| HappySqurriel said: It all depends on how they change the Cell to make the CPU for the PS4 ... In the early days of the Cell processor it was assumed that the PS3 wouldn't have a GPU and would have multiple Cell Processors instead; I can't be certain, but I suspect that many of the design decisions early on would have been focused on this and I wouldn't be surprised to see that you could use the Cell processor as a "Single Core" in a multi-core processor. Beyond that, if you have at least one Power Processor Core and at least 6 SPEs it should be fairly easy to add additional cores to the processor and maintain backwards compatibility; hypothetically speaking, Sony could do something drastic like include hundreds of Stream Processors with how well suited they are for physics calculations. |
Only CELL like architecture without GPU sounds nice as a concept. But when you think about it a bit better there will be more problems with that one. For example what happens to graphical api? You would have to make it all by yourself or someone would have to make whole new api. What would happen to shaders? & so on... You would have to do much more work with it and because games are getting enourmous today it might be too much for some devs. Also you know how fast today GPU:s are? And how unbeatable they are when it comes to 3D graphics(raster), thats mainly because they are made only for that purpose.
I wonder can CELL even beat RSX rendering power? (If you have some articles about this one, I would be highly interested in those.)
