| DarkD said:
Oh I think I figured it out. Are you saying that it has 1 PPE and 8 SPE. The PPE directing the SPE? and that one of them could be locked to handle specific tasks? Which is kinda like what I said in the first place only it doesn't detract from the over all processing power? Is that it? |
Yes and no. The basic problem is: You have one normal core that can be used as usual. If you want to use the additional power you have to use the SPEs, that have several weaknesses(the programmer is responsible for the memory management (only the local memory of the SPE gives the wanted performance , no load balancing , a very high code dependency (some functions are dramatically slower than the PPE), no shared cache ). How much power you can really get out of the cell depends on the program itself or even the problem behind it. You can't easily compare it with a common multi core system.
An additional problem: AI depends heavily on branching. The Xenon in the Xbox 360 isn't very good in this discipline (a rather deep pipeline) and the Cell is even worse. I always get a funny feeling when people talk about the AI improvements and even the physics advantages are misleading. Games don't use the very complicated real functions, that are used by scientists, instead they rely on simplified functions that give the needed results under certain conditions (a so called numerical approach). Game designers don't care if the car would break in this situation: it looks spectaculare, so it should work in this game.
