We were talking about the inclusion of the Cell in the PS3, weren't we?

It's probably not the inclusion of the Cell in the PS3 that made it go from the 1st to the 3rd place...
The main reason is the huge success of the Wii by Nintendo, it was the cheapest system, it was fun and it appealed to a broader audience. Second reason is that it went out one year after the 360. Third reason was its pricepoint at first, mainly because of the bluray drive, remember the price of the first bluray standalone players.

There are many other reasons why the PS3 is not doing as well as the PS2 (yet, time will tell, even if I don't have high hopes), but the inclusion of the Cell really wouldn't be in the top 10 of these reasons IMHO.

Quite nice post, but its timestep(and usually everything in game have different kind of timestep, for example physics/collision detection/translations usually use very small timestep because of clipping etc) not frame. You can skip frames and today games skip frames quite often. Even if you skip frames you must calculate those physics & stuff. And for the rest of stuff... For example (A) can't be ever good with iOE PPE + SPUs vs current OoOE multicore CPU:s. CELL should have to evolve into beast like current PC CPUs are to be better in (A). And for (E), what do you mean by skinning? You mean textures? They are heavily affected by GPU and its abilities. So making better CPU doesn't do a thing for it. So in the end all its very good at are (B) , (C) and that doesn't make it superior to others, does it? :P

And of course you can do some preprocessing with CPU while GPU is working with something else. For example you can make translations for some objects already or calculate shadows etc. Theres a lot of stuff you didn't include, but I guess you haven't ever really checked what 3D engines have eaten. Anyway thats also stuff that CELL is good at. :)

I like how everyone ignored the most balanced and informative perspective, grouchos. Why? Because most posting in this thread are anti PS3...Its whatev, thats the way things go around here. The evidence doesnt matter if you are already convinced of something. It's scientific fact that what you believe affects how you see the evidence. That is why they do double blind experiments in the medical field, so you do not even know what you working on.

OT

I know a guy at IBM (who developed the chip for the 360, the Wii and PS3 by the way) and he says the biggest problem is the memory. the ram they chose is ultra fast, but it bottlenecks because there is not enough of it. The funny thing is that this is such a small part of their revenue (IBM) but they are already using the cell in servers (where they make most of their money)...basically sony paid IBM to create the tech and now its IBM who is receiving the biggest benefit.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081118-game-on-nvidia-ps3-hardware-in-top-500-supercomputers-list.html

Ha ha, this article I just read is kinda what i was talking about (ibm taking advantage)

@Bokal: We were talking about both, because someone suggested the PS3 was fitted with both for reasons which ignored the gaming part. Now while I agree that blu-ray was put on the PS3 because of company interest to a big extent, I'd hope that wasn't the case with the Cell. It's not like Sony as a company has a lot riding on CPUs.

There is a difference between what the CELL is able to process and what a general Intel processor (including Nahalem) can process.

The CELL is a media processor, its ability is to be able to process, decode, and encode the many forms of file types but it can also act as a GPU in terms of processing games graphically and texturally. The CELL is insanely fast at processing number equations needed to run many different AI streams at once.

A general CPU is stronger at general physics based tasks like Physics engines and running the code behind the scenes, this is why you need a GPU. The newer Core i7 processors fair better then the Core 2 against the CELL at crunching numbers for multiple streams.

I think this is as general as I can make it.. there really isnt much major difference between a general processor and the CELL other than how they are architecturally made to handle different tasks.

It's sort of the other way around. Sony isn't using the PS3 in an attempt to market the CBE, Sony is using the fact that the PS3 uses the CBE as a marketing bullet point.

If anyone stands to gain anything from the consumer marketing of the CBE via the PS3, it's IBM. They're getting visibility in the consumer electronics field they wouldn't have been receiving had Sony not agreed to use their chip/architecture.

Sony doesn't actually get any direct benefit from sales of the CPUs they use in their consoles. Maybe if they still manufactured them in house and distributed the chips as a chip vendor, but... their production facility was sold off to Toshiba a year ago.

This. Awesome in a small chip :p

I think you don't know what your talking about

Wtf? You just don't make any sense at all. :D

Why developers use only PPU for AI when they can "...run many different AI streams at once..."?

(Hint: Branches...)

Good example is killzone 2:

Also general CPU isn't stronger at physics. Usually CELL can do it better as its nothing but playing around with floating points. And there are some big differences between general PC processor and CELL. :P

Oh, I get it. You are just trying to confuse us? (I hope you are...)