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alephnull on 17 June 2009
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Squilliam said:
alephnull said:

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the next xbox used the son of cell and the ps4 used something else depending on how many egos at Sony were bruised by the intrigue at IBM this gen. That would be a master stroke by MS if they pulled that off as they'd have the real (non-rushed cell) and will have got their competator to pay for it.

The cell is designed at every level to take some pressure off of the FSB and it that sense the next xbox CPU has to follow in its footsteps if it is going to be increasing the number of cores (assuming it retains a MIMD model). Maybe they will copy the Parallax Propeller :P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_Propeller

There are all manner of esoteric arichitectures out there that are not well known outside of the HPC community which I think are going to be making a comeback of weird things like hypercube routing networks now that the rapid advances in fabrication of the 90s are over. Look up the CM-2 for a really radical architecture.

I would be very surprised if they slapped in an x86 desktop cpu. Those things have so much architectural baggage that their only real advantage is that they run all they stuff already made for them. This is one of the reasons that consoles with cheap 3 year old hardware can quasi-compete with PC gamming rigs.

Interesting stuff, I did hear they were going to use a rather unique processor for the next Xbox. So perhaps theres some truth in this? Their work with developers is probably second to none and they seem to actually trust Microsofts tools to get the job done.

@Procrastinato: I would say that Microsoft would probably invest more of their transistor/die budget towards the GPU than the CPU because not only do people tend to notice visual improvements a lot more but also it works hand in hand with their development of Directx 11+ and Directx compute. So we could probably expect an architecture which goes quite beyond whatever the current standard for directx development is and that leans on the GPU for a lot of its parrellel processing.

If they can make the software development enviroment efficient enough im sure they could plonk a pretty unique architecture down on the developers plates and they'll eat it up.

Bah, they could take the same sdk Sony uses right now call it cell.net or cell# and tomorrow you'd have a hoard of developers led by the CEO of valve proclaiming it to be the pinnacle of human achievement. My guess is that you weren't around for the early days of DirectX or visual studio or MFC or OLE.

I've heard this a couple of times 'The best tool for PS3 development is an Xbox 360 development kit!'

That's just silly. But I guess I now understand why there are so many crappy PS3 ports. I've never heard of anyone using MS's performance analysis tools even on a windows machine.