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Gilgamesh on 09 June 2012
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zarx said:
Gilgamesh said:

Just curious. 

Why doesn't Sony slightly upgrade the CELL and put it in the PS4. From my understanding the CELL is able to put out so much more, and the rest of the PS3 hardware is holding it back. I believe that an AMD CPU would probably be easier for developers to work on, but by the time the PS4 releases developers would of already been working with the PS3 hardware for 7/8 years, surely there plenty familiar with it by now, hell the PS2 was supposely harder to make games for then the PS3, and it has the biggest library of games of any console.

I was just wondering this because there so much rumors of Sony using a different CPU and none of the rumors claim that they'll be using an upgraded version of the CELL. So would this not make a lot of sense, by now the CELL is probably cheap as hell, an upgraded version of it shouldn't be that more expensive.

Am I missing something? Someone enlightened me please.


The main reason IMO is that all the advantages the CELL has over a traditional CPU (highly parallel, great floating point performance etc) a modern GPU does 10x better. The GPGPU revolution of recent years has meant that modern GPUs have gained general purpose computing capabilities, which allows developers to utalise hundreds of shader cores in parallel which is great for things that require lots of simple repetitive calculations, things like rendering, decompressing video, and even physics simulations.

And those are all the things that the CELL was designed to do by using several SPEs in a time where CPUs had at most 2 cores this meant that in those areas the CELL beat out any other CPU at the time (and still outperforms the latest CPUs in some areas), which meant that developers could use it to do graphics work etc in conjunction with the GPU in the PS3. But the CELL was also weaker in many areas compaired to a traditional CPU, and with the huge advances in GPU computing the CELL is basically obsolete which is why IBM abandoned it. 

Also upgrading a CPU architecture is not an easy task, compainies like IBM and Intel spend hundreds of millions of $ every year upgrading their CPU architectres, while they also spend tens of billions over several years making new ones. And as IBM rolled the CELL team onto other projects the CELL line has been left alone. Sony doesn't have a full CPU design team in house so they would need to pay IBM to upgrade the CELL to meet modern standards which would likely cost millions. Licensing a modern CPU and a modern GPU would likely not be much more expensive as they would require less modification and would likely end up being much more developer freindly (the CELL is notoriously hard to work with which meant only 1st party studios that could devote years to mastering it could actually get good resaults from it). 

The only reason to go for the CELL again would be for backwards compatability.

Thanks for the info, I understand now.