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I always wondered who thought it was a good idea to make a gaming console with seven cores in 2006. iirc, most pc games at the time barely used more than one th

I always wondered who thought it was a good idea to make a gaming console with seven cores in 2006. iirc, most pc games at the time barely used more than one thread. even in 2020, most games have a main thread that pegs one core at 100% and creates a hard ceiling for fps. what were they thinking?

klodolph 7y ago
Maybe they took some cues from the people who released an eight-processor system in 1994? Granted, only two of those are CPUs.
wmf 7y ago
The PS3 originally planned to run the game on the PPE and shaders on the SPEs; you could think of it as a single-core CPU with a 7-core GPU on one chip. At some point they realized this wasn't powerful enough so they added the RSX but that left the SPEs with no particular job to do. It was too late to redesign Cell so they just shipped it and punted the problem to game developers. In retrospect, a G5+RSX with unified memory probably would have been much better.
- stordoff 7y ago
  > In retrospect, a G5+RSX with unified memory probably would have been much better. Which is not _that_ far from what the 360 ended up with. The 360 CPU is basically a triple-core variant of the the Cell without the SPEs, and it has 512MB unified memory.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    I'll throw out there that a G5 was never in the cards from a count count budget perspective.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      *from a gate count perspective
- monocasa 7y ago
  It was supposed to have two Cells, with one of them focused on rasterization (sort of like larrabee). To meet that, they were expecting to clock it to 4GHz. It's really one of the first casualties in the end of Moore's law. And I'd say that the SPEs were fantastic, and in a lot of ways was the only thing making up for the anemic GPU. It took a while for game devs to orient their thinking from "this thread is the render thread, this thread is the physics thread" to "this is the dependency graph of work that needs to be done, have all the (even heterogeneous) cores picking work off of that graph and completing them as fast as possible in order", but that was the right direction to go either way. That's about the only way to take advantage of the PS4/Xbone effectively too.

klodolph 7y ago

Maybe they took some cues from the people who released an eight-processor system in 1994? Granted, only two of those are CPUs.

wmf 7y ago

The PS3 originally planned to run the game on the PPE and shaders on the SPEs; you could think of it as a single-core CPU with a 7-core GPU on one chip. At some point they realized this wasn't powerful enough so they added the RSX but that left the SPEs with no particular job to do. It was too late to redesign Cell so they just shipped it and punted the problem to game developers. In retrospect, a G5+RSX with unified memory probably would have been much better.

stordoff 7y ago
> In retrospect, a G5+RSX with unified memory probably would have been much better. Which is not _that_ far from what the 360 ended up with. The 360 CPU is basically a triple-core variant of the the Cell without the SPEs, and it has 512MB unified memory.
- monocasa 7y ago
  I'll throw out there that a G5 was never in the cards from a count count budget perspective.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    *from a gate count perspective
monocasa 7y ago
It was supposed to have two Cells, with one of them focused on rasterization (sort of like larrabee). To meet that, they were expecting to clock it to 4GHz. It's really one of the first casualties in the end of Moore's law. And I'd say that the SPEs were fantastic, and in a lot of ways was the only thing making up for the anemic GPU. It took a while for game devs to orient their thinking from "this thread is the render thread, this thread is the physics thread" to "this is the dependency graph of work that needs to be done, have all the (even heterogeneous) cores picking work off of that graph and completing them as fast as possible in order", but that was the right direction to go either way. That's about the only way to take advantage of the PS4/Xbone effectively too.