5 ms·

Ahh, the old "triangles as an absolute measurement of power" fallacy. Shame on you Ars, shame shame. Still, an amusing headline given that among developers the

by ajg1977 16y ago

Ahh, the old "triangles as an absolute measurement of power" fallacy. Shame on you Ars, shame shame. Still, an amusing headline given that among developers the RSX (the PS3 GPU) is widely acknowledged to be a bit lacking. One of the big challenges of PS3 development these days is figuring out how to move basically everything onto SPUs and leave the RSX as a basic rasterizer.

rbanffy 16y ago
Three (two-and-a-half) symmetric ARM cores seem to be easier to program than a PPC and an entourage of SPUs. One of the things that always made me wonder about Cell's future is that it looks devilishly hard to program. Wouldn't things like OpenCL sort of ease that pain? IIRC, IBM is one of the companies behind it.
- Samuel_Michon 16y ago
  "OpenCL was initially developed by Apple Inc., which holds trademark rights, and refined into an initial proposal in collaboration with technical teams at AMD, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia. Apple submitted this initial proposal to the Khronos Group. On June 16, 2008 the Khronos Compute Working Group was formed with representatives from CPU, GPU, embedded-processor, and software companies. This group worked for five months to finish the technical details of the specification for OpenCL 1.0 by November 18, 2008. This technical specification was reviewed by the Khronos members and approved for public release on December 8, 2008" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    IBM has http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/opencl http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/opencl for Linux on PowerPC. It covers Cell.
- gamble 16y ago
  Many game companies already have proprietary libraries to manage the SPUs. It's still a struggle to make PS3 games look as good as the 360. In fact, I know there are at least a couple of games where the 360 version is crippled to match the lesser quality the developers could wring out of the PS3.

by ajg1977 16y ago

rbanffy 16y ago

Three (two-and-a-half) symmetric ARM cores seem to be easier to program than a PPC and an entourage of SPUs. One of the things that always made me wonder about Cell's future is that it looks devilishly hard to program. Wouldn't things like OpenCL sort of ease that pain? IIRC, IBM is one of the companies behind it.

Samuel_Michon 16y ago
"OpenCL was initially developed by Apple Inc., which holds trademark rights, and refined into an initial proposal in collaboration with technical teams at AMD, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia. Apple submitted this initial proposal to the Khronos Group. On June 16, 2008 the Khronos Compute Working Group was formed with representatives from CPU, GPU, embedded-processor, and software companies. This group worked for five months to finish the technical details of the specification for OpenCL 1.0 by November 18, 2008. This technical specification was reviewed by the Khronos members and approved for public release on December 8, 2008" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
- rbanffy 16y ago
  IBM has http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/opencl http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/opencl for Linux on PowerPC. It covers Cell.
gamble 16y ago
Many game companies already have proprietary libraries to manage the SPUs. It's still a struggle to make PS3 games look as good as the 360. In fact, I know there are at least a couple of games where the 360 version is crippled to match the lesser quality the developers could wring out of the PS3.