MikeB on 21 September 2007
@ sieanr
Except the SPEs are dependant on the PPU for instructions. A far better analogy would be an orchestra - the SPEs are the musicians and the PPU is the director.
The Forbes article made a comparison between the PS3 and the Amiga in the most superficial terms; apparently you took it literally.
The Forbes article made a comparison between the PS3 and the Amiga in the most superficial terms; apparently you took it literally.
Yes and no. I would rather compare the PPE to a manager who does do some additional work within a company himself apart from just telling others what to do (like in the real world, telling others what to do isn't very (proccessing) intensive work, compared to what needs to be done). The SPEs in the PS3 are like 7 talented hard working employees, who can work independently once they are told what to do.
The SPE is a self-contained vector processor which acts as an independent processor. So, each SPE can perform multiple operations simultaneously with a single instruction. The DMA device in each SPE handles the movement of data between local memory and the main memory.