Well, there are good points like usage of SPUs as CELL in PS3 do not use all of them. Other than that it theoretically BS that has very little to do in real cases.
I just re-read what he said and the only good-ish points I see involve the GPU. The rest are nonsense.
The stuff about the OS's memory footprint on these machines is just plain silly as even if we had a game machine with a 96 meg kernel as those pages not in use would be swaped out. Completely rediculous! It's almost a certainty most of that consists of user space apps, maybe I just haven't been paying attention for awhile, but I don't think I can build a linux kernel that big even if I compile every possible module into the stupid thing. And seeing as both systems run the same flavors of the same kernel anyways (unless MS finally ported some stripped down version of NT to Power with the new NXE patch thing or whatever its called out of embarrasement).
The stuff about the SPEs being floating point cores (someone should tell him that most DSPs are not floating point friendly, btw) is nonsense. The fact that one is reserved for the OS should say something about that. The biggest problem is branching, and that's not THAT big of a problem, basically they just start loose a bit of there performance edge over normal cores. And you'd be surprised how many tricks there are to avoid branching. Also the SPEs are quite good at searching trees believe it or not. Anyways alot of those integer ops you are going to want to convert to bit-perumtations/ops. Although, I will admit I initially thought the same before I started to get decent experience coding on the damn thing.
Yes, daughter die is 'made' for AA, but you can also use it for other stuff too. Anyway you are right. Its not a some kind of super special ram and I admit I was wrong. Its seems to exists for postprocessing pixels etc.
I actually wasn't referring to you, but someone in the middle of this thread (If I had known YOU had said something to that effect I would have been way more condescending... I kid, I kid).
Anyways my thinking has evolved on this daughter die :P (Yes, I am a terrible hippocrite)
Initially I figured this thing was just a simple ASIC hardwired with a bunch of ALUs surrounding the DRAM cells connected to do fast AA. All of these "reviews" (which are usually just lame attempts to parrot back what manufacterer X said about the new thing they are selling) seemed to imply this by stating 4xAA was "free". Then I came across this..
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=4624
So now I have a new theory. In order to make the GPU fit into the unified shader model without loosing performance, they moved most of the things that would have stood the most to loose performance-wise in the switchoff to the unified shader model eg. most of the algorithms that use pixel shaders off onto the daughter die. I bet there is more logic on this thing than disclosed and game devs are using it as basically a pixel shader core. That's the only explanation I can thing of for all these xbox games not having AA. You realize the irony of this don't you
Of course this is all just speculation as I've never actually coded on the 360. For some reason it lack linux support at the moment... hmmm.
(Heh, hopefully you weren't referring to me as emotionally attached to any of console as I am more like PC purist/elitist. If I am wrong about something just correct me, I try to remember it next time. :) )
No, I was refering to the usual suspects, selnor, the captain kirk guy, his sidekick the anime girl with an ak, crazzyguy or something, your arch-nemesis MikeB, the guys whose names end in J, etc.
I am pretty much a turned based strategy gamer at heart so, yeah. Ok, that's not entirely true I find myself going back to star control 2/(Urquan Masters) rather frequently.
PS. Its good that your back. I was getting tired with MikeBs propaganda posts. Hopefully youre still around when I try to make something for PS3 as I am sure that you might be able to help me with it, if I have probs. ;)
Heh, don't lump me in with MikeB. I was an AtariST guy, if you think xbox versus ps wars are bad, the Amiga versus ST wars were worse since it was more like a civil war.
(However it seems that with current prices and pricecuts it will take a long time before I own one.)
Yeah, I think sony was planning on having the 45nm cell by now from the old road map here:
http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/hpc/roadrun...7%20(LAUR).pdf
But here's the newest roadmap leaked...
http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/9205/roadmap1kh0.png
Notice how the pushed back date coincides with when the rumored pricecuts will take effect.
Also notice how the prototype cell2 will be done around when sony will probably start on the ps4.
PS. I'm usually lurking, just to busy to post.
