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Wlakiz on 16 November 2012
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zarx said:
Wlakiz said:
...... are you guys serious? If anything Sony should reuse Cell Architecture.

1. The technology has already been broken down.. little to no learning curve for existing developers.
2. Companies that built Engines for PS3's Cell can continue to use that Engine with little to no modifications..
3. Cheap Manufacturing cost since they've been pumping those out for 8 years.
4. Cell was originally designed to be scalable, adding an SPU with more SPEs should be a simple redesign task to boost its processing power to match next generation.

Anything outside of GPU design would result a less efficient processing unit.


1. x86 has been broken down longer than the CELL has existed, there are thousands opon thousands of developers that have experiance with the architecture. And x86 is designed to be developer freindly lessening learning curve. The CELL is still a pain to work on even if developers now have a good understanding of it's flaws and strengths and how to work around them, unless a lot of work was done to the base architecture that won't change.

2. Next gen engines are all built on PC, so are designed on x86. Frostbyte 2, UE4, Cryengine 3, Luminous etc are all already running on x86 CPUs.

3. Global Foundries already has a fab designed to produce 60,000 of 300mm wafers/month at 28nm and below in the future for AMD, Sony could piggy back off that with an AMD CPU allowing them to take advantage of their volume production and planned die shrinks that AMD are already bankrolling.

4. R&D work has already been done by AMD, Sony having to pay $500m+ to scale up the CELL is a bad thing.



... do you even know what you're talking about?

1. Cell uses RISC architecture, which was developed back in 1960, waaaay before your 'x86' instruction set. RISC is more efficient which is why its used for mobile devices and super computer. Flaws? You mean the inconvenience of having to write efficient code and have knowledge of memory management? Yeah, I know.. all the new grads come out knowing only Java, and have absolutely no idea what are pointers, stack or heap but news flash: Its not a flaw to design system that trade convenience for efficiency; hence all firmwares and hardware level code are written in C and not in Java or Python.

2. So what you're saying is that because someone built something for the next gen Civic, you should dump your Porsche for a Civic? Yes, I am comparing 'x86' to a civic because its 'common' and 'easy to use' whereas Cell is more like a Porsche, faster, more expensive and harder to use.

3. And why can't they 'piggy back off' that with new generation cell chips? The fact, they are already manufacturing Cell chips at 45nm and made commitment to reduce it to 32 nm back in 06. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor_implementations:

"IBM could elect to partially redesign the chip to take advantage of additional silicon area in future revisions to make the size small. The Cell architecture already makes explicit provisions for the size of the local store to vary across implementations. A chip-level interface is available to the programmer to determine local store capacity, which is always an exact binary power. It would be feasible to double the local store to 512 KiB per SPU leaving the total die area devoted to the SPU processors roughly unchanged. In this scenario, the SPU area devoted to the local store would increase to 60% while other areas shrink by half. Going this route would reduce heat, and increase performance on memory intensive workloads, but without yielding IBM much if any reduction in cost of manufacture."

4. Where did this $500m come from? I didn't see it in their Q4 report that they spent that much on R&D on the new AMD chip. Again, they designed the Cell to be scalable in the first place. Jumping ship to R&D a conventional CPU, just waste the money and time used on Cell. They should maximize and push their technology to the limit before following the bandwagon of the new popular kid in town.