Ea finally gets it, "We Need Cell Processor"

[Entroper]

Woot, another member who understands silicon. :) I'll probably participate more in this thread after I've had some hands-on Cell programming experience (which should begin later this week). But I would like to say a few things about the development process for using SPEs. I think if you're going to write code for a platform with 8 processors, you should design your engine with parallelism in mind. Writing everything for one processor and then parallelizing it later for performance is a valid approach, and will work very well for cross-platform games. But you're not going to get the same level of performance that you would if you think in terms of parallelization from the beginning. Writing parallel code for the Cell is much harder than just starting another thread on a shared-memory SMP system, since each SPE has its own local store that must be managed separately. There may be design decisions you can make before you write a single line of code that have profound effects on the kind of performance you can get out of the Cell versus a single-CPU machine or a shared-memory machine.