Why is domination important to you?

[MikeB]

Legend11 said:

MikeB said:

Developing code specifically for the Cell easily benefits any other multi-core or multi-CPU based platform, there are no issues with regard to code porting. The only difference is that you would be able to yeild much greater performance from the Cell in comparison to other currently common CPU architectures, it will not inhibit any performance potential on such alternatives (including Windows PCs, Macs or 360).

How does it easily benefit other platforms? Are you saying that code first developed on the Cell and then ported over to the PC and 360 would run as well or better than if that code had been created on the PC and 360 for example from the ground up? What I'm trying to get across to you is that if Sony has not been so arrogant and instead used a processor that was very similar to the PC and 360 then code could have been easily ported between the 3 and everyone benefits (especially publishers not having headaches and wasting time and money trying to work with platforms that are so different from each other). Sony didn't have to go with the Cell, the fact that they chose it showed their complete disregard for programmers and third parties.

Yes, it will result in cleaner code, inefficiencies are easily spotted when developing for the Cell. The code running on the Xenon or x86 CPUs will however not outperform the Cell, due to the fact that the Cell provides more raw horse power. (218 GFlops for the PS3's Cell, compared to 77 GFlops for the Xenon, but there are other bottlenecks for the Xenon to take into account like shared L2 cache between cores, shared main memory bandwidth with the GPU with much worse latency (low latencies are crucial for getting the most out of CPUs) compared to the PS3's XDR Ram).

The PS3 nor any other rival platform will ever run Direct X, so there will always be porting issues for such software nomatter what Sony would have done while designing the PS3.

Some dev comments:

A multiplatform games developer posting at Beyond3D (admitted their initial games were just "quick & dirty ports from 360):

"We all agree given the time we'd like to architect for the SPU's first then work back... giving us cache-friendly algorithms by design "

Tomb Raider Underworld developer:

"Secondly, the matters of multithreading policies, the whole job queue architecture, encapsulation of jobs and their corresponding data packets, etc. that work on the PS3 are indeed more than applicable of the 360/PC. And as I've mentioned before, they work better than anything and everything that Microsoft recommends (so far without exception for us). The problems lie in the fact that that work is an absolute necessity on the PS3, whereas they're not entirely necessary on any other platform.""