New TV to use the CELL ~

[DarkNight_DS]

HappySqurriel said:

DarkNight_DS said:

HappySqurriel said:

Back in the day, I remember reading an interview with someone from IBM who (basically) stated that they were not focused on giving the Cell processor the best performance for games because Sony wanted the Cell processor to be used in everything from MP3 players to their top of the line TVs ... To a certain extent, this was part of the reason there was the early (moronic) talk from Sony about being able to take advantage of multiple Cell processors from various devices to boost ingame performance.

For me, the only surprise of this is that it has taken so long to see more devices taking advantage of the Cell processor.

 

A general purpose embbeded X86 processor makes way more sense in a TV or set top box. Having something that's so hard to program makes no sense at all. Toshiba and Sony never thought it all through properly. They believed so much that the PS3 would rule them all that they had no back up plan.

Yes and no ...

The X86 has always been a very shitty architecture and its primary advantage was that it was inexpensive when initially released, and had the most software made for it because it was the most popular architecture on the market. The areas where the x86 is currently disadvantaged is that it is expensive for the performance you get, and is not very energy efficient ... Which are the reasons why the x86 has never broken out of the PC market, and why most devices (PDAs, Cellphones, MP3 players, calculators, etc) use drastically different architectures.

Now, it probably would have made sense for them to target a much simpler architecture though ...

You can get a dual core CPU from intel or AMD which would be more then capable of handling the streams as long as you included a DSP (which is what this new cell cpu has).  A DSP added to an X86 chip will use less power, cost less to make and allow easier options to software programmers then the Cell.  The Cell is still VERY power hungry. 

Nobody programs Cell instructions except for Sony programmers and it's third parties.  Those guys don't write code for TV appliances.  Nor are there enough of those guys who could.  It's just a viscious cycle. 

Also feel free to call the X86 a shitty architecture all you want.  It's beaten all of the supposed good ones in price, performance and power usage etc as well as adoption over the years.  x86 morphs into whatever it needs to be.