PS4 Leaked Specs: (Denied by Sony)

[jetrii]

HappySqurriel said:

jetrii said:

ssj12 said:

scottie said:
Lol, the rumour contradicts itself with these two statements

"Sony will be cutting down manufacturing costs for this model by basing it off the existing PS3 technology."

"Also, it’s also said that Sony will be developing a new PlayStation that will be easier to write games for"

 

A CELL v2 would be easier to code since it would be a very similar processor

Actually, it would be harder because now they have to find a way to take linear algorithms and make it scale to 20+ SPEs instead of just 7. However, if IBM makes the improvements to the Cell that they spoke about, a few technical challenges will become much easier to work around. I guess in the end it would break even to be as difficult as it is now.

 

It really depends on the direction they choose to go with on a "Cell V2" ...

Hypothetically speaking, Sony could choose to produce a processor with 3 to 8 Power Processing Elements and keep the same 8 SPEs just for backwards compatibility, and the end result would be (somewhat) similar to most other multi-core processors and could be much easier to develop for.

The problem with that design is that the SPEs would be neglected since the PPEs are much easier to develop for and it would be like programming 2 architectures because the SPEs and PPEs have a few differences. I think that would actually complicate things a lot. The job of the PPE is to manage and distribute tasks to the SPEs and handle a few tasks which requires data from all SPEs. An equal number of PPEs and SPEs would break that philosphy and require major changes to their existing codebase.