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darkknightkryta on 16 November 2012
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zarx said:


1. Like I said RISC was not the CELL's problem in facti it has nothing to do with the CELL's issues. What does CISC being emulated have too do with the problems of the CELL? Did I say CISC was faster? My arguement was that a traditional x86 was more developer freindly than the CELL.

2. True but the CELL is very much not freindly to that. Unless you write code specificly for it performance is terrible, which is one of the reasons many early games sucked on PS3. 

3. It's not really that powerful these days Xenon Phi runs circles around it. 

4. More powerful at a few things all of which a GPU does 10x better. 

5.I have said before in this thread the future is likely heterogeneous computing but the CELL won't be the template for that. For high end CGI flexibility will trump performance just like real time performance trumps flexibility. As soon as hardware acceleration was a thing games moved away from software renderers and they aren't going to go back any time soon, especialy now that GPGPU and programable shaders (and more recently compute and geometry shaders) have increased flexibility of rendering in a GPU such a huge amount.

1.  It was the general flow of the discussion, not directed at you just the misinformation.

2.  Cell was designed for multi core programming.  A lot of the decisions made for Cell was directly for that (Lack of cache for the SPUs, in-order exectution).  Programming specicially for it or not does't change multi-core programming paradigm it encourages it.

3.  Cell is more powerful than most, if not all, PC processors, so yes it's still pretty powerful.  As powerful as more modern server processors?  No, not unless they do another update ontop of the PowerXCell 8i revision.  But no one is willing to invest.

4.  I was agreeing with the GPU point.

5.  I disagree, it will always be performance vs flexibility.  If flexibility was the way to go everyone would have jumped ship to Larrabee.  There will be the convergance, so you're right with that, but they're going GPU to CPU (Current video cards) vs CPU to GPU (Cell, Larrabee).