The long term implications and potential of the Cell's calculating power and PS3's general architecture are enormous with regard to gaming and multimedia.

It's not quite the step up compared to moving from a single tasking, 2 color, soundless, CLI driven MSDOS PC environment towards the pre-emptive multitasking, 4096 color, stereo sound, GUI driven environment like the Amiga introduced in the 80s, but a lot more things can be done simultaneously at much better quality when lots of code is moved to the SPEs. Developers already have a good understanding what needs to do done with regard to adjusting their legacy game engines accordingly, it's just a matter of time and effort.

Insomniac:

"SPU code and data optimization is fairly well understood at this point.
While not everything has been optimized, we do know what needs to be done"

http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/0907/files/spu_shaders_introduction.pdf

Example processes currently running on the Cell's SPEs (Killzone 2):



link

Regarding the potential:

Naughty Dog:

"We are utilizing all SPUs in Uncharted for AI, animation and lots of other systems. We are however just starting to tap into the power of the Cell. In future games I can promise even more utilization of the Cell which will result in more of everything, including game play.""

Insomniac:

"What's most exciting is the way things are headed right now I think we'll see just as big a leap from our second generation engine to our third as we did from the first to second."

Sucker Punch Productions (Infamous):

"For us, the most exciting part of the PS3 has been the cell processor, the SPUs specifically. In our highest density scenes right now, we are currently using about 30 percent of the SPUs' capabilities--with the SPUs doing lots of heavy lifting for us on rendering, visibility, particle systems, skinning, animation blending, and so on...this with scores of pedestrians, cars, fires, etc., all going on. And the best part? We've not made any significant attempts to even optimize the SPU code. I think it's reasonable to guess we could put 10 times as much stuff on the SPUs and still make our frame budgets. It's really pretty amazing."

I never owned a PS2, but loving tech I just had to get my hands on a PS3 as soon as possible.

I don't blame developing companies for having difficulty learning new ways to write their software, I do however blame them for the lack of effort with regard to many cross platform games (Valve, EA and in the past Epic when the Sony SWAT team still hadn't come over to help them).

My comments from July 2005:

"I understand that games developers may not be too fond of the idea of having to learn new ways to write their software"

"for software to really take full advantage of the new Cell technology, software needs to be optimized for using the specialized SPEs"

"Today single CPU solutions are dominant, thus multithreading isn't really that much of a benefit. Software developers who mainly write for single processor solutions don't like doing extra (time=money) work to get the most out of multithreading for other platforms."

To Devs (of performance demanding games): Do yourself and your consumers a favour and tap into this enormous potential, eventually you will look incompetent in the eyes of your consumers. Uncharted and Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction are technically the most impressive games currently available, consumers won't accept much longer subpar game ports, make the PS3 your lead platform and you will understand it's actually easy to develop for and the burden of having to write cleaner and smarter code will potentially make your XBox 360 ports run better as well (by keeping an eye on common strenghts and weaknesses and only add to the PS3 version where it doesn't severely affect the core game engine to be ported over to the XBox 360).

Shit MikeB, did you really have to fetch your txt file where you have the propaganda that you copy paste to all threads even remotely related to the Cell?

The Cell is an excellent number cruncher by all means. Scientists can get very good performance out of it for their applications, but it is still to be proven that it's a good choice for programming games.

@ NJ5

Have you played Uncharted and Ratchet and Clank on a HDTV? I think such games should already be proof enough that it's not a bad choice.

In the past PC magazines and salesmen often claimed stereo sound and colors were only useful for playing games and maybe for very specialized people like graphic artists and musicians, a GUI was for people who couldn't type and such was claimed (neglecting the Amiga had a more powerful CLI and you could have various instances and other programs running simulteously). Nowadays people know better, but it's too late for the Amiga platform (in the 80s you could multitask between paint programs, word processors, spreadsheets, copy and paste text and images between them long before this became possible to do on a PC, but currently that's the standard, the Amiga was a great multimedia system way before Microsoft marketed the term with Windows 95 more than a decade later in 1996).

IMO take the comments from Microsoft millionairs like Gabe (Valve) with a grain of salt. They are used to sell crap like MSDOS (one of the most limited and flawed operating systems every released, they bought Quick and Dirty OS for a mere 25.000 USD from its programmer, which was actually a more limited direct ripp-off of CP/M as the source code shows) as the best thing since sliced bread.

Yes, the Cell can be made to run games well, but at what cost in terms of development? The thing which Microsoft brought to the industry was knowledge and willingness to help developers be more efficient, Sony should learn that from them.

No matter what some exclusive developers say, asymmetrical processors with glorified DSPs running on low memory must be a bitch to program some algorithms with. The PS2 was a difficult architecture too, but developers had to live with it because it was so successful. Sony is probably hoping that the same happens with the PS3, but it's not guaranteed.

 

@ NJ5

I just aim to get devs to properly investigate and evaluate the Cell, it's use is beyond just the PS3 though, I think it would be great if we would eventually see consumer targetted PC upgrade boards like we saw with 3DFX add-on graphics boards in the past.

My main interest in the PS3 is due to the Cell and not the other way around, although I do credit Sony for adding a Blu-Ray drive and making the console as reliable and highly specced as they did.

IMO they have only helped developers to become inefficient and more platform dependent. BeOS was a good effort towards more efficiency, sadly Microsoft used its monopoly to stop this effort.

This is what I call efficiency, the new AmigaOS 4.0 running on decades old Amigas even supporting ECS graphics from the 80s (oldskool assembler optimised in key core parts to provide a nice end user experience):

http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4084

 

MikeB said: As could be expected PC CPU: 10--15 million cycles per second vs PS3 Cell 1.4 billion cycles per second. The PS3 is a number crunching powerhouse, also interesting: "TOKYO, Nov. 28 -- Fixstars Corporation today announced that the company developed the new "CVCell" module aiming to accelerate several important OpenCV APIs for the Cell Broadband Engine. CVCell achieved up to 27 times faster performance in image processing compared to Intel Core2Duo 2.4 GHz." http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1913695.html

 so the ps3 can outperform a 386  running at 15 Mhz, wow news to me

MontanaHatchet said: It's only a matter of time until the world's top terrorists have PS3s...

Well I do remember the mediascare that "rogue countries" like Iraq and Syria were going to buy PS2's and link them up to work as missle system machines and other such like that.

So if media hype is to be believed one PS3 could probably let a rogue nation nuke the entire country.

 @ masschamber

Somehow I think Intel has better chips than 386s.

MontanaHatchet said: It's only a matter of time until the world's top terrorists have PS3s...

No big deal, as long as they have Sixaxis and not Wiimotes they'll never hit their intended targets.