Kyros on 17 June 2008
2 or 3 PPEs would make it essentially as easy to program as the 360
Three PPEs ARE a 360 CPU. Three power cores taped together. The basic problem is that you have only a limited number of transistors on a chip and need to use them as efficient as possible. The problem with general purpose cores is that they use much more transistors than are necessary for most repeating tasks. Because of this the CELL processor is much more efficient than a similar sized chip that has multiple standard cores put together. Its more complicated of course but at PS4 release developers should be used to it.
but I can see where game developers would have problems.
True and I am not sure if the Cell was the optimal CPU for a game console. On the other hand you only have to solve a problem once. So most game developers will have working solutions for using CELL SPEs for most of their problems by the time the PS4 comes out.
You are correct that game devs will have many things that are better done on a general purpose core, but I really doubt that programming the CELL would get easier if they would mix multiple PPE with multiple SPEs. At the moment you have one core distributing work. In your proposed architecture you would have multiple cores distributing work to multiple SPEs? Sounds like a deadlock disaster waiting to happen.
