5 ms·

Interestingly Sony went the other way with the PS4, Moving to x86. any ideas why?

• douche 10y ago
  Possibly because developing games for the weird PS3 Cell architecture turned out to be so complicated, particularly for games that were intended to be cross-platform with x86 XBox and PC platforms.
• buddapalm 10y ago
  Most certainly this was a COGS decision (keep costs of parts and development to a minimum)
• esjeon 10y ago
  - Heterogeneous architecture made game development a lot harder. - Engines had to be re-implemented for PS3, because Cell is simply too different. (Note: Xbox is almost-PC, so it attracts lots of devs.) - Cell architecture isn't good for games, honestly. Cell CPU has bunch of stream processors, but has only one (or few?) general purpose core.
  • snuxoll 10y ago
    You're correct, honestly it seemed like Sony was expecting ALL the graphics work to be done on the SPU's. The whole design of the Cell Broadband Engine is basically one SMT PowerPC core (PPU) and a bunch of stream processors (SPU's). Considering their choice in an extremely weak GPU compared to the Xenos in the 360, a lot of games had to move a bunch of work off the GPU and write it for the SPU's instead (which were nowhere near as nice to work with, they couldn't just pull data from system memory without you passing a pointer to them that was translated to an address they could DMA from, and you couldn't just throw GL or RSX commands at them so you were stuck writing all the nitty gritty by yourself).