What's the point of cell?

[arsenicazure]

Deneidez said:

greenmedic88 said:
AMD 3 core CPUs. Of course no games actually take advantage of that architecture.

The old G5 Macs utilized quad core PPCs on two chips, but again, since those were only available for workstation grade computers, no games really took full advantage of that architecture either.

I don't think anyone is going to argue that the 360 architecture is "harder" to develop for than any other platform. If a developer made that claim, it would be a first.

No it wouldn't be a new claim... Our dear friend Gabe Newell has done it atleast... :)

 

"He recently lambasted both Microsoft and Sony for failing to make life easier on next-gen developers."

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20051126044124/http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=10480&filter=&rp=357

 

However that article wasn't the one I was looking for. I couldn't find that one without waybackmachine. The other article is surely also gone in to bit heaven. Anyway Newell said something like he can live with iOE, but it will make developing a bit harder. Also he added that when you add multiple cores to that it will be even harder and lastly he said that assymmetric platform makes it more or less impossible to make games efficiently. I think he used numbers or something.

Edit:

Found it,

"Technologically, I think every game developer should be terrified of the next generation of processors. Your existing code, you can just throw it away. It's not going to be helpful in creating next generation game titles,"

"Yes, it is different. It is much more difficult now to write code that will have predictable behavior. We have performance problems now in the out-of-order universe because we have programmers who can't  figure out why the changes they made caused the system to behave the way it does."

Source: http://www.edge-online.com/news/quotyour-existing-code-throw-it-awayquot

wasnt half life originally ported for the DC.. if they could manage that then I dont see how the 360's lack of a HDD should be a problem. Its not as big  a problem as dealing with the cell's complex architecture