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

[omgwtfbbq]

MikeB said:
@ 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.

Nowhere in your post have you mentioned how this is good for AI? You seem to be unable to comprehend the idea that not all tasks are equal. Have you noticed how much better a GPU is than a CPU for graphics processing? So why don't we run windows on our GPU?

Get off the Cell hype train and realise that just because the Cell is "more than twice as powerful as the xenon" that it is suddenly etter at everything. The Cell processor is quite simply not designed to handle AI. No amount of hype or development effort will fix this. You can make good AI for the Cell, but the Xenon will always have more potential.