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TheBigFatJ on 02 May 2008
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Words Of Wisdom said:
MikeB said:
@ TheBigFatJ

The PS3 doesn't have "seven processors"


No, the PS3 Cell includess 8 active processors. 1 PPE and 7 SPEs. The SPE is a processor which allows for one hardware thread (and any number of software threads), the PPE allows for two hardware threads (and of course software threads).

To be more exact, the SPEs are more than just processors. They can compute independently from the rest of the system, that's why they are often referred to as a system on a chip.

It seems obvious that he was referring to the fact that it SPEs have too many limitations to be considered fullfledged general purpose processors ala the PPE or 360's cores.


Thanks for standing up for me and suggesting MikeB should read my post before responding to it, but the problem is that he's uninterested in understanding the architecture but rather in explaining that the Cell is so amazingly powerful that it has no limits.  Or nearly none.  Suggesting that the Cell is "8 processors vs 3" when comparing the PS3 to the 360 is completely misleading, because it suggests that the PS3 is outright several times more powerful than the 360 without limitation.

That simply isn't true. Which is why I took the time to explain in a simple sense how that is misleading.  Now if you want to find evidence that the Cell rules or the Cell sucks, you'll find plenty of developers who will say both.  Tim Sweeney was interviewed by Anandtech saying that you could rewrite many parts of a standard FPS to run primarily on the SPEs, but there were some things it was not suited towards.  He cited AI.  I don't know, maybe MikeB optimized more 3D engines for the Cell then Sweeney.  His approach was very pragmatic, and very informative. 

I myself have designed a pipelined processor as well as a 3D engine (both on the way to my computer science degree) and have a fairly decent understanding of the tradeoffs taken with SPEs and what Tim Sweeney was talking about.  Hearing soe dev like Gabe Newell say "the cell is useless" and hearing some other dev say, "the cell is limitless" really mean nothing because there is no substance there.  And those devs likely don't even program.

Personally, I just don't care as much as he does. It may be very important to him to compare an inexpensive computer system from 2006 to an inexpensive computer system in 2005, and ensuring that everyone knows that he heard from someone that the Cell is more powerful.