| albionus said: Which of the 3 specialties the 3rd party devs focus on, Cell, Live, or Wiimote, will depend on which generates the most profits for each game. I don't see what the fuss is (aside from trying to use it solely to start flame wars), none of them cover the entire gambit of gaming which seems to be all EA is saying. |
Sorry, but I don't really agree with you, due to a simple reason:
Do you know how optimized Code for the Cell is written?
First you write the complete program for the PPE alone and then you try to debug it. The main reason for this is that every bug you won't find in this stage will cause you major headaches or even crash the whole project in later stages. But this code can be easily transfered to the Xbox 360, andf withn slight modifications even to the PC!
The big difference of the plattforms happens in the next stage: On the Xbox 360 and Multicore PCs you try to divide the main Project into several only weakly connected problems. These semantical weakly connected problems can be divided into different processes.
For the cell you don't need semantic problems, instead you try to find computing intensive routines, that obey ceratin criteria. If a routine does not follow these demands you can try to rewrite the code, to make it better suitable for the execution in a SPU.
The first step will always generate highly portable code, due to the similar architecture, even if you use high level development there is no principal difficulty in writing a transcription layer that translates the code for one plattform to one of the others.
In general it will not be easy to develop games that can be done much easier on the Cell, than on any of the other plattforms. If I look at the plattforms at least PC, Xbox 360 and the PS-3 are clearly on a way to a multi plattform path. It isn't as simple with the online part, because Microsoft follows a different architecture (more oriented to centralized servers), to follow this path Sony and Nintendo will have to find ways to finance such a structure.
