6 ms·

Most hardware is sold with “works with existing software” as a selling point. Most software is sold with “works with existing hardware” as a selling point. Mo

Most hardware is sold with “works with existing software” as a selling point. Most software is sold with “works with existing hardware” as a selling point. Most vendors don't have the luxury of being able tailor both to eachother.

crote 3y ago
Yeah, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. You're not going to have any luck selling hardware which performs subpar with existing software, and nobody is willing to adapt software to an obscure hardware platform. We saw the result with Intel Itanium: great concept, absolute failure due to software incompatibility. On the other hand, the PS3's Cell architecture demonstrated that innovative platforms aren't impossible given the right incentives.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  PS3 is probably the only console generation that Sony lost. Not the best example.
  - Anarch157a 3y ago
    They lost because tge winner of that generation was the Wii, wich won because of it's gimmicky motion controller and good library of party games. Something simmilar is happening now with thw Switch. In both cases, being much cheaper doesn't hurt. But compared to the Xbox, PS3 "won" at the tail end of the generation, I would credit this to the supperior exclusive titles and the sales outside US. In Europe, Japan an South America, Playstation sells a lot more than Xbox. Where I live (Brazil) almost no one buys Xbox. As an anecdote, in 20 years, I met only one person who owned one (a X360) and several who had Playstations. And the X360 owner only had it because she worked at Microsoft and got it as a gift from the company.
    - dontlaugh 3y ago
      In the UK and US, it was mostly the other way around with the 360 being much more common.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        MS has the home team advantage here in the US, so you’d certainly hope they’d win here at least!
    - justapassenger 3y ago
      Could that be related with PS3, IIRC, being, easier to play "backup" games than X360?
      - twisteriffic 3y ago
        Or the PS3 being a cheap and consistently upgraded BluRay player. I bought a slim as soon as they came out as a BluRay and media player. It was cheaper than about 95% of the other offerings at the time, had a way better UI and remote, and wasn't going to get locked out when content keys were rolled. It supported upnp media playback, so I could stick a mediatomb machine in a closet and use a nice remote and UI in the living room. A side benefit being that you can get dirt cheap laser modules and keep it going forever.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Graviton has shown that is not entirely true.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    Graviton isn't a novel arch it piggyback on billions and years invested on mobile.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    What Graviton really shows is that if the performance is there, open source can be readily available - if you use PostgreSQL or Krita or Audacity or Ffmpeg, you don't need to think much about what the ISA is as long as it supports your OS of choice. What open source software does is to turn hardware architecture into a commodity. Itanium and Alpha, it seems, were a bit too early to this party.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  The PS3 Cell was just as much a conceptional dead end as Itanium though (Sony would have been better off using an off-the-shelf CPU design and a slightly more powerful GPU to make up for the missing Cell SPUs - which is pretty much what the PS4 then did - hindsight is 20/20 of course).
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    On the contrary, Sony didn't had an "AMD" to pull their carpet off, and many game devs actually see GPU compute adoption for graphics engines as revalidating PS3's design.
    - whizzter 3y ago
      Yes and no, "data oriented" designs do make sense for full GPU compute utilization by not becoming bottlenecked by memory speeds, but the main problem with the PS2 VU and later improved PS3 Cell design (it's a straight evolutionary line since the mode of working was more or less the same) was that you had to spend a lot of time on the chore of shuffling data in/out of the processor and had to handle the limited memory of those units with no escape hatch. On the contrary, even if you better not access memory too randomly to get full performance with GPU compute, today you can often access gigabytes of memory randomly IF needed (PS3 Cell had 256kb.. but you were double or triple-buffering for send/receive so effectively it was less) and even if it's better avoided it gives a whole lot of freedom in practice. Doing RTX style raytracing would've been doomed on the Cell.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Not necessarly, there were many creating uses of Cell from developers with background on demoscene, no need to transfer data around all the time. Which are the same kind of features driving mesh shaders, or more recently, DirectX work graphs. It doesn't have to be RTX style raytracing.
        whizzter 3y ago
        Yes, you could always do creative stuff with limited resources. My point was rather that while it's possible to crank out cool stuff even on PS3 Cell's (and the lessons learned from that era has been useful afterwards), the mere ability to "randomly" traverse memory IF needed allows developers to do even more tricks that become troublesome if you don't have the ability. I took RTX style raytracing as my own current demoscene stuff is doing raytracing with just compute shaders (not needing actual RTX support)
- bell-cot 3y ago
  That I recall, Itanium's major problems were: - A flawed theoretical basis (super-smart compilers and VLIW CPU architectures were the key to faster general-purpose computing performance) - Many, many years of design/development delays before Intel actually shipped working hardware - Competing CPU architectures (x86, RISC, etc.) increased their performance enormously during Itanium's delay years - When you finally could get Itanium systems with decent performance...they were damned expensive, and their bang-for-the-buck performance was mediocre at best.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  > Yeah, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. You're not going to have any luck selling hardware which performs subpar with existing software Apple did it three times with the Mac 68K -> PPC -> x86 -> ARM
  - xattt 3y ago
    Apple did a lot of backend work as well as developer shepherding in order to make that happen.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      And honestly Apple really only cares about its first party applications, Microsoft, Adobe and a few other high end applications. Microsoft has to care about niche vertical market apps that will never be updated.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I’m sure Apple is the entity that caused the caveat. > Most vendors don't have the luxury of being able tailor both to eachother.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      I should have been more explicit. My comment was a supporting comment not a repudiation of what the parent poster said.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    I don't remember any cases of 68K software performing better on 68K macs than under emulation on PPC ones - parts of MacOS were still 68K code running under emulation until past the point booting MacOS on 68K was no longer possible. The same was true for x86 - by the time Apple started selling x86 machines, the x86's were so much faster than even G5's it was hard to notice any slowdown. And, while I assume there are uses in which some x86 MacPros still perform better than their ARM counterparts (1.5 TB of RAM must help), those are far and in-between.

crote 3y ago

Yeah, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. You're not going to have any luck selling hardware which performs subpar with existing software, and nobody is willing to adapt software to an obscure hardware platform. We saw the result with Intel Itanium: great concept, absolute failure due to software incompatibility. On the other hand, the PS3's Cell architecture demonstrated that innovative platforms aren't impossible given the right incentives.

KptMarchewa 3y ago
PS3 is probably the only console generation that Sony lost. Not the best example.
- Anarch157a 3y ago
  They lost because tge winner of that generation was the Wii, wich won because of it's gimmicky motion controller and good library of party games. Something simmilar is happening now with thw Switch. In both cases, being much cheaper doesn't hurt. But compared to the Xbox, PS3 "won" at the tail end of the generation, I would credit this to the supperior exclusive titles and the sales outside US. In Europe, Japan an South America, Playstation sells a lot more than Xbox. Where I live (Brazil) almost no one buys Xbox. As an anecdote, in 20 years, I met only one person who owned one (a X360) and several who had Playstations. And the X360 owner only had it because she worked at Microsoft and got it as a gift from the company.
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    In the UK and US, it was mostly the other way around with the 360 being much more common.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      MS has the home team advantage here in the US, so you’d certainly hope they’d win here at least!
  - justapassenger 3y ago
    Could that be related with PS3, IIRC, being, easier to play "backup" games than X360?
    - twisteriffic 3y ago
      Or the PS3 being a cheap and consistently upgraded BluRay player. I bought a slim as soon as they came out as a BluRay and media player. It was cheaper than about 95% of the other offerings at the time, had a way better UI and remote, and wasn't going to get locked out when content keys were rolled. It supported upnp media playback, so I could stick a mediatomb machine in a closet and use a nice remote and UI in the living room. A side benefit being that you can get dirt cheap laser modules and keep it going forever.
fbdab103 3y ago
Graviton has shown that is not entirely true.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Graviton isn't a novel arch it piggyback on billions and years invested on mobile.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  What Graviton really shows is that if the performance is there, open source can be readily available - if you use PostgreSQL or Krita or Audacity or Ffmpeg, you don't need to think much about what the ISA is as long as it supports your OS of choice. What open source software does is to turn hardware architecture into a commodity. Itanium and Alpha, it seems, were a bit too early to this party.
flohofwoe 3y ago
The PS3 Cell was just as much a conceptional dead end as Itanium though (Sony would have been better off using an off-the-shelf CPU design and a slightly more powerful GPU to make up for the missing Cell SPUs - which is pretty much what the PS4 then did - hindsight is 20/20 of course).
- pjmlp 3y ago
  On the contrary, Sony didn't had an "AMD" to pull their carpet off, and many game devs actually see GPU compute adoption for graphics engines as revalidating PS3's design.
  - whizzter 3y ago
    Yes and no, "data oriented" designs do make sense for full GPU compute utilization by not becoming bottlenecked by memory speeds, but the main problem with the PS2 VU and later improved PS3 Cell design (it's a straight evolutionary line since the mode of working was more or less the same) was that you had to spend a lot of time on the chore of shuffling data in/out of the processor and had to handle the limited memory of those units with no escape hatch. On the contrary, even if you better not access memory too randomly to get full performance with GPU compute, today you can often access gigabytes of memory randomly IF needed (PS3 Cell had 256kb.. but you were double or triple-buffering for send/receive so effectively it was less) and even if it's better avoided it gives a whole lot of freedom in practice. Doing RTX style raytracing would've been doomed on the Cell.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Not necessarly, there were many creating uses of Cell from developers with background on demoscene, no need to transfer data around all the time. Which are the same kind of features driving mesh shaders, or more recently, DirectX work graphs. It doesn't have to be RTX style raytracing.
      - whizzter 3y ago
        Yes, you could always do creative stuff with limited resources. My point was rather that while it's possible to crank out cool stuff even on PS3 Cell's (and the lessons learned from that era has been useful afterwards), the mere ability to "randomly" traverse memory IF needed allows developers to do even more tricks that become troublesome if you don't have the ability. I took RTX style raytracing as my own current demoscene stuff is doing raytracing with just compute shaders (not needing actual RTX support)
bell-cot 3y ago
That I recall, Itanium's major problems were: - A flawed theoretical basis (super-smart compilers and VLIW CPU architectures were the key to faster general-purpose computing performance) - Many, many years of design/development delays before Intel actually shipped working hardware - Competing CPU architectures (x86, RISC, etc.) increased their performance enormously during Itanium's delay years - When you finally could get Itanium systems with decent performance...they were damned expensive, and their bang-for-the-buck performance was mediocre at best.
scarface_74 3y ago
> Yeah, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. You're not going to have any luck selling hardware which performs subpar with existing software Apple did it three times with the Mac 68K -> PPC -> x86 -> ARM
- xattt 3y ago
  Apple did a lot of backend work as well as developer shepherding in order to make that happen.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    And honestly Apple really only cares about its first party applications, Microsoft, Adobe and a few other high end applications. Microsoft has to care about niche vertical market apps that will never be updated.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I’m sure Apple is the entity that caused the caveat. > Most vendors don't have the luxury of being able tailor both to eachother.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    I should have been more explicit. My comment was a supporting comment not a repudiation of what the parent poster said.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  I don't remember any cases of 68K software performing better on 68K macs than under emulation on PPC ones - parts of MacOS were still 68K code running under emulation until past the point booting MacOS on 68K was no longer possible. The same was true for x86 - by the time Apple started selling x86 machines, the x86's were so much faster than even G5's it was hard to notice any slowdown. And, while I assume there are uses in which some x86 MacPros still perform better than their ARM counterparts (1.5 TB of RAM must help), those are far and in-between.