DemoniOtaku said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:
GameAnalyser said:
Sal.Paradise said:
The viability all depends on how easy it will be to bring PSN games to PS4 without using integrated hardware.
Having to spend ~$40 for cell integration would pay off quickly if that meant the thousands of games already on PSN available for download to PS4 customers over its lifetime, and there was no other way to achieve this. As well as the extra consumers it would incentivise to upgrade to PS4 as it will play their PS3 games.
But if, say, ~80/90% of PSN's library can be ported over to PS4 either through PC versions, Gaikai streaming or software emulation, that ~$40 upfront hit seems like a less desirable route to take.
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Streaming or software emulation seems the ideal bet.
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Agree, particularly if it's true they'll use an APU: the GPU core included in it could emulate SPEs using a SW layer much simpler than what a general purpose CPU would need to do the same job, and a lot more efficiently, while the parts of SW running on the PPE should be portable easily anyway, as PS3 used only one general purpose PPE core, so considering how much HW power increased in 7 years, even a simple and brute force emulation running on a modern mid-range multicore CPU should be able to reach the performances of the old native HW.
OTOH, HW BC would have been easy if Sony stuck to POWER architecture: in that case it would have just taken to add some SPEs to a normal multicore POWER 7+ CPU, possibly using the latest version developed by IBM, so that it could make sense to use them also as coprocessors for new SW (for physics engines, as DSPs, for graphics pre-processing, to run codecs, etc) and not only for BC.
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Well there was a rumour were PS4 was going to use a APU unit and a GPU unit.. and come with a hybrid crossfire.. XD
Well.. about that what You say.. that's possible, I read that APU series have been made over some pattents of CELL chips.. so probably works similar (i'm not sure how is tyhat I'm just saying.. correct me if I'm wrong please).. so APU is a safe path to BC... and a cheaper option intead of integrated Cell on a SKU...
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I don't know whether APUs use Cell patents or not, but APUs contain a GPU core, and GPUs are specialized processing units that offer instructions for single precision floating point calculations (or double precision with lower performances), matrices manipulation, DSP, etc that can emulate similar instructions offered by Cell's SPEs a lot more easier, leaner and quicker than what a general purpose CPU could do, also because many of those instructions are designed to behave following IEEE standards and other scientific or industrial standards and recommendations, whatever the producer and the architecture, and even without following those standards, they'd end up performing mostly the same algebraic operations on scalars, vectors and matrices (not following those standards would be a big problem in scientific and industrial applications, but not in games). Also, GPUs and SPEs offer a larger degree of parallelism performng their limited and specialised set of instructions on a lot of data at a time, while general purpose CPUs, even multicores, can perform a wider range of instructions, but with very little parallelism, so they could perform those operations too, but a lot less efficiently and on much fewer data at a time.
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