Pemalite said:
Kyuu said:
I thought by now it should be possible to accelerate and improve Cell to the extent to easily outperform a 1.6 ghz Jaguar in most regards. Because apparently even a 7 year old Cell isn't too far behind the newer Jaguar Architecture. Plus, the fastest supercomputer in the world was Cell powered at one point.
I think Sony might've benefited from the Cell given the fact that it was developed in house with IBM and Toshiba. Not sure how it all econimically works for each compnay but since they've already invested over a billion dollar for the project. Why would they let it all go? where they too hopeful? did they miscaclulate or was the Cell planned as a temporary product from the get-go. I'd like to hear your take on the matter.
I really don't know much about this but wasn't Cell initially supposed to handle graphics alone without a GPU? Does it have an edge in graphics processing over similarly priced/powerful traditional CPUs or is this just gibberish?
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The fastest super computer in the world currently isn't the fastest because of the CPU type, but the fact it's powered by nVidia's Tesla.
Besides, when you build a Super Computer you can take advantage of a particular CPU's strengths in order to extract maximum performance anyway, it's not always so variable like a game engine.
For sure, it would be relatively easy to improve Cell to the point it would make Jaguar look like something from the 1980's, but again that would cost Billions in R&D, money that Sony really doesn't have when they keep reporting losses to shareholders, not to mention the extra difficulty it creates for developers which might have created a situation where the Xbox One might have been the lead platform for all multiplatforms. (x86 is relatively easy to build games for.)
Not to mention it would have driven up costs for the Playstation 4 a situation that Sony would not have benifitted from. AMD has already spent the cash on R&D building Jaguar remember.
Thus, in the end it really all comes down to costs, which actually beneffited the consumer with a cheaper console.
As for the Cell doing graphics processing, that was mostly just advertising fluff.
If you remember decades ago, games would actually fall back to a form of "software rendering" - Where-as the CPU handled all the graphics effects in a game, this isn't something that's unique to the Cell and that was being performed on the old 486 CPU's, which are half the speed of the origional Pentiums.
Heck, even the Xbox 360 used it's CPU in some games to improve the graphics in a game by using CPU compute time to perform Morphological Anti-Aliasing which is merely just a filter on screen and very cheap to implement.
Half the problem though with CPU's doing GPU work is that rendering a game is stupidly parallel, CPU's however are very serial in the way they process information. (And Core counts!)
The best example for this is to use a book.
A CPU will read each page in a book, one page after the other untill it gets to the end, the GPU will read every single page in a book at the same time, the Cell isn't exactly GPU-like in the way it processes information, thus even though it could potentially render an entire game which even a CPU from 20 years ago could do, it wouldn't have been feasible from an image quality of performance perspective.
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