| Gilgamesh said:
So like people mentioned early why doesn't Sony eliminate the GPU and put two Cell processors in the PS4 like they originally were going to do? Surely the Cell is cheaper now to get good benifits out of it. |
Because while the CELL is 10x better at the brute force floating point calculations needed for modern rendering than a traditional CPU. A modern GPU is over 100x better at that type of workload.
The CELL is basically like a half way point between a modern CPU and GPU in terms of design. But while it may offer high parallelism and massive amounts of floating point math compaired to a traditional CPU and much better interger performance, memory managmeent, branch prediction, flexibility and per thread performance compaired to a GPU. The CELL also offers poor floating point performance and parallelsim compaired to a GPU and poor memory management, integer performance, flexibility etc compaired to a traditional CPU. It's a jack of all trades master of none.
Now there is a trend towards heterogeneous processors being the future of computing. But that relies on the need for flexibility to outway the need for efficiency. A specialised peice of hardware will always be able to outperform a general perpouse one for the same price, or even a fraction of the price. And it seems the future will be more like a modern GPU than the CELL anyway, even for heterogeneous computing.
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