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Groucho on 21 November 2008
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Deneidez said:
MikeB said:

@ Deneidez

I still can hardly imagine this email came straight from Microsoft, it's so incredibly misinformative it's mind boggling...

Just like with the PS2's Emotion Engine, with its missing L2 cache, the Cell is designed for a type of game programming that accounts for a minor percentage of processing time.


Sony's CPU is ideal for an environment where 12.5% of the work is general-purpose computing and 87.5% of the work is DSP calculations.


"Bottom line: SPUs are like most CPUs"

"Rule 1: The SPU is not a co-processor!"

"The ultimate goal: Get everything on the SPUs."

"Complex systems can go on the SPUs- Not just streaming systems -
Used for any kind of task"

http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/0208/files/insomniac_spu_programming_gdc08.ppt

Wah? I haven't said anything about that email. Some of it is obvious bull and other part I am not sure.

Yeah, SPUs are like cores...

and yes they are not co-processors.

That ultimate goal will never happen unless you have very simple program(I am sure Groucho can agree this one too).

And for the last one, show me game that uses SPUs for AI(Not scripted of course).

Anyway very interesting slides even though I don't have OpenOffice right now I was able to check it with google. And maybe your msg was for selnor? :)

selnor said:
What I am posting is from a M$ e-mail from their own comparitive analysis of the entire performance of PS3 vs 360. I will add if you understnd it (as most gaming PC enthusiasts will) this info certainly doesnt lie and is accurate. But take it how you will.

No offense, Deneidez, but in another thread, you claimed you didn't know what "skinning" was... you thought it might have something to do with texturing, in a response to one of my posts.

Skinning is the process of weighing the vertices of a skinned mesh to its animated skeletal bones, in computer animation.  You could consider each vertex in an animated character to be "attached" to one (or more) elements of its animated skeleton (a set of transforms, each of which represents a "bone" of the character's body, although its an oriented "point", not a "line segment").  Each vertex in the mesh has "bone weights" associated with it, so that, when the skeletal structure moves, the vertex moves along with them, with an initial reference offset to each bone, and a value to determine how "attached" that vertex is to each bone's transform.

Skinning, is something that a SPU would be exceptionally good at (or 6 of them).  Its also something that is usually available as a GPU operation, although your GPU will be happier if it doesn't have to do this (large) chunk of work.

 

That may seem off topic to some.  I think that its not, so much.  I hope you can understand that... I'm trying to educate, but wading through spin posts and dissecting them is a little... tiresome.  Perhaps you learned a little something about the SPU, and computer animation from this post... and perhaps you have another reason to step back and take a closer look at the article that MikeB find so laughable.