NJ5 said:
The Cell in its PS3 incarnation is a great processor for some applications, especially the ones which have the following characteristics:
1- not hard to distribute to a large number of cores (PS3's Cell has 7 cores)
2- intensive number-crunching without the need double-precision arithmetic (it's great for half or single precision arithmetic, but only gets around 1 GFLOP/s per core in double-precision which isn't great for a 3.2 GHz CPU)
3- each thread doesn't need to access tremendous amount of data (each core has a small amount of fast memory and other data needs to be transferred manually from memory)
If your application fulfills most of that, the Cell will give you great performance AND programming ease. Otherwise, performance, ease of programming or both will suffer.
Unfortunately, game engines don't fulfill the first attribute, and they only partly fulfill the second and third. This means it's hard to get performance out of the Cell on games, and much harder to tap the full power it has. It's already hard to fully tap a dual-core processor, it's much harder to tap 7 cores.
You don't have to take it from me though. Killzone 2's developers made a diagram which shows how much of the Cell they're tapping after years of engine development:
Notice that they're only using 5 of the 7 available cores, and even then not completely with lots of wasted CPU power (blank areas).
I'm not a games programmer, but based on the facts above and the opinions I've read from games programmers, I don't think the Cell was a very good choice for the PS3. A simpler processor would have been better given the complexity of making games.
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So that kinda proves that Killzone 2 can be handled by Xbox 360 as well, since only 5 processors are utilized and the last 2 processors are mostly idle, besides 360 has 3 general cores, each of which is easier to program for and utilize. It is also a much cheaper and more efficient solution.
