| alephnull said: Everybody is going to have to switch to an architecture similar to cell due to the current crisis in computer architecture it's just a matter of when. As a side project with two other people we already have a realtime raytracer doing 6 fps using just the 6 SPUs one one PS3 involving a number of light sources emitting sierpinski triangles (at different trippy colors) onto a number of highly reflictive sheres (so theres alot of light bouncing around) at 800x600. This is even though we haven't even begun to optimize things seriously yet, all the floating point to integer conversion for display are done on the ppu which needs to be moved over to the spus, and we are doing it through the draconian hypervisior which runs underneath linux. I honestly think that a few more usable spus clocked a little higher (not necessarily the 2007 6Ghz version shown) would have changed things drastically. If sony sticks with the cell next generation they are set. BTW the ps3 runs a modified version of the AIX kernel, I'm not sure but the 360 might also run AIX as they both use the POWER ISA (although what most people thing of as the OS are really userspace apps). |
So hows it handling divergence, I know thats one area which kills GPU raytracers. Also how many bounces are you doing?
Btw, you're just a lazy developer for not offloading the work off the PPU, shame on you!!! 
I also take it you don't see the POWER 7 architecture as being useful for Sony? (Which is sad as im quite fond of that new processor)
Tease.
