MikeB on 09 June 2008
@ ProfCrab
I've always said that IBM came out much better on the Cell deal than Sony did. IBM got a great server processor out of it and Sony got a great server processor out of it . . . that can, in a far less effective role, run games.
To quote a friend (of PS3coderz and his many Cell articles fame):
"As for performance there's plenty of research papers out there now showing Cell is not only fast on the areas it's designed for but also in many areas it's not designed for. On raw performance anything less than 8x faster than an x86 core is *low*."
The Cell is a most excellent chip for gaming and multi-media. The only real issue is porting legacy game engines. Building an engine from scratch results in no issues to harvest its potential (of course some initial R&D may be required to get a good idea of how to best approach game engine design).
The SPU code should ideally stick to half- or single precision format, be designed to run parallel as possible (which requires some planning talent) and be cut down into small enough pieces if needed to fit the LS (for example fetch new data and process other data simultaneously streaming data around the super high bandwidth ring, a multi-buffer design).
Main issue: The Cell is very different.
Main advantage: The Cell is extremely powerful.
Comparing the 360 with PS3 CPU, the Cell's PPE is roughly the equivalent of 1 360 core, however the PS3 Cell has 7 SPUs which are considerably more powerful than the PPE can be for game, plain number crunching and multi-media code.
