| HappySqurriel said: In general, any special purpose processor is less expensive, easier to develop for and more powerful in what it was designed to do. No one has really focused on producing a videogame specific CPU, but the same basic rules applies to creating a custom architecture for game development. |
Yes, that's the key thing. A special purpose processor is great for what it was designed to do, but try to make it do something else with reasonable performance and you'll start writing your suicide note pretty soon (especially if your internal memory is limited - not talking about RAM here, but the SPEs's memory).
I work in telecommunications software development right now, and we use DSPs for a lot of the stuff, since they're easy to use for signal processing, and they give great performance at it too. But do we use the DSPs for the high level code? Hell no, we have other stuff for that...
My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957
