MikeB on 12 November 2007
@ starcraft
As for the SPE's, greater numbers of game developers are now questioning their ability to add to a game's technical quality. Common complaints include the extraordinary amount of to and fro that has to go on before data gets to post-processing and the limitation of having only one core processor to co-ordinate the efforts of the SPE's, as opposed to the three Xbox 360 cores working in tandem to create six separate processing threads.
Overall the PPE is insanely powerful for just the task of sheduling and co-ordinating the SPEs. Although I believe for many future games it may well be the case that's all the PPE will need to do. Look at the PPE as a manager and the SPE as employees, the employees can operate independently to a certain extend when given a task.
And to address your earlier comment that Blu-Ray allows the streaming of more data than DVD (you were discussing memory, so I assume you meant simultaneously rather than 50gb to 9gb), the Xbox 360's DVD read speed can be optomised to 16X, whereas the PS3's BLu-Ray drive can only be optomised to 2X.
Like was the case with regard to CD and DVD, 1X speed for a DVD isn' the same as 1X speed of a Blu-Ray drive. The XBox 360 DVD drive can read about 15 MB/s max but the average reading speed is much lower due to the outer rings containing more data than the inner rings, one circulation reads more data at the outer rings.
Most PS2 and XBox 360 games are currently dual layer discs, all 16X DVD drives can read dual layer DVD at max 12X speed, on average that's significantly slower (a little more than 4MB/s for the inner rings) than the sustained reading speed of the PS3 Blu-Ray drive (9 MB/s).
Seektimes is another issue, with similar technology like was the case with the transition of CD to DVD is a little longer. This related to the higher density of the data of the disc, like in a library offering more books than another library it will take a little longer to find the book you are looking for using identical technology.
(Blu-Ray and CELL)
Both are excellently suited for multimedia and thus games development. However legacy game engines need to be adapted, else they would only use the PPE of the Cell.
