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selnor on 15 June 2009
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WereKitten said:
selnor said:

Multithread has been around for 20 years, and SPE's that are on Cell are not the first time PC coders have seen and tested these. The 90's had many manufacturers research this.

But it's intersting to point out to everyone as well, PS2 actually had a better CPU on the whole than Xbox 1. And the gap between Cell and Xenon is actually closer than the gap between PS2 and Xbox 1 CPU's. That is something that will shock many people.

You have to remember he does state that with time and effective programming developers can come up with using the SPU's. But at the end of the day it still comes back to spreading 512kb L2 Cache between 6 SPE's and 1PPE. As well as having to deal with each instruction in order rather than like a PC CPU which can deal with any code it needs to.

Their is actually very little speculation in the article. And when he does he tells you.

Research is one thing, but day-to-day coding on PCs is an entirely different one. The Unreal Engine 3, the multithread version of Source are stuff of about 2003-2004. And to this day Valve doesn't seem keen on anything but symmetric multiprocessing.

As to the bolded part: the author might have said "with time" in 2006, but in 2009 most of that time has come and gone yet :)

Talking about what the L2 cache or in-order processors could imply for the coding effort is all fine and dandy speculation before you start, but the proof is in the pudding. Good developers came to terms with symmetric multiprocessing and hyperthreading on the 360 and came to terms with the PPE+SPEs multiprocessing on the PS3. All those CPUs being in-order doesn't keep them from delivering better and better results each time, it seems.

I agree. He even stated that good devs would work around the small cache.

No denying though if both ps3 and 360 had out of order processors, they would be much more efficient and faster. As the quote in his article from Romaro states.

Maybe next gen we will see OOO Processors.