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HappySqurriel on 23 October 2007
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Smashchu said:
mr-money said:

This is probably true. Personally, I do think dev kits will become available and PS3 development will be made easier, but I think Sony has definately made mistakes in trying to make PS3 dev too complicated. I really don't know if the Cell was necessary.


 I don't think it can be made easier. Developing for the Cell (which is the main graphical component in the PS3) is the real problem. But it's not just the difficulty, but the effort and time that goes in to it as well. Even a smige easier, it's still be about as hard as the 360, but then you have to factor in that with fewer PS3 sold, you'll not be able to sell as many units as on the 360 or Wii.


The Cell is the CPU which means that (although it can act like a bottleneck limiting graphical performance) it is not the main graphical component of the PS3 ...

The interesting thing is that there was a lot of complaints about the Emotion Engine back in the day but the content of the complaints if much different; the main complaint with the Emotion Engine was that a large portion of its processing power came from its two vector units which were not being taken advantage of by Sony's early compiler which meant that all high-performance code had to be handled in assembly.

The Cell is a much worse problem than the Emotion Engine was because it impacts the architecture of a game engine; the problem is (essentially) how do you split up an engine (or smaller algorithm) into 7 equal pieces, without having one "core" of the processor overloaded or under used, and without running out of memory bandwidth.

Think of it like a construction team, you have one truck and 7 people working. You send two people off to the lumber yard to pick up the wood and you have 5 people standing around, doing nothing while you pay them; finally when the two get back with the lumber you have all 7 people working on building until you (rapidly) run out of wood; this means you have to send the 2 people back to the lumber yard to pick up more wood while the other 5 of you wait around. Now, there are lots of things you can play around with like having everyone unload the truck when it arrives and sending the 2 people back to the lumber yard whilst the other 5 begin working but everything you try will take a lot of effort and may result in no noticeable improvements.