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greenmedic88 on 18 November 2008
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Bokal said:

NJ5 said:
misteromar mk4 said:
bdbdbd said:
People seem to miss completely one important thing, which is that PS3 was designed for multiple tasks, in which Cell is definately at its best. It can handle multiple tasks at a time, with none to little loss in performance.
Then, Cell is designed for another use than just PS3, so PS3 was a good trojan horse for the Cell to enter the market. The devs would become familiar with programming the Cell and the price of the processor would also drop significantly.

I agree, it was Sony using their gaming division R&D dollars to further themself with a processor which would excel in HD tv's etc. Kind of like how they also forced blu-ray on their playstation customers.

 

So you're saying that not only did they sacrifice/risk the Playstation brand for a disc format, but also for a CPU?

I don't think Sony hates their gaming division that much.

 

Where have you seen them sacrifying/risking anything?

They built an excellent system for a really decent price if you consider all it is able to do.

It might not be the best gaming system this gen (I think it is, but still...), it's definitely an AWESOME multimedia center, again for a really decent price. I challenge you to build a system with the same functions for the same price...



Anyway, the Cell is used in the fastest supercomputer of the world, it will be used into Toshiba's High End TVs, it's used into the PS3 in an awesome way, and it will probably be used again into the PS4. I don't think Sony did anything wrong in chosing the Cell for the PS3.

The main problem of the PS3 today is that sony hasn't been able to produce a 3D engine that would push the PS3 to its limits and that developpers use the very cool Unreal Engine that runs like shit on the PS3 but runs flawlessly on PC and the 360.
I hope Guerrilla will sell the engine from Killzone 2 to other developpers, I hope Insomniac could do the same, I hope Naughty Dog could do the same. But yet, they haven't.

Cost effectiveness was the main problem IMO.

The same games made for the PS3 (with very few exceptions) could have (and do) run just as well, if not better on cheaper hardware.

Selling a system that cost about $840 per unit to produce initially and selling it for $600, just didn't make much sense, even accounting for being able to reduce per unit production costs by half within 15 months.

The current $400 production cost, $400 MSRP two years later doesn't exactly paint a much brighter picture relative to PS3 soft sales.

The only logic in using such an expensive architecture was for the purpose of leaving it on the market for an extended period of time (ie PS1, PS2).

The only problem with that logic is that it runs the assumption that the platform will become profitable soon enough to be able to drop price fast enough to earn a significant market share and ensure the platform remains commercially viable in the future.