PS3 already maxed out? Lair devloper thinks so!

[HappySqurriel]

ssj12 said:

HappySqurriel said:

ssj12 said:
Developers still havent figured out how to use all 6 SPEs at the same time properly; how the hell is it maxed out?

You're assuming that the 6 SPEs can be used at the same time for an extended period of time though ... Many if not most (existing) algorithms that are used in game engines are not well suited to being split into 6 or 7 seperate parts, and even those that are run into load balancing and concurrency issues which are (very) difficult to resolve; even if you resolve those issues you still have the problem of getting data into and out of your CPU and into memory at a rapid rate to take advantage of the CPU which means you suddnly are bottlenecked by your memory bandwith and bus speeds.

The SPEs may never get used to a level to give the PS3 the performance you expect

 The SPEs can be split into doing different tasks. 1 can do audio, 2 can do physics calculations, 1 can do dust particles, etc. 

Actually, they can't ...

An SPE is not a threadable core meaning that it gets its 'work orders' from the main core on what it is supposed to be working on at any given time. This means that when doing animation two SPE may animate the Arms, two can animate the legs, one can animate the head, one can animate the body.

This is great when doing certain things (like animation or working with the scene graph in general) but when you're doing other tasks the SPEs sit there completely inactive doing nothing.

I could be wrong but I suspect that Sony would have been better off having a system with a dedicated physics processor and a single/dual core PowePC processor than the Cell ...