In a recent keynote at High Performance Graphics 2009 ( http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/archive/SweeneyHPG2009/TimHPG2009.pdf pgs 70 and 71 ) Tim Sweeney, technical director of Epic Games, said:

"Developers must be willing to sacrifice performance in order to gain productivity.

...

Easier hardware beats faster hardware!"

and

"If it costs X (time, money, pain) to develop an efficient single-threaded algorithm, then…

- Multithreaded version costs 2X
- PlayStation 3 Cell version costs 5X
...

Over 2X is uneconomical for most software companies!

This is an argument against:

- Hardware that requires difficult programming techniques
- Non-unified memory architectures"

Could it be that the biggest mistake Sony made with the PS3 was using the Cell, a chip which is ~2.5 times costlier in time, money and "pain" to develop for, than the other multicore chips? Is this trend going to ballast the Sony console the entire generation, where only first and second party studios have the time and budget to extract that extra bit of performance of it?

he better get used it, because multi thread it's the future.
now intel and IBM cpu are way over 8 cores. so more than the cell.
and future cpu are going to be multi core, and multi SPE. making more complex.

and PC have unified memory architecture, this isn't really a plus but a minus,
cpu and gpu sharing memory have it downsize, either way integrated chips would be outperforming dedicated DDR3-5 GPus now.
360 aids itself with a fast 10mb , but that isn't enough for a full msx2 and HDR fp 16 720p, thats why we get a 640p halo: reach upscaled to 720p --> 1080p.

Gears of War 2nd party exclusive developer, Epic, verifies that they want MS' business after a public talk!

Also in breaking news, Microsoft issues docs in 2006 claiming that the 360 architecture is profoundly awesome in comparison to the competition.

And, Valve's Gabe Newell insults the PS3... again!

Full story at 11.

...sorry, couldn't help myself.

The funniest part of Tim Sweeney's presentation is the part where he goes on and on about doing software rendering sometime in the 2012-2020 timeframe, and goes on to point out that architectures like the Cell as basically the future.  Then later, he knocks true multicore architectures (like the Cell) with the comments above.  Fascinating.

2nd party means they only develope on that platform.  considering the fact that the ps3 has unreal tournament (got it before 360 even) then this isn't true.  There is also that the fact that a huge amount of games on the ps3 use unreal engine technology.  Epic is very much a 3rd party.  Sweeney is just talking about how he can get performance much quicker on easier to develope for platforms. 

I don't really see multi-threading as the future on the desktop. On the server they have 6 cores (Intel and AMD) [Not 8 yet] and that will be 12 early next year with Magny-Cours, but on the desktop except for the $1000+ CPU price point it will be all quad-cores until 2011 at least.

Server apps scale with more cores, but desktop apps don't - and don't need to; most consumer apps are either GPU-bound (games, media encoding, rendering) or don't actually benefit from faster hardware noticeably (Office).

PCs don't have unified memory, the CPU has RAM and the GPU has VRAM. Integrated graphics that use main RAM are much slower due to high latencies and low bandwidth. GPUs will eventually be on the CPU package but this isn't happening to high-end GPUs in the foreseeable future (Clarkdale/Llano are IGPs basically).

RAM is not the main bottleneck on either console. GPU power is, and the 360 has more in most cases unless you use the Cell to render which no one does.

Can the Cell be used to render ?

Why doesnt the PS3 make more use of this function and bring up graphical performance ?

What was he doing at that conference? the Unreal Engine is not a high performance graphics engine.

Because it isn't very fast at that compared to the GPU.

I think in context his comments make sense.

What's interesting is his slides on bypassing DirectX AIP, etc. given that MS demands on 360 you use DirectX even though if you bypassed it you could potentially save costs and improve results.

Also, this echoes comments from id that the big drive now isn't massive graphical jumps, but productivity and ease of development improvements.

who said desktop ? but rather gaming PCs and consoles and there are multi thread servers, IBM road runner it's a cluster of cell processors.

and IGP take ram from main pool, for IGP, especially for notebooks almost 50% of notebooks sold in 2007 had intel gma 950 which share ram, a dedicated gpu should be faster.

a pc with 3gb ram, vs a pc with 2gb + 1gb on the gpu same spec, the dedicated one would be faster.