused developers headaches and many delayed games.  So why did they go with such a processor when they knew the problems it was going to cause?  I seem to remember Ken Kutaragi dismissing the concerns that the Cell would create problems for developers by saying they would simply have to start from scratch and learn a new way to program games.  It really struck me as him being arrogant at the time and I wondered if he cared at all for the third parties which made the system the success it was in the first place.

It seems to me that Sony was just using their Playstation brand to push other technologies that weren't needed in a gaming console and considered many Playstation fans as mindless drones that would buy any console the company released with the Playstation logo.  Another example besides the Cell is Blu-Ray, was it really required in a next generation gaming console like Sony told everyone?  I can't help but wonder what the system would have been like with a normal dvd drive, would the games have been horribly different?  Would a game like Resistance: Fall of Man which was their showcase title been not possible on a dvd9 disc?

Anyways I guess I should simply accept the fact that third parties will suffer because of the PS3 and hope that the fallout isn't enough to hurt multi-platform games that are also on the 360.  As long as the majority of developers release their games as scheduled on the 360 and those delayed because of the PS3 don't pull the 360 versions back as well I should be happy and remember that things could be much worse.



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How about you stop saying PS3 owners are drones? I'm sure 360 owners are all rocket scientists.

Edit: PGR4 already had to be limited because of being on a DVD, the difference between PS3 games and 360 games will only grow with time as more game developers make use of all that extra space on the Blu Ray. Just look at the Stranglehold collector's Edition as another example, the 360 version is crap, the PS3 version comes with the Blu Ray movie on the game disc.

Even if they don't actually use the space provided, they could add cool features such as this that add something to the game.



Thanks to Blacksaber for the sig!

I'm not sure that the issue is so much the Cell, but that the developers have to figure out to program for one specialized processor and then another.....and if its a wii/360/PS3 triple play, all three.

The "drones" comment makes me think that you are a moron, I mean, at least the PS3 was designed for technophiles with a diverse set of interests, besides just playing games. 



ckmlb said:
How about you stop saying PS3 owners are drones? I'm sure 360 owners are all rocket scientists.

Well Sony saying something like 5 million Playstation fans will buy the Playstation 3 even if it didn't have any games made me immediately think of mindless drones at the time.  If say Nintendo or Microsoft had said that 5 million of their fans will buy their next gaming console even if it didn't have any games released with it wouldn't you think the same thing?



Do you think that PS3 owners are going to be happy that all 3rd party games are going to be limited by the 360s use of DVD9 and lack of HDD as standard?



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Legend11 said:
ckmlb said:
How about you stop saying PS3 owners are drones? I'm sure 360 owners are all rocket scientists.

Well Sony saying something like 5 million people will buy the Playstation 3 even if it didn't have any games made me immediately think of mindless drones at the time.  If say Nintendo or Microsoft had said that 5 million people will buy their next gaming console even if it didn't have any games wouldn't you think the same thing?

No I wouldn't. Sony was the leadder for two generations, that's why they thought they could sell on brand alone. If MS or Nintendo had been in the same position they would have believed the same thing. No need to insult PS3 owners or fans. This is a warning.

 



Thanks to Blacksaber for the sig!

ckmlb said:
Legend11 said:
ckmlb said:
How about you stop saying PS3 owners are drones? I'm sure 360 owners are all rocket scientists.

Well Sony saying something like 5 million people will buy the Playstation 3 even if it didn't have any games made me immediately think of mindless drones at the time.  If say Nintendo or Microsoft had said that 5 million people will buy their next gaming console even if it didn't have any games wouldn't you think the same thing?

No I wouldn't. Sony was the leadder for two generations, that's why they thought they could sell on brand alone. If MS or Nintendo had been in the same position they would have believed the same thing. No need to insult PS3 owners or fans. This is a warning.

 


Show me where I'm insulting Playstation 3 fans.  I simply stated that I believed at the time that Sony thought of some of them as mindless drones.  If you feel they didn't consider those 5 million customers as that then so be it but it doesn't change the fact that others can read their statements and claims a different way.



I don't think Legend is insulting anyone by himself, he pretty much said that Sony was so arrogant that they thought their fans would buy anything with the PS brand, no matter if it had nothing or if it had everything.

On topic, this isn't Cell's fault, Cell is a pretty cool piece of engineering, but its fault of the top people at Sony and their arrogance (as I stated above), they were on the top and they thought nobody could stop them. It happened the same with Nintendo and it's 64.

PS: This is gonna burn do you know?  



I'm actually glad that Playstation fans proved Sony wrong and that they have to work for the hearts and minds of gamers.



Way back in about 2000 there were a lot of people who were looking at the amazing processing power that inexpensive DSPs had. I can't remember the name of the processor but Motorola had an 8MHz asmetric 3 core processor based on the Motorola 68000 (2 cores were super scalar RISC processors and one regular Motorola 68000 core) that could unencode MP3s; this sounds like a simple task but you required a 200MHz+ Pentium 2 processor to perform the same task.

I imagine Sony choose the Cell because they wanted to create a bleeding edge DSP like processor under the belief that the processing power gains were universal and easily accessable; the problem is that a DSPs are designed for a very specific task (digital signal processing) and it isn't easy to take advantage of the additional processing power and many algorithms run dramatically slower on DSPs.

 

Think of it this way ... If you have a modern GPU in your PC the odds are pretty good that its floating point performance is dramatically higher than that of your CPU. In terms of Floating Point Performance per clock cycle your GPU is probably 100 times as powerful as your CPU; this is because your GPU has many parallel processing elements for pixel/vertex shading which enable it to produce the advanced materials you see on objects at high resolutions in realtime. It is theoritically possible that Microsoft could produce MS Office to run on top of your GPU rather than your CPU but it would run slower and become a development nightmare.