PS3 used to crack passwords

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Final-Fan said:

NJ5 said:

Yes, the Cell can be made to run games well, but at what cost in terms of development? The thing which Microsoft brought to the industry was knowledge and willingness to help developers be more efficient, Sony should learn that from them.

No matter what some exclusive developers say, asymmetrical processors with glorified DSPs running on low memory must be a bitch to program some algorithms with. The PS2 was a difficult architecture too, but developers had to live with it because it was so successful. Sony is probably hoping that the same happens with the PS3, but it's not guaranteed.

 

There's definitely something to be said for staying close to familiar architecture, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and go with different, superior architecture.

I'm not a programmer but from what I understand most of the complaints about PS3 vs. 360 architecture stem from the fact that the 360 has a very PC-like processor, while the PS3's Cell is an entirely new and rather complicated beast. It's true that it has taken a lot of effort for developers to get truly superior performance out of the PS3, and those efforts have been expensive. But once the groundwork has been laid, it should become easier to get that performance out of the PS3, right?

If the PS3 is significantly more costly to develop for than the 360 (I don't know), it may well be true that that will be the case for the entire lifespan of both consoles. However, I think that over time the PS3 will create and widen a performance advantage as developers acclimate to the hardware.

HAVING SAID THAT MikeB, not every single thread relating to the technical abilities of the PS3 needs to turn into god damned trench warfare between you and whoever takes offense to your propaganda. Please keep that in mind next time you get a twitchy trigger finger on "Ctrl", "C", and "V".

I actually agree with FinalFan on this one.  I am a programmer, and your understanding is basically correct.  A symmetrical design is much more familiar to developers, and an asymmetrical design presents a lot of new challenges, mainly in thread control (not so difficult) and memory management (more difficult).  The fact that the SPEs cannot directly address main memory is simultaneously the Cell's greatest strength and its greatest weakness.  The fact that you have to initiate DMA transfers any time you want to read or write to main memory makes the coding more difficult, but the fact that you can see where all the transfers are and carefully analyze the flow of data makes optimization somewhat automatic.  Somewhat, because you can still code it poorly, but if you're good enough to code it at all, you're probably good enough to do it well.

 

@MikeB... it's not even that I disagree with you on any particular point.  It's that you seem to have made it your mission in life to loudly proclaim the greatness of the Cell from every mountaintop and disprove every slightly negative thing anyone says about it.  Some of us don't have anything to prove, we just want to have a conversation.  I understand that there are a lot of myths, misunderstandings, and FUD regarding the Cell, but this is true of every important piece of technology.  In fact, if you go back a few months on these boards, you may find that I've argued against a lot of the FUD, but you have to know how to distinguish between FUD and reality, and when to draw the line between dispelling myths and being the crazy poster boy.  I'd actually be on your side on some of these issues if you weren't so annoyingly fanatical.