Soleron said:
joeorc said:
Soleron said:
"the Cell is also a GPU...the Cell is a hybrid CPU/GPU so yes it does indeed make game look better if you as a developer design a game to use the Cell Processor's GPU functions..and as for the PPE being there to control the SPE's , once again that is not 100% true the SPE's are and can be used without the need of the PPE to direct them, does that mean the SPE should..no because you indeed get better result's from the PRE-call file system of the PPE to the SPE's. but the SPE's can do DMA commands without the need of the PPE."
That claim is marketing speak only. The Cell is clearly a CPU, however you are right in that it has much higher FP performance per core than a normal CPU. But it doesn't have any fixed-function hardware that a GPU does and it has very few parallel threads compared to a GPU. I said it can perform some pre- and post-rendering effects to the graphics, but if you were to make it do shaders it would be 10-100x slower than the PS3's GPU.
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umm no its not..that is for sure not marketing speak,since when is 30 billion shader ops/sec is marketing speak because that is what the Cell has been already benchmarked at with its terrain rendering..that's without needing the GPU...the Cell is infact a hybrid CPU/GPU yes it does indeed get better results while working in tandum with the GPU but the Cell is infact also a GPU ..that's not marketing speak it is what it is.
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Yeah, and you can use a standard desktop quad-core to do software rendering too, and it looks about as good as that Cell rendering demo (i.e. rubbish compared to modern GPUs) You'd still call Intel's quad-cores CPUs, right? To qualify as a GPU it has to be massively parallel, have some fixed-function hardware to accelerate setup, and support a graphics API. Not one commercially available product using the Cell uses it for rendering like a GPU.
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But I'm sure the Cell could do more effectively do GPU tasks then some GPUs, say like a GeForce 2 ;)
@ Soleron: How do you know so much about CPU & GPU architectures?
