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Forums - Sony - Cell Processor: "Dead In The Water"

alephnull on 24 November 2009
NJ5 said:

theprof00 of course it's harder to develop for. No amount of "it's just different" platitudes are gonna change that.

First of all, it's asymmetric, which means you have to write code differently for the PPE and SPE if you want to exploit them to the max. This does not happen with most other gaming CPUs, where you have a single core design replicated several times.

Second of all, it has more cores which means you have to program more threads (a gaming engine is not trivially parallelizable).

Objectively, the Cell is harder to develop for. If someone says otherwise they're either ignorant or lying.

Your languages analogy is also flawed. For example even though my native language is Portuguese, I am perfectly able to realize that Portuguese verbs are much harder than English verbs.

 

Objectively a GPU is harder to program for than the cell.



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NJ5 on 24 November 2009
alephnull said:
NJ5 said:

theprof00 of course it's harder to develop for. No amount of "it's just different" platitudes are gonna change that.

First of all, it's asymmetric, which means you have to write code differently for the PPE and SPE if you want to exploit them to the max. This does not happen with most other gaming CPUs, where you have a single core design replicated several times.

Second of all, it has more cores which means you have to program more threads (a gaming engine is not trivially parallelizable).

Objectively, the Cell is harder to develop for. If someone says otherwise they're either ignorant or lying.

Your languages analogy is also flawed. For example even though my native language is Portuguese, I am perfectly able to realize that Portuguese verbs are much harder than English verbs.

 

Objectively a GPU is harder to program for than the cell.

Yeah but most people don't use GPUs for general-purpose programming.

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

alephnull on 24 November 2009
NJ5 said:
alephnull said:
NJ5 said:

theprof00 of course it's harder to develop for. No amount of "it's just different" platitudes are gonna change that.

First of all, it's asymmetric, which means you have to write code differently for the PPE and SPE if you want to exploit them to the max. This does not happen with most other gaming CPUs, where you have a single core design replicated several times.

Second of all, it has more cores which means you have to program more threads (a gaming engine is not trivially parallelizable).

Objectively, the Cell is harder to develop for. If someone says otherwise they're either ignorant or lying.

Your languages analogy is also flawed. For example even though my native language is Portuguese, I am perfectly able to realize that Portuguese verbs are much harder than English verbs.

 

Objectively a GPU is harder to program for than the cell.

Yeah but most people don't use GPUs for general-purpose programming.

 

Maybe, maybe not. But the point is ease of development is sacrificed in favor of performance. This is a valid tradeoff in my mind irrespective of one's opinion of the cell and sony.



alephnull on 24 November 2009
Deneidez said:
theprof00 said:
damndl0ser said:

Are you serious?  So your saying that it is better to have an exotic architecture that no one knows how to program for and it takes a year or 2 before anyone can master?  Think about what you just said and how foolish it sounds.

 

If a platform is easier to program for the development house can spend more time polishing their product instead of just figuring out ways to make it work.  It would also make said studio more profitable, because their product could be released a lot faster.  It would be a win win for everyone not just for Sony.

 

I'm going to write a thread about this tomorrow maybe.

Here's a taste. Sony doesn't want their games to be easily ported to the PC.

The cell isn't harder to develop for. Rather it's different. It's new and there is a learning curve. Think about other languages. Other languages aren't harder to express, they are just different and alien.

 

Yes, think about some small african tribe language with only few users. Afterwards you have only wasted your time learning it because nobody else talks it except the tribe with whom you have been living with. I know, someone must do that job too, but forcing all people to learn it is stupid. Its the same as with ps2. If you are able optimize stuff on ps2 and make wonders with EE, it really doesn't help with PS3. Thats what Sony is doing all over. Its nicely rewarding them with big losses and actually it serves them well too, arrogant bastards. :)

There's nothing stopping developers from doing all their work in Java.



NJ5 on 24 November 2009
alephnull said:

Maybe, maybe not. But the point is ease of development is sacrificed in favor of performance. This is a valid tradeoff in my mind irrespective of one's opinion of the cell and sony.

Maybe that's your point, but that's not the point I was discussing :P

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

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0cton on 24 November 2009

cell is not dead, at least 20 million future ps3's will have cell, let's not forget maybe in some HDTV's that toshiba announced and even supercomputers you are missing the point here, if it is no longer considered the "future" it doesn't mean it's dead :\



Shoestar on 24 November 2009

"IBM Denies Pulling Out Of Cell Development

A news story that appear in an influential German online technology website has apparently convinced many that IBM will stop the development of the highly successful Cell processor.

The processor, which is present in a number of high profile products like Toshiba's own range of LCD television and the Sony Playstation 3 gaming console, will not be developed by IBM beyond the PowerXCell 8i model according to Heise Online.

IBM's Vice President of Deep Computing, David Turek, said that there were no plans to update the latter. However, a spokesperson told Driverheaven that "only one CPU development cycle is being halted" and that IBM would be developing other CPUs in the Cell processor family including the successor the PS4 which should be with us by 2011.

This was corroborated by Kokatu to which IBM's Ron Favali told that "As long as we have a contract with Sony we will continue to manufacture Cell processors for use in the Sony PlayStation".

It has been further confirmed that IBM will be looking to branch into Hybrid multi-core processors designs that resemble Intel's Larrabee and AMD's Fusion in a bid to build more integrated solutions."

link: http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/11/24/ibm-denies-pulling-out-cell-development/



I am a Gamer... I play games and not consoles. I have a PC and Console on which I game... I like games. End of Story!

Ryusuken on 24 November 2009

Lets see, wee have a lot of Cell haters going wild because of first link, happy that the core of PS3 isnt going to be develop anymore. Then we got new info saying that one, only ONE, iteration of the Cell Architecture wont be developed anymore - the one IBM uses on SUPERCOMPUTERS, by the way - so we got a lot of PS3/Cell haters still going wild, but more contained, back to 2006/7 when it was a downright hell to develop a game for it. And now, the last info added, wich it means its quite problably that IBM and Sony will use a evolved Cell on PS4. Now I am waiting for the next excuses. I stated many times before, for it is MO, Sony isnt going 'revolution' next gen, but evolution.



Ryusuken on 24 November 2009
Lastgengamer said:

 

http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2009/11/23/cell-processor-dead-in-the-water/

The PS3’s innovative ‘Cell’ processor won’t be used in the PS4, according to reports this morning, claiming the chip is “dead in the water”. Apparently German website Heise Online has quoted IBM’s Vice President of Deep Computing, David Turek, saying the planned successor to the current processor, slated to have two PowerPC processors and 32 SPEs, will not be released. Extrapolated, then, you can summise that the Cell processor line is terminated, with the current PoweXCell 8i the last one off the production line.

The Cell, once stated to be in everything from games consoles to food blenders, was never particular quick at certain tasks, with a 1.4GHz Niagara already running 13 times faster than the 3.2GHz Cell at ‘long string pattern matching’, for example.

 

 

Update: It appears that the sourced article at Fudzilla isn’t quite the full story. Reading further into this,  the original German story at Heise actually states that it’s only the planned successor to the current PowerXCell-8i processor, slated to have two PowerPC processors and 32 SPEs, that will not be released. There’s no specific mention that IBM are halting the development of other Cell processors in the report, and thus there’s every chance that the PS4 could still use some variant of the Cell. Hope this clears up this story somewhat.

_____________________________________

But didn't Sony say that Cell would be used for years to come?

Quoted for the lazy +

http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/11/24/ibm-denies-pulling-out-cell-development/

For the new devlopments on it....



HappySqurriel on 24 November 2009

Actually GPUs are actually very easy to program for because their architecture is perfectly suited to the kinds of software (typically implementations of graphics APIs) that is developed for them.

In contrast, the Cell architecture is not well suited to videogame development (or general application development) and I expect Sony ignored rational arguments against this architecture because they believed that the PS3 would be so popular developers would be forced to become Cell experts to get decent performance out of it; and this may have seemed reasonable because this is exactly what happened with the PS2 and the Emotion Engine.

 

With that said, I wouldn't expect Sony to make another console which wasn't backwards compatible and I doubt that a decent emulator for the Cell could be produced and ran on a different architecture with reasonable performance (at an affordable price) for quite some time. This means that I would expect Sony to extend the Cell architecture in some way, or include the Cell processor in their next console, as a way to preserve backwards compatibility. The most obvious choice of how to use the Cell processor if you changed architecture would be to include it as an audio-processor.