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It's a shame in a way. I remember the reports about the Cell architecture for the PS3. By all accounts it wasn't easy to program for, but that was a hell of an
by ljm 7y ago
It's a shame in a way. I remember the reports about the Cell architecture for the PS3. By all accounts it wasn't easy to program for, but that was a hell of an innovation only to fall back to the standard PC arch. Impressive as hell but it took game devs a long time to make the most of it; and then they did in spades. You only have to track the trajectory of Uncharted in the space of a console generation to see what that architecture could do. It must have informed Naughty Dog's design ever since because they haven't suffered from rolling back to a traditional chipset.
It was a different world though, PowerPC was still alive and strong back then.
The PS4 does continue the trend but I think that's more a question of time and investment rather than pure tech considering they have a steady trickle of top notch exclusives.
- voldacar 7y agoThe homogenization of compute hardware is indeed very depressing
- eru 7y agoThe rise of ARM via mobile devices is a nice antidote. The different ARMs don't even share a common instruction sets, I think.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y agoI prototyped some physics modeling on the Cell BE. Having Linux on it was a huge help, but it definitely was an odd beast to program for. One thing that made it practical to work with was that we could install Linux on a PS3. When Sony retroactively killed the ability to install Linux, they did more than make PS3 irrelevant to supercomputing. They made me deeply skeptical of relying on a technology with a single-vendor gatekeeper.
- ljm 7y agoFor the sake of the environment and not throwing away hundreds of thousands of perfectly functional computers I hope they will change that situation. If nothing else, it's going to be a hacker's dream to play with such a unique chipset. It shouldn't die out. I'd love to poke into it myself. The only barrier is the language you have to use to speak with it.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y agoI suppose there are multiple measures of environmental-friendly. I would guess that the ps3 offer pretty bad flops per Watt compared to newer hardware.
- ljm 7y agoI'm more curious about the subsequent death of PowerPC. Back in the day we had a decent amount of hardware running on that chip. But on benchmark levels Cell would be competing on different grounds to an X64 and a few PCIe slots right? I've not a clue, I'm curious but I know I don't really know what I'm talking about after this point.
- milesvp 7y agoI got two big take aways from reading naughty dog’s blog about what they learned from the cell. the cell really taught them the trade off between latancy and throughput. That by batching up computations they could do orders of magnitude more than naive pipelining. But, to get that good batching, they had to compromise on framerate. Which gets to the second big takeaway, which was that standard deviation in the framerate was more important than the framerate and by keeping the framerate low they could also drastically reduce standard deviation in the framerate (Incidently I understand that this was something the amiga demoscene really understood, and low S.D. was a must for any text marquee to look completely smooth).