| bdbdbd said: The Emotion Engine had the same architecture as did PSX and N64. It was already outdated before PS2 was released, but Sony chose an architecture that the developers were already familiar with (technically so did everyone else; Dreamcast had the same architecture with Saturn, Gamecube shared an architecture with Power Macs and Xbox had a Celeron inside). Yeah, the problem, as you point out, with the Cell is optimising the workload; if you don't do it, the processor isn't going to perform well. |
I didn't mean the MIPS architecture, which wasn't more outdated than x86 at that time because it still saw development. And no, even the MIPS core wasn't 'the same' like in the PS1 since it got massive enhancements on the instruction set (MIPS III plus major parts of MIPS IV), VLIW, SIMD, way more cache...
The most important part here are the two vector units that gave Emotion Engine the 'insane' floating point performance of 6.2GFLOP/s. THing is, Sony went for that power for graphics calculations, basically all the geometry work was done on the CPU to do stuff that graphics accelerators in the late nineties couldn't. But at the same time others worked on vertex shaders, pixel shaders and so on.
Having a lack of English right now because of being tired and having to much/not enough beer, but long story short, while being very flexible for 3D graphics when it was in development, Sonys approach as a whole was totally outdated a year after release.
CELL is a little different. It's approach is totally outdated as well and people should finally accept that. It definitely wasn't a miracle machine and no one needs it anymore. And no one needs it less than Sony.
