First, we're in the same boat about multiple cores, for games as well as apps. I was refering to the stuff where CELL actually seems to shine. Like cloth simulation and other stuff that can be parallelized that good. If not neccessary you wouldn't do that on the CPU.
Jaguar can do things like cloth simulation, in-fact if you were to do cloth simulation at FP64 levels of precision, Jaguar would be almost twice as fast as Cell. - Doesn't mean you should though when you have a GPU which is 1,000x better than a CPU at said task anyway.
captain carot said:
In other cases, as far as i've always understood CELL, the architecture can be a massive hindrance. Even IBM's improved PowerXCell didn't work out as planned in the end.
Even PowerXCell had a ton of caveats that were a hindrance. IBM could never keep pace with Intel and AMD, but that was to be expected as Intel and AMD often had a process and R&D advantage anyway.
captain carot said:
But PS3's CELL actually depends on dividing the workload on as much SPE's as good as possible, which wasn't that easy and sometimes did not work at all. So leading to games with good multithreading, they should definitely benefit from multicore CPU's if they are to use all SPE's. That doesn't give CELL any advantage over 'real' multicore CPU's htough, at least in my understanding.
The main issue was... Software was just not heavily multi-threaded at the time of the 7th console generations launch, developers were struggling to use two CPU cores, let alone having to deal with essentially half a dozen of them. It took many years for that to change, even on the PC games didn't really start using 4+ CPU cores fully until the end of the 7th console generation.
But you are right, Cell doesn't have any advantage over a real modern multi-core CPU though, PC CPU's haven't stopped progressing since Cell came along in 2007.
Speaking of cloth simulation. Can someone explain what Dreamcast was doing with Dead or Alive 2 with what at the time seemed like Cloth simulation and on Gamecube I remember a greater degree of it with Luigi's Mansion? Was that just warping?
pxrocks said: They can but it's going to make NGPS more expensive which may slow down its adoption rate.they rather use that resource to actually make NGPS more powerful and use that power to soft emulate ps3 games.placing two CPUs inside a gaming console is not good for anything.imo they should make NGPS more affordable as they can.if it launches at 350$ ww then it's guaranteed that it's going to break some record.
Technically the Playstation 4 has 2x CPU's anyway.
You have the 8-core Jaguar group. (Which are actually 2x Quad Core processors.) and then you have the secondary ARM CPU and DDR3 Ram to assist with background tasks.
Teeqoz said:
Even then, the whole BC argument is stupid... A PS5 will easily be powerful enough to emulate the PS3 if Sony wants it (the XBO can, after all, emulate the 360. Now, while the PS3 is afaik a lot harder to emulate, the PS5 should also be a lot more powerful than the XBO...). Not to mention PS2 and PS1. That only leaves the PS4 which is easily achieved by sticking to x86.
The Playstation 3 Emulator is actually better than the Xbox 360 emulator, so the Cell hasn't been a hindrance in that regard.
captain carot said:
Thing is, everything where really CELL exceeded falls under those parallel processes. Cloth simulation, you wouldn't actually do that on a CPU today. In other cases CELL was kind of a nightmare for programmers.
Many things CELL was intended for are simply done GPGPU-wise today, for the other stuff there are way more efficient ways.
Not really. Because modern CPU's not only have superior serialized performance to Cell, but they have significantly superior parallel capabilities as well... Hyper-Threading has been a massive boon for parallel processing capability. - In-fact right now the PC seems to be experiencing the "Core Wars". - Thanks in part to AMD of course.
However, both pale in comparison to a modern GPU's capabilities on that front.
Ruler said:
Microsoft wont be around when the PS5 launches
Lies.
Ruler said:
But i tell one thing they wouldnt composite the extra power from a cell processor inside a PS5 by just adding in a Xeon from the 360 for their next xbox, because that would turn their BC roadmap they have taken so far into a waste.
You are still under the false illusion that the Cell is actually powerful? Really? Are you being serious or are you just trolling?
Ruler said:
What you just dont get is that a Ryzen is pretty much all what Sony could get out of AMD in 2019 looking at how expensive they are now.
False.
Ruler said:
It doesnt just work that way that they you can add in an extra core for a CPU. You ether buy an affordable 8 core, or super expensive 12 or 16 core, looking at Ryzen.
False.
Ruler said:
the Cell is just being an extra processor for some extra graphics.
If you think you have ample knowledge about Cell. Then please. Describe those "extra graphics" to me. What effects are you talking about exactly?
Zkuq said: I'm no expert, but I'm fairly sure combining even exactly identical processors isn't easy to do efficiently. There's a reason even multicore development is challenging, let alone multiprocessor development. Here we have a suggestion to combine a fairly standard processor with possibly the hardest processor ever to develop for in a console. I'd say this sounds like a recipe for a disaster.
Combining Identical processors has actually been a thing for over a decade. But there are different approaches to doing so which has it's own caveats.
You have systems that have two separate physical processors, these tend to be the hardest to program for as there are a ton of caveats, namely communication between the two chips.
Then you have two separate physical chips on the one processor card, this is actually the approach Intel took with some Core 2 Quad processors, packaging two Dual-Cores to make a Quad-Core and it worked well, from a developer standpoint you would never have known. And AMD took that same idea and took it to the extreme with Threadripper having multiple CPU chips on the one processor allowing them to Scale CPU core counts to 16+ cores, 32 threads.
And with the Xbox One, Xbox One X, Playstation 4, Playstation 4 Pro... AMD took two Quad-Core Jaguar units and combined them to make an 8-core processor which has it's own caveats, especially when it comes to cross-communication between the two separate quad-core clusters, but for the most part has been a non-issue for developers.
KratosLives said: Had mark cerny or sony execs known how well received the cell would have become, i feel they would have continued with the cell processor technology. Maybe they would have gone with 16 or 24 cell units with advanced architecture. But the cost of the console would probably be more.
The Cell was never well received.
Ruler said:
Yes you can have as good of a GPU you want, it wont archive 60fps if still using the same Jaguar CPU cloacked @1.6-2.2 Ghz. The XBox One X is the definitive prove for that, Microsoft had all the time in the world to fix it, they went that way because 4k 30fps was the goal from the beginning.
That is completely up to the developer and how the game is bottlenecked. If you are GPU bound, then doubling the GPU performance can mean the difference between 30fps and 60fps, regardless of the CPU being used.
Ruler said:
So now i have to philosophy about the numbers 4 and 18? I can tell you what i know about this topic, that 4 is almost a fourth of the number 18 thats all you need to know about.
I mean if this is all too complicated for you and me, I can also express it visually by showing some pictures of the Last of Us on PS3 and ask you if it can hold a candle against Uncharted 4?
You are not even making any sense. You can have a GPU with more Gflops perform slower than a GPU with less Gflops. - Do you wish for me to provide some evidence for this like I have prior in other threads? Because the GPU industry is littered with examples where this is the case.
Ruler said: So are you, because you never provide any evidence for anything
The difference is. I can. - And if you desire for me to do so, I will be happy to provide evidence for all my points going forward.
However, I think over the years of being on VGChartz I have conducted myself with a degree of proficiency where my knowledge in regards to technology can be taken with a degree of seriousness. Unless you are claiming you have more intimate knowledge on these topics than I?
Ruler said: So what, it is using PowerPC? Just like Macs did or the Wii U. Doesnt mean its bad, just look at Wii U games like Bayonetta 2 or the latest Zelda, all praised for their graphics and scale and that wasnt even a Cell.
The WiiU and Switch don't have good graphics. That doesn't mean the games cannot have great artistic flair, did you not watch the Digital Foundry on the breakdown of Zelda's imagry? There were a ton of graphical sacrifices that were made.
Poor Anti-Aliasing, draw distance on things like grass also leaves much to be desired, low-quality shadowing.
Ruler said: There are various benchmark showcasing how the Cell can render a lot of stuff without the GPU.
And? All CPU's can render. But if you think that render video is somehow superior to what RSX or a modern CPU can give us... Then you are kidding yourself.
Here is Unreal, which could run on a 300Mhz Pentium 2, think: Worst than the Original Xbox CPU.
Doesn't mean the Cell is great at rendering. (And if that image quality in the video you posted that has no Physics, High-Quality lighting, shadowing, Particles, A.I and so on is to go by... Eww.)
Ruler said: Yeah an integer calculation designed for x86.
Ruler said: Sure the Jaguar is great but any processor would be with 8 Gigs of Ram and a powerful GPU, put that into the Cell and you would see the same performance for many games, if not even better in some games.
Except, no. Also... Ram typically has no processing capabilities, so it doesn't actually "speed" anything up.
I demand you provide evidence that Cell would provide the same or better performance than Jaguar when equipped with a powerful GPU and plentiful amount of Ram.
Ruler said: Like in PUBG as an example, it would probably runbetter on the Cell than on a Jaguar processor, simple because its designed for dual or quad processor on PC, not 8th cores.
I have PUBG on PC. I have 12 threads. I can assure you, PUBG utilizes them all.
Ruler said: And that was my main point that Cell wouldnt supposed to be used to render the entire game if it is just a co-processor
Just like Fetch. Cell is never going to happen, so stop trying to make it happen.
Ruler said:
It doesnt matter what is better than XDR2, XDR2 is better than GDDR5 and is needed for the Cell. All the other types of RAM arent out there in any relevant form and probably ultra expensive too.
But you made the statement that XDR2 is the best. You were wrong. Here, go brush up on your Ram tech, clearly your information is stuck a decade in the past.
Not to mention, you can take DDR2 Ram and if taken wide enough, made faster than GDDR5 or XDR2 anyway.
Ruler said:
Yes it has everything to do with Developers and also gamers cheerleading for their favorite hardware monopolies.
I demand evidence for your baseless conspiracy theory.
Ruler said:
Look at PS4s Exclusive Uncharted 4, Driveclub, Bloodborne, they look beyond anything that runs on any Nvidia hardware, and that despite of the weak Jaguar CPUs.
Get back to me when they are 4k, 60fps. All those games listed would look better on PC, running high-end nVidia graphics.
Ruler said:
Software optimisation is all what matters, consoles arent effected by that because its only 1 or 2 pieces of hardware of the same brand, in this case on ''Weak'' AMD architecture.
Cell was hard to develop for, while x86 is easy to develop for, adding in cell would only complicate matters and make it harder to develop for PS5. The last console to try a dual CPU solution similar to what you're suggesting was Sega Saturn, and it was a beast to develop for from what I've heard, most developers ended up just using 1 of the 2 CPU's since it was easier. I just don't see what you're describing happening.
Also, Sony doesn't care about BC, they've said multiple times that when they've implemented it in the past, PS2 BC on launch model PS3's for instance, that not enough people used BC to warrant the increased cost (regardless of rather you use hardware BC or emulation BC it costs money).
Ryzen will be plenty powerful for PS5 and they'll get a good deal on a Ryzen/Navi APU because AMD is always looking for console deals since they can't compete against Intel or Nvidia in PC marketshare.
Saturn was a bitch to develop for, for the same reasons PS3 was bitch to develop for; the developer had to know every precise moment when a certain processor (core, unit, or whatever you want to call them) was available.
klogg4 said:
But it is better than a Jaguar. A single GPU at 3.2Ghz will run better in a lot of situations than an 8 core CPU running at 1.6Ghz.
You clearly don't have a clue how central processor unit works...
3,2 gigahertz GPU would be a beast today, as the high end GPU's run somewhere around 1,5 GHz ATM.
Ruler said:
Slarvax said: So uh, did you learn anything from the PS3?
I assume you refer about the Cell being hard to program for. I dissagree, because it would be just a bonus for devolopers for rendering certain graphics and processing to offload the CPU, sure you would have some developers not utilizing it (probably Bethesda and the likes) but others like Naughty Dog they could make miracles with with it again especially for times to come. 50$ is really not a lot of money in the end of the day, and outweighs the worries.
Pemalite said:
It can. Developers just choose not to.
Where is the poll? Put your money where your mouth is.
RSX doesn't hold a candle to a more compute-centric GPU architecture like GCN.
No.
No.
No.
Why are we even having this discussion? It's almost 2018. The Playstation 3 is dead, the Cell is dead. They are old, slow, outdated.
The Cell was never a high-end CPU to begin with, sure once you delved into iterative refinement it could come into it's own... But outside of that, the Cell was nothing impressive, even 10 years ago. The Cell was designed to provide adequate performance for a low cost, perfect for a console.
I would say I expect better of this forum after all this time of tech-orientated based threads/posts dating back years... But then a poster comes along and destroys that fantasy.
Jaguar is superior to Cell. Especially in Integers... Jaguar was AMD's worst CPU during a time when they had the industries worst CPU lineup. So it goes without saying that any successor to Jaguar is going to be a rather large increase... And by default is what we will have in next-gen anyway.
So I concur. I would rather an SSD Cache... A nice big chunk of SLC NAND please.
1. That true but you have to ask yourself why the Developer do that, they see these consoles they know the CPU is weak and they rather use the GPU power to deliver 1080p and better graphics than running the game in 720p with lower settings. These consoles were pretty much designed that way.
2. I put my money where my mouth is, i own all PS consoles including PS3 and continue to play older games for them
3. Yes it is the RSX has 400 Gflops, the Jaguar GPU has 1840 Gflops, its pretty much as simple as that. Does that sound like RSX cant hold a candle?
4. Dont know where you quoted me, but yeah the Cell trumps the Jaguar if you remove GPUs. The PS3 was even originally designed to run without a GPU, they planed to use two 2 Cells originally without any GPU. It is a known fact that the Cell was designed like a GPU rather than a CPU, hence why without a GPU the Jaguar would lose against the Cell running in benchmarks like the ones i have posted in my opening post.
5. Yes XDR2 even the original XDR1 inside the PS3 are faster than GDDR5 Ram
6. Yes the Cell was impressive for its time, the reason why it failed is not because it was a bad piece of hardware but because developers didnt want to programm for, you know they love their monopolies just like AMD hardware isnt running great on PC either over Nvidia and Intel despite having same hardware specs.
Its design is even superior to x86 in power savings, x86 CPUs are wasting 30% of energy while the Cell only does 5-10%, hence it was used for servers a lot. How is that not a High End CPU? And The Cell wasnt cheap at all, it costed Sony 800$ to produce one PS3 and they sold it for 600$. Does that sound a low end cost CPU? that was the whole problem with the PS3 to begin with, but now prices are down
Edit: damn, I accidentally skipped this quote. Obviously RSX can't hold a candle for a system that's 4,5 times as powerful.
To be fair, IF you consider Jaguar as CGPU and Cell as CGPU, a fair comparison would be Cell without the SPE's and Jaguar without GPU. I take that as you apparently don't understand what you're talking about.
Ruler said:
caffeinade said:
You don't just buy a CPU and RAM, slam it in a box and be done with it. That isn't how it works.
If Sony did put a Cell in the PS5 they would have to live with that for the entire life-cycle of that console, meaning: They would have to supply / develop an OS that is capable of running in such a system. They would have to write an API, or extend an existing one to support the exotic hardware configuration. They would have to teach developers how to get the maximum performance out of the Cell. They would have to learn how to develop games that can leverage all of the Cell, to stay competitive with Microsoft and everyone else. They would have to give up the performance of adding an SSD cache or another x86 core, or some more GPU core, or an FPGA or whatever.
All of that would cost more than $50 per unit. And even at $50 per unit (or even one dollar) they could do so much more.
+ a Cell proving BC, is not necessary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goSgzyxwxVA A Ryzen 1200 running Demon Souls just fine for a young emulator. Given a first party developed emulator, and the CPU you define in your PS5 and PS3 games will run perfectly and beyond. Without a Cell.
Thats not running fine to be honest.
Yeah all these stuff you have listed is true but its also true for X86 hardware especially limited to 400$-500$, and i think it still better and easier to just have an extra processor than some Mhz more. Sony knows both architectures now, X86 and Cell, it shouldnt be that hard to make that work together. And as i have mentioned before it should be Reserved for certain things not the whole game. And you forget the XDR2 Ram.
It would be a HELL to make both of them work together, well maybe not for the hardware engineers, but every programmer would face a nearly impossible task optimising the system. The idea of having a multi-general purpose core processor is a dynamic system, unlike that a special purpose core that would be running idle when it's task isn't needed. A system that would have two processors with different instruction sets, would mean that one of the two could only be used as a co-processor for additional tasks, and idle the rest of the time. However. IF you wanted a co-processor, it would make more sense to put additional X86 core as co-processor, or if you need DSP-like performance it would make more sense to put a GPU as the co-processor, or an SPE from Cell, as every other option you have, would make more sense for everyone than putting the fucking Cell (and it's nine extra threads) on the motherboard.
If Sony knows X86 architecture and Cell arhitecture well, it shouldn't be a problem for Sony to create a compiler for the PS3 BC, if they wanted to.
FunFan said: Sure. While they are at it, they should use one with 64 SPEs. The PlayStation 64. It won't be a real 64 console cause the Cell is 32 bits. Unless you use Jaguar logic.
Do the math!
Pemalite said:
NATO said:
Glhf getting worthwhile performance with that.
May work for legacy code base via peephole SO's from much slower systems with off the shelf ppc processors, but customized 64bit ppc with spe and ppe? Yeah not going to happen.
Works fine. Just ask Intel when running ARM apps on it's x86 medfield processors. Microsoft is also leveraging a similar approach to achieve backwards compatibility on the Xbox One. (Amongst other things.)
Because consoles are closed systems, they are expected to have high performance, and not "working fine". Just compare early PS3 games, that worked fine, to 360 games of the era that actually utilised the system's performance to much higher extent.
IGN... Or from someone who was active in the development itself? Hard decision that.
Besides. Even the IGN link you posted also reinforces the argument that there was no second Cell chip for graphics.
I'm under the impression that PS3 was supposed to have one Cell-processor and no GPU, because this way the system had been cheap to manufacture, as the way Cell functions, it can work as a GPU. This way the system had looked more like PS4, when you compare CPU to GPU performance.
The Cell as an additional processor would be a waste of money, that component costs could be used much better at other places:
- a Ryzen based CPU + a modern GPU is probably fast enough to emulate a PS3 (and PS Vita, PS2, PSP and PS1)
- if the PS5 is PS4 compatible: how many games would profit from PS3 compatibility? Almost all good PS3 games already exist in an x86 version (PS4 or PC)
- Sony and third parties prefers to sell remasters, otherwise PS4 would have PS2 BC by now
- most third party developers would ignore the Cell coprocessor anyways
- the additional Cell wouldn't only increase the hardware costs, but also the power consumption
SegataSanshiro said: Speaking of cloth simulation. Can someone explain what Dreamcast was doing with Dead or Alive 2 with what at the time seemed like Cloth simulation and on Gamecube I remember a greater degree of it with Luigi's Mansion? Was that just warping?
SegataSanshiro said: Speaking of cloth simulation. Can someone explain what Dreamcast was doing with Dead or Alive 2 with what at the time seemed like Cloth simulation and on Gamecube I remember a greater degree of it with Luigi's Mansion? Was that just warping?
Anyone?
How else you see the girl's asses if the clothes don't move.
At first an animation comes into mind with the cloth simulation, however, here's pretty detailed list of DC's hardware features:
