Cell Processor: "Dead In The Water"

[alephnull]

NJ5 said:

alephnull said:

NJ5 said:

theprof00 of course it's harder to develop for. No amount of "it's just different" platitudes are gonna change that.

First of all, it's asymmetric, which means you have to write code differently for the PPE and SPE if you want to exploit them to the max. This does not happen with most other gaming CPUs, where you have a single core design replicated several times.

Second of all, it has more cores which means you have to program more threads (a gaming engine is not trivially parallelizable).

Objectively, the Cell is harder to develop for. If someone says otherwise they're either ignorant or lying.

Your languages analogy is also flawed. For example even though my native language is Portuguese, I am perfectly able to realize that Portuguese verbs are much harder than English verbs.

 

Objectively a GPU is harder to program for than the cell.

Yeah but most people don't use GPUs for general-purpose programming.

 

Maybe, maybe not. But the point is ease of development is sacrificed in favor of performance. This is a valid tradeoff in my mind irrespective of one's opinion of the cell and sony.