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

[Pycus]

During the reading of this topic i must say i ve changed my opinion on ps3's cell beneficiency.

I realized just now that in ps3 cell is actually rendering something, calculating not only the instructions to send to rsx and directing the memory flow between xdr and rsx, but its also working really hard on the pictrue quallity.

And to be honest with you i never heared of anything like this before except for software calculated physics or other emulated things but working on a pictrue and animations? In a 300mln transistors chip thats very much like larabee which occured to be so big of failure that even Intel with its massive funds couldn't do anything to make it work.

In contrast normal processors like xbox's amd's intel's dont do such stuff. I'll say even more they aren't designed to do that stuff. I belive that even wii has a processor that doesn't tackle that subject.

So when ps3 was first introduced to mass media i watched every conferennce, read every news about it and never realized what was the case when producers ware switching to multiplatform development or just dumbing or dumping their games on ps3.

The thing is that when a new technology is introdueced, hyped and so on and so on people think of it as a secound coming of Jesus. But then we meet with such a thick iron wall which hits us so hard, so really hard, that the dissapointment is so great because it always don't live up to the expectations and in ps3's case it failed so hard that we're left only with bitter taste in our mouths and our trust is siriusly dameged.

I think i got a little sidetracked here so ill just cut to the point. Processors aren't made to calculate graphics they're not a graphic unites to do so. When a cell was made it was a powerfull chip but not to calculate graphics. The reason it has 6 cores (which aren't all tasks cores) is to calculate other things. Like sending wright instructions to the rsx or (if sony didn't cut out it last moment) to sending diffrent video streams on two hdmis or more. And so the transistion (that actually was dependent on a wright sdk from sony more then developers job) was very difficult becouse it wasn't an evolution of an existing architectures but a completely new design that could do multi tasks but not right out of the box.

If for example instead of cell we'd have an amd's or intel's desktop design like a quad core processor, the ps3'd had its exclusives, promissed titles on lunch. On the other side however with a quad chip and rsx tandem we wouldn't get an uncharted's great enviroments or killzones or even those milions of grass leafs in flower, all of that wouldn't be passible. However if instead of nvidias bulk chip desig we got an amd radeon with its 5d shader system not only we'd have those tittles but futhermore we'd got them with higher resolution textures or other fancy stuff.

On the blu-ray side it's a definetly benficial component, with its high storage capacity and win in a format war a strong benefit.