3 ms·
I wonder if the Cell microarchitecture will make a comeback someday in some form.
by layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
I wonder if the Cell microarchitecture will make a comeback someday in some form.
- lproven 7y agoI doubt it. As shipped, it was profoundly broken. Charlie Demerjian did a good exposé on this for the Inquirer, but the page has been taken down. Here is a blog post that references it, though: http://topofcool.com/blog/2006/06/05/sony-suicide-watch-ps3-hardware-not-looking-good/ http://topofcool.com/blog/2006/06/05/sony-suicide-watch-ps3-... The memory read speeds for the SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements, or "APUs" these days) was horrible. It was about 3 orders of magnitude slower than it was meant to be. This is why the chip basically died. Memory read speeds for the SPUs were impossibly slow, meaning that they were crippled into uselessness, AIUI.
- lproven 7y agoSome additional commentary from a blog analysing the Inq's story: https://assemblergames.com/threads/ps3-concerns-cell-architecture-has-very-serious-flaws.10201/ https://assemblergames.com/threads/ps3-concerns-cell-archite... «It means that no more than three of the SPE's can talk to the memory controller at one time using full capacity. Four SPE's will fill the bus, and the CPU controller will not be able to access the memory at all. [...] What you can do is have all the SPE's work at the same time, but using nowhere near the capacity they each have. Basically the PS3 gets punished for performing well, and tweaking cell for better results in the future seems to be a nightmare if not impossible. »