| jasongw said: I don't know a great deal about Power7, but I've read interviews with IBM engineers who've said that they've taken lessons learned from Cell and incorporated them into the Power7. We know already that Wii U's processor is based on the Power7, and yet still retains backward compatibility with Wii games, so it's probable that they could do the same with PS4. Given the critical importance of the SPU's in Cell, which developers have to code specifically for, I'd think that any new variant that incorporates Power7 core changes would still need to keep the SPU's. It's possible that they may be able to adapt the out of order execution units to the primary core and keep the SPU's (maybe even adding a few more), or they could introduce logic to map calls for SPU functions to equivalent (or alternatives) on a more native Power7 chip, but I'm not sure what would be the more cost effective (or compatibility-effective) method. Looking at the huge quantity of content now available on both Xbox Live and PSN, though, I just can't see them moving to completely new architectures right now. There's just too much work that they'd undue if they lost compatibility with the past 6 years worth of software that's already deployed. Before PS and Xbox are anything else, after all, they're *products*, and businesses sell products to turn a profit. They know there's money in this content library, but only if it continues to be usable once today's consoles are yesterday's news. I hope you won't see that as a bad thing, though, I certainly don't intend it as negative judgment :). |
With games turning more and more into a service industry and with the massive sunk cost people have with PSN and XBOX Live I imagine that consumers would definatly prefer the ability to bring all their digital content over seamlessly and it's not like software emulation for the Cell is going to be arround for a very very long time so it doesn't seem like Sony have much of a choice in the matter when you think about it.
Hmm combining Power 7 cores into a cell design does sound like a viable option to get the 4 SMT threads per core and OOO execution and keep backwards compatability, I am sure most developers would prefer more traditional cores over lots of SPUs especially if the console uses a modern GPGPU. Or I guess they could just resurrect the old cancelled 4 PPE 32 SPU design that IBM was planning. I suppose if they wanted to maintain hardware level backwards compatability they would also have to keep using expensive XDR RAM as DDR3 still hasn't matched the bandwidth XDR offers (on a single channel anyway and I don't think they are going to use tri channel RAM on a console), and I don't think anyone has actually even licensed XDR 2.
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