Your technical opinion on Blu-Ray and the Cell as found in the PS3

[oobob]

I bought my ps3 for blueray and the rare gems like LBP.  While I think blueray may not have been the best addition for the ps3, my arguments are too speculative so I'll get to my real problems with the console.

The cell is a total joke from the perspective of any programmer who isn't funded by sony to put up with the complexity of programming for it. Parallel programming is hard enough to optimize. But the ps3 (xbox too in fairness) used in order execution cores that require the developers to determine how to order the instruction calls to optimize their games. While determining how best to split it up among 6 SPUs. Whenever I hear "lazy devs" I think "moronic design."

Know what else had multiple processors developers never used? The atari jaguar. And so most games on it ran on the processor intended to sync all the others and it looked like a slightly improved SNES or Sega. Just like how the complexity of parallel programming has most multiplat games on ps3 using a couple SPUs.  But it gets better: the ps3 had a 3dO price tag at launch. It's like Sony wanted to emulate the failure of 2 advanced consoles against the much weaker SNES by combining their flaws into a powerhouse of fail.

Whenever I hear a ps3 fan insult valve I get furious. Gabe may be fat, but he needs those calories to power his big brain. What dev chooses the losing platform to develop on if it costs MORE and takes top talent to optimize? Uncharted 2 looks incredible, I admit. It's an amazing game. And it's simply not possible without Sony tossing money at Naughty Dog to fund the increased development time and complexity caused by their moronic design choices.

There's an issue of phrack where they talk about programming the Cell. Link: http://phrack.com/issues.html?issue=66&id=13#article

A choice quote that reveals one of many poor design choices in designing the cell and the half-assed attempt at parallelism (though different from what I previously discussed):

"------[ 3 - Exploiting Software Vulnerabilities on Cell SPE

I love the architecture manuals and the engineers and the way they talk
about really dumb design choices:

"The SPU Local Store has no memory protection, and memory access wraps
from the end of the Local Store back to the beginning. An SPU program is
free to write anywhere in the Local Store including its own instruction
space. A common problem in SPU programming is the corruption of the SPU
program text when the stack area overflows into the program area. This
problem typically does not become apparent until some later point in the
program execution when the program attempts to execute code in area that
was corrupted, which typically results in illegal instruction exception.
Even with a debugger it can be difficult to track down this type of
problem because the cause and effect can occur far apart in the program
execution. Adding printf's just moves failure point around"."

Hilarity.