| Kyros said: I think that had the PS3 had multiple GPUs and not just one with SPUs around it, it would have been a much more robust and flexible system to develop for. You mean CPUs right? GPUs are parallel anyway and apart from SLI systems you won't have multiple. And for CPUs I think you are mistaken. Vector machines like the Cell have many advantages and are most likely a big part of the future. Just putting multiple cores on a die is just so much waste because you simply do not need all these circuits multiple times. In raw floating point power the Cell and possible successors will destroy everything that competes against them. And it just scales extremely well. So it would be a major surprise if the CPU successor would be very different. ITs not the most important part of the console though. The GPU is more important. |
That was a typo, but it wasn't CPU I meant to say. It was PPU.
Right now you need to look at the Cell's single PPU as the workhorse of the PS3 and the brain of the SPUs. It not only functions to control the SPUs but it also functions on its own to handle multiple tasks. The SPUs lack the ability to do the latter.
This is why when you hear developers talking about optimization for the PS3 (most recenty Terminal Reality), you hear them talking about organization in terms of what each SPU is doing. This SPU is doing sound, these SPUs are doing physics...etc. You don't hear them say "This SPU is doing sound and physics" because that's now how SPUs are designed to work. They do one thing at a time and they do it efficiently.
By comparison the PPU (or your average CPU these days) can multiple tasks simultaneously. When you're straight number crunching (model looks more like an assembly line) or can delegate tasks in terms of batches, singleminded SPUs are awesome. However what happens when you need to do more but your SPUs are all busy? You either queue up the item to an SPU after it finishes a task or you run it through the PPU which is juggling lots of different tasks. If your SPUs are dedicated (to sound, physics...etc) they're never going to be free so the more you need to do, the more work gets piled onto the PPU.
Now imagine an architecture featuring several the same number of cores the PS3 has where each core can do its own juggling where you can divy tasks not just by number but by intensity/resource usage as well and you have the concept I'm speaking of. The developers don't have to worry about task juggling but rather resource management which, while also not simple, would still give more freedom.
That's my understanding of it all anyway. ^_^
