@ Deneidez

The basic principles remain the same. It's not like if you have been doing one or the other your hands will be tied in terms of competence. Just use the Cell a little on a PS3 running Linux, you have absolutely nothing to be afraid of.



Very unlikely, a heterogeneous design provides significant benefits with regard to performance and efficiency. IMO by the time the PS4 launches the bulk of current PS3 developers will be fully accustomed.



The Cell has already been developed in co-operation with Sony and IBM will further the design. The Cell isn't that expensive as a component for Sony (other than the initial R&D) and it provides a superior performance per Watt ratio. The PS3 is expensive to build due its many out of the box cutting edge technology and other onboard features other than the Cell, not the least the default Blu-Ray drive.

i think sony is only over powered there Cell ... cuz until now we dont see a thing from this processor that other processors can't do.

MikeB often brings some valid points into the discussion, but half of his posts are repetition of things which have been argued tons of times.

Facts for the programmers who are present here and haven't interacted with MikeB before:

1- MikeB is not a programmer, according to him the last time he did anything resembling programming was on the Amiga.

2- MikeB often misuses quotes from valid sources to prove his (sometimes invalid) points.

3- Even if you prove MikeB wrong about something, you will see him repeating his wrong points in a few days (at most).

4- I never saw MikeB admitting he's wrong about anything (but it might have happened).

5- MikeB thinks the SPE's pipeline can be 100% full at all times (because he thinks dynamic branch hints and branch elimination are the solution to all branch prediction troubles).

6- MikeB never talks about Amdahl's law or anything near it.

That should get you started. The main point is... no matter whether you prove him wrong on some points, it doesn't matter because he'll keep spewing the same propaganda about the Cell.

PS: I never wrote a post like this bashing anyone before, but I think we're at the point that MikeB has to acknowledge some of his shortcomings and mistakes like all of us do when we have to. I admire the fact that he, as a non-programmer, can understand some subjects well enough to talk about them, but he's by no means really knowlegeable about much of the stuff he talks about.

 

these debates are pointless. they never end and there get more and more boring with the same facts and opinions being regurgitated over and over again :s

MikeB said: @ Deneidez On heterogeneous platforms, yes, but there isn't many of those when it comes to games. :) The basic principles remain the same. It's not like if you have been doing one or the other your hands will be tied in terms of competence. Just use the Cell a little on a PS3 running Linux, you have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. I am quite sure that PS4 will be homogeneous one. Very unlikely, a heterogeneous design provides significant benefits with regard to performance and efficiency. IMO by the time the PS4 launches the bulk of current PS3 developers will be fully accustomed. Because of current design sony has lost more money it might never get back during the lifetime of PS3. The Cell has already been developed in co-operation with Sony and IBM will further the design. The Cell isn't that expensive as a component for Sony (other than the initial R&D) and it provides a superior performance per Watt ratio. The PS3 is expensive to build due its many out of the box cutting edge technology and other onboard features other than the Cell, not the least the default Blu-Ray drive.

i have one question for u .... u work for sony ???!!!

 

NNN2004 said: i think we will see the true power of Cell in Killzone 2.

 

Doubt it. Highly doubt it. More like 40% of what it can do....

Aren't we beyond this discussion. For the last few years we have depended upon technical specs and misinformation provided by threads such as this. The architectures are very different. Too different for easy comparison by novices. Let's move this discussion to the games the systems are able to deliver. I will put MGS4, GT5P, and Uncharted up for discussion. Please let me know 3 360 games that are in this league.

Dgc1808 said: NNN2004 said: i think we will see the true power of Cell in Killzone 2.   Doubt it. Highly doubt it. More like 40% of what it can do....

 

 to be honest .. thats what i hope.

Depending on what you mean with better performance you are either wrong or correct. If you take raw floating point crunching power the CELL is better than anything Intel had to offer. For example if you want to encode/decode a video the CELL is still faster than the intel lineup.
If you mean faster in terms of general purpose applications then you are correct.



Depends again from the usecase. The CELL SPUs have their own memory section to work on and are customized for stream processing of huge data sets. You can be sure that IBM knows what it is doing. A different question is if the CELL is the best fit for a gaming console.

One nice example for the power of the CELL is that Toshiba demonstrated the display of 48 simultaneous MPEG2 streams on a single display. That's something no INTEL processor could do.

NNN2004 said: i have one question for u .... u work for sony ???!!!

 

I don't think anyone has to "work for SONY" to know about "IBM's Proccessor"......