I think alephnull is fighting against the X86 Intel monopoly. Hes in the process of making Windows run on the powerpc range of processors!

Normally, I do not agree with you, but that was the funniest quote in this thread. Haha.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the next xbox used the son of cell and the ps4 used something else depending on how many egos at Sony were bruised by the intrigue at IBM this gen. That would be a master stroke by MS if they pulled that off as they'd have the real (non-rushed cell) and will have got their competator to pay for it.

The cell is designed at every level to take some pressure off of the FSB and it that sense the next xbox CPU has to follow in its footsteps if it is going to be increasing the number of cores (assuming it retains a MIMD model). Maybe they will copy the Parallax Propeller :P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_Propeller

There are all manner of esoteric arichitectures out there that are not well known outside of the HPC community which I think are going to be making a comeback of weird things like hypercube routing networks now that the rapid advances in fabrication of the 90s are over. Look up the CM-2 for a really radical architecture.

I would be very surprised if they slapped in an x86 desktop cpu. Those things have so much architectural baggage that their only real advantage is that they run all they stuff already made for them. This is one of the reasons that consoles with cheap 3 year old hardware can quasi-compete with PC gamming rigs.

You guys realize that a huge number of X360 and X360/PS3 games basically rely upon one HW thread to do the vast majority of game functionality, right?

Other threads do side work, like audio, streaming, OS stuff, but they're far from "busy", relative to the main thread. The only times when all cores are decently busy are during portions of the frame where parallel work is obvious.

As I mentioned above, doing tasks in parallel, which have the same memory access pattern, yields horrendous cache thrashing. (The Cell concept gets around this by not sharing quick-access memory with other cores/threads)

Adding more general purpose cores, with a shared cache (unless it was GIANT), would be... stupid.

The "next" Xenon would be perfectly fine as, for example, a quad core, with a larger cache, in the next gen. The only reason the Cell is "better" than the Xenon, as a CPU, is because it can basically absorb all the animation work (which must be done on the CPU) and all but the most basic vertex processing operations (like... projection), thus freeing the GPU to burn most of its cycles on pixel work.

The "Nextbox" would be plenty more powerful if it merely added more flexible pipelines to its GPU, to support more vertex processing work, thus freeing more for pixel work -- it suffers at the moment, because although it has more pipelines than the RSX, it needs to devote a large number of them to vertex processing (mesh skinning is good example, of something expensive the Xenos usually does on the X360, and the SPUs usually do on the PS3) during the frame, whereas the RSX gets everything spoon-fed to it, via the SPUs.

The device described in the original article basically describes a marginally more powerful CPU (I don't even think they need to go that far... 4 cores maybe.. not 6, if they are all sharing a L2 cache), but it could be describing a massively parallel GPU, which would basically embody everything the "next" generation of games would need.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt ?

Interesting stuff, I did hear they were going to use a rather unique processor for the next Xbox. So perhaps theres some truth in this? If they can make the software development enviroment efficient enough im sure they could plonk a pretty unique architecture down on the developers plates and they'll eat it up. Their work with developers is probably second to none and they seem to actually trust Microsofts tools to get the job done. I've heard this a couple of times 'The best tool for PS3 development is an Xbox 360 development kit!'

@Procrastinato: I would say that Microsoft would probably invest more of their transistor/die budget towards the GPU than the CPU because not only do people tend to notice visual improvements a lot more but also it works hand in hand with their development of Directx 11+ and Directx compute. So we could probably expect an architecture which goes quite beyond whatever the current standard for directx development is and that leans on the GPU for a lot of its parrellel processing.

Yeah we all aware but FUDDING is an acceptable posting behaviour in here so the only think we can do is be rational about it.

At least people aren't reposting from sonydefenseforce.com anymore lol. 

TeamXbox is reporting something in relation to this. Something about them waiting for 3D TVs to become widespread.

Squilliam said: I think alephnull is fighting against the X86 Intel monopoly. Hes in the process of making Windows run on the powerpc range of processors!

1) Intel and I are on good terms for the moment. They are beating the snot out of AMD simply because their fabs seem to always be a year ahead of everyone else. Microsoft's monopoly on the other hand....

2) Didn't MS already port a stripped down version of windows to there newest version of WebTV sporting a ppc chip? What was that box called again? Oh, yeah the xbox 360.

3) I would never port anything to PowerPC. Thats for mac users. Real programmers don't use lowercase letters, hence all my code for my POWER machine is in FORTRAN running on AIX.

If they can make the software development enviroment efficient enough im sure they could plonk a pretty unique architecture down on the developers plates and they'll eat it up.

Bah, they could take the same sdk Sony uses right now call it cell.net or cell# and tomorrow you'd have a hoard of developers led by the CEO of valve proclaiming it to be the pinnacle of human achievement. My guess is that you weren't around for the early days of DirectX or visual studio or MFC or OLE.

I've heard this a couple of times 'The best tool for PS3 development is an Xbox 360 development kit!'

That's just silly. But I guess I now understand why there are so many crappy PS3 ports. I've never heard of anyone using MS's performance analysis tools even on a windows machine.