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The IBM Cell, an architecture decried by many at the time, especially in the game industry (Gabe Newell's infamous rant), was right: A lot of specialized cores

The IBM Cell, an architecture decried by many at the time, especially in the game industry (Gabe Newell's infamous rant), was right: A lot of specialized cores managed by a few generic, all-purpose, cores. http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html

eikenberry 8y ago
I thought the big problem with the Cell architecture was that fully taking advantage of it was very difficult. Particularly as a gaming system where game engines have to be finely tuned to the hardware. Has this changed?
- jandrese 8y ago
  The big problem with Cell is that it didn't come with a graphics stack. Sony apparently thought developers would be OK with building their own geometry/T&L/etc... engines and then were kind of surprised when that idea turned out to be unpopular. They were then forced to bolt a traditional GPU on the side to appease the developers. Even if someone was crazy enough to build the entire graphics stack on the Cell, performance would likely not have been as good as a regular graphics card. It's hard to compete with hardware designed from the ground up for the task.
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    Software support (I took an IBM workshop on them) was atrocious. If they had a way to share parts of the SPU memory with a small block shared between adjacent units, it'd be much easier to build a GPU-like thing out of them. The way they were delivered, it was just torture.
- vvanders 8y ago
  The real problem with Cell is it came after X360. Everyone had written and/or ported their engines for heterogeneous computing architectures with no addressing limits(PS3 Cell had max 256kb per SPU). If you but your engine for PS3 first and ported to X360 it generally ran faster due to better cache coeherancy. Sadly, few did that. Source: shipped a few titles from that era.

eikenberry 8y ago

I thought the big problem with the Cell architecture was that fully taking advantage of it was very difficult. Particularly as a gaming system where game engines have to be finely tuned to the hardware. Has this changed?

jandrese 8y ago
The big problem with Cell is that it didn't come with a graphics stack. Sony apparently thought developers would be OK with building their own geometry/T&L/etc... engines and then were kind of surprised when that idea turned out to be unpopular. They were then forced to bolt a traditional GPU on the side to appease the developers. Even if someone was crazy enough to build the entire graphics stack on the Cell, performance would likely not have been as good as a regular graphics card. It's hard to compete with hardware designed from the ground up for the task.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Software support (I took an IBM workshop on them) was atrocious. If they had a way to share parts of the SPU memory with a small block shared between adjacent units, it'd be much easier to build a GPU-like thing out of them. The way they were delivered, it was just torture.
vvanders 8y ago
The real problem with Cell is it came after X360. Everyone had written and/or ported their engines for heterogeneous computing architectures with no addressing limits(PS3 Cell had max 256kb per SPU). If you but your engine for PS3 first and ported to X360 it generally ran faster due to better cache coeherancy. Sadly, few did that. Source: shipped a few titles from that era.