LordTheNightKnight said:
MikeB said:
@ HappySquirrel
One of the main reasons so many companies have been moving towards IBM for their embedded solutions is because IBM has designed their processors in a modular way so that they can be highly customized.
That's not the case with regard to the Broadway chip. The PS3 Cell is also basically as for some other products, other than one SPE being disabled for the PS3. Of course a lot R&D went into the Cell, unlike for the Broadway chip, but it's in Sony's interest to see as much mass production of the PS3 Cell as possible (like used for servers and super computers, this to trigger production cost reductions).
If Nintendo doubled the on chip cache on the Broadway processor
64 KB L1 cache (32 KB instruction cache, 32 KB data cache) and 256 KB L2 cache.
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Although that was because that was a lot of cache in the 6th gen. The Xbox's CPU had just 128KB of L2 cache, and the Cell has 512KB all the processor's shared. The 360 has 1MB for all the cores.
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The Cell does not work like that. The PPE has 32 KB L1 instruction cache, 32 KB L1 data cache and 512 KB L2 cache, each SPE has its own little cache and 256 KB SRAM, which is as fast as cache but isn't cache as it's far more flexible, it's dedicated system memory, each SPE is like a seperate system on a chip.
