| selnor said: 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. |
That L2 cache is not as important as in other architectures, as each SPE can rely on DMA and SPEs communicate between them through a bus. It means having to manage memory access at a very low level, but it can be highly optimized. Some extra effort is also needed on the 360 to avoid L1 cache contention troubles (the two threads of each of the 3 cores share the L1 cache), so in general memory management has been a critical issue in this generation of consoles.
As to the bolded, the trend seems to be the opposite.
In-order processors are simpler and cheaper, and they allow for a greater number of concurrent cores per die. It's not an accident that such a design choice was made by IBM, and the same was done by Intel with Larrabee sharing a lot of design ideas with Cell - I think that's where the GPU/CPU hybrids will go next.
