Ubisoft Dev: PS3 Can't Handle AI as well as the 360

[MikeB]

@ thermal7

What do you base this on? Do you know the developers? Do they have a history of incompetence? How do you know the Cell processor is "far more powerful than the XBox 360's Xenon processor for calculating AI"?

I have been following Cell development for many years now. I have been to IBM presentations and someone I know well has written many in-depth articles on the Cell processor.

I know far less about the Xenon, but IBM technical specialists made it clear to me the Cell as used by the PS3 is more than twice as powerful as compared to the Xenon. Note that IBM designed both chips.

The Cell provides a far more interesting design IMO (and it should considering there has been far more R&D invested in the Cell than for the Xenon). It's not just an ordinary multi-core CPU, it's more like having many independently operating full co-processors, each with their own super fast local memory. IMO the design provides somewhat an Amiga-like philosophy, like the Amiga custom chips drew the workload off the CPU (working almost independently from the CPU), the SPEs take the workload off the PPE.

Note that the Amiga game developers needed some time to properly adapt to the Amiga custom chips.When exclusive Amiga games started to beome far more impressive than mutli-platform games eventually multi-platform games started to improve considerably as well utilizing the custom chips much better.