This is pretty good overview. One fun tricks we would regularly do was move all the background audio off the disk and into GPU ram. We'd stream just enough that

This is pretty good overview. One fun tricks we would regularly do was move all the background audio off the disk and into GPU ram. We'd stream just enough that we wouldn't saturate the bus but could get back 20-30mb of system memory. There was also that time we ran out of open file handles ahead of key demo at one of the tradeshows. I remember rewriting the whole audio streaming subsystem to piggyback on the seekfree texture loading system so that we could use the that single big file as a source for both streaming texture and audio data. Did that in 24 hours less than 2 days ahead of the show, fun times. [Edit] Another fun thing from that era was that almost no one other than the in-house Sony Studios used the SPUs well. X360 came out just ahead and had tooling that was miles ahead(PIX!) so everyone started from the X360. None of the workloads we're vectorized so it was absolutely brutal to get them to fit into the SPUs. For a long time a good chunk of that silicon was just idle. If you did start from the PS3 though because of the vectorized workloads you had insane cache coeheranch and usually ran better on the X360/PC as well.