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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 p

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)
yvdriess 3y ago
That's also essentially what the PS3 was. Plenty of developers ended up ignoring the SPUs and treating the Cell as a regular off-the-shelf POWER processor.

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)

yvdriess 3y ago

That's also essentially what the PS3 was. Plenty of developers ended up ignoring the SPUs and treating the Cell as a regular off-the-shelf POWER processor.