3 ms·

>The highly parallel computer architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun workstations and Intel x86 machines)

>The highly parallel computer architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun workstations and Intel x86 machines). Strangely enough, a decade or so later Sony tried an exotic architecture with its PS3 only to go back to a generalist x86/x64 architecture with the PS4. Funny how the top-down approaches fail compared to bottom up 'kitchen sink' approaches almost consistently and how so many countries and companies never learn this lesson. The West didn't panic from what I can tell. AMD and Intel kept raising transistor density and clock speeds and kept giving their customers what they wanted via a competitive market approach.

arethuza 10y ago
Those ESPRIT projects I worked on tended to have very nice Sun workstations as their standard machines - when we maxed out the RAM on a 4/330 someone actually flew from London to Edinburgh just to fit it! Not sure if the research was worth the money but we certainly did eat well.
jdmichal 10y ago
Was that because the PS3 architecture was a failure? Or was it because many game developers are interested in cross-platform releases (many consoles and PC), and having an oddball architecture makes that harder for your platform to get those releases?
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  A little from column A, a little from column B. On the one hand, the PS3's weird architecture made porting older PC game engines (like Bethesda's Gamebryo, which drives Skyrim and Fallout 3+) extremely difficult, and much-anticipated Skyrim DLCs were long-delayed by problems that existed on the PS3 but no other platform Gamebryo supports. On the other hand, once Xbox 360 games started getting ported to PS3 and the graphics were compared across the two systems, the consensus was that the PS3 really wasn't much more graphically powerful at all. There was one sports game in particular (boxing? I can't recall-- it's been too many years) that was a particularly telling case because the PS3 port had had something like 6-8 months of extra optimization work, and despite that the launch-day Xbox 360 version of the same game looked and played better. "Failure" is strong; obviously the PS3 wasn't a failure as a gaming system. But its weird architecture certainly didn't deliver the benefits Sony claimed it would, and it definitely made things more difficult on game developers.
Retric 10y ago
The 2 x 4 = 8 core PS4 CPU vs. the 1 main + 8 mini core PS3 is not exactly a large leap back. Cross platform games and a much improved CPU's pushed Sony to a more main stream product, but you can also see the PS3 as an arguable precursor to modern systems. The basic problem is it's hard to find tasks that scale out past ~8 cores really well yet can't just go to the GPU.

arethuza 10y ago

Those ESPRIT projects I worked on tended to have very nice Sun workstations as their standard machines - when we maxed out the RAM on a 4/330 someone actually flew from London to Edinburgh just to fit it! Not sure if the research was worth the money but we certainly did eat well.

jdmichal 10y ago

Was that because the PS3 architecture was a failure? Or was it because many game developers are interested in cross-platform releases (many consoles and PC), and having an oddball architecture makes that harder for your platform to get those releases?

blakeyrat 10y ago
A little from column A, a little from column B. On the one hand, the PS3's weird architecture made porting older PC game engines (like Bethesda's Gamebryo, which drives Skyrim and Fallout 3+) extremely difficult, and much-anticipated Skyrim DLCs were long-delayed by problems that existed on the PS3 but no other platform Gamebryo supports. On the other hand, once Xbox 360 games started getting ported to PS3 and the graphics were compared across the two systems, the consensus was that the PS3 really wasn't much more graphically powerful at all. There was one sports game in particular (boxing? I can't recall-- it's been too many years) that was a particularly telling case because the PS3 port had had something like 6-8 months of extra optimization work, and despite that the launch-day Xbox 360 version of the same game looked and played better. "Failure" is strong; obviously the PS3 wasn't a failure as a gaming system. But its weird architecture certainly didn't deliver the benefits Sony claimed it would, and it definitely made things more difficult on game developers.

Retric 10y ago

The 2 x 4 = 8 core PS4 CPU vs. the 1 main + 8 mini core PS3 is not exactly a large leap back. Cross platform games and a much improved CPU's pushed Sony to a more main stream product, but you can also see the PS3 as an arguable precursor to modern systems. The basic problem is it's hard to find tasks that scale out past ~8 cores really well yet can't just go to the GPU.