5 ms·

For some reason, I am very fascinated by the architecture of PS3. Its complexity makes RPCS3 the most impressive emulator in my eyes. Though to be fair, all emu

For some reason, I am very fascinated by the architecture of PS3. Its complexity makes RPCS3 the most impressive emulator in my eyes. Though to be fair, all emulators are impressive one way or another.

zirgs 3y ago
The architecture is unnecessarily complicated and it turned out to be dead end. Which is why SONY dropped it and now uses x86 like everyone else.
- opan 3y ago
  Everything from this generation (PS3's Cell included) was some sort of PowerPC, many previous gens also had consoles using PPC or MIPS. Sony and MS went x86 during the same generation (PS4 and Xbox One). Nintendo went from PPC to ARM (though arguably they'd already used ARM for a while because of their handheld stuff).
  - ericlewis 3y ago
    OG Xbox was x86 and was released similar time as PS2. Then they went PPC for 360. And now back to x86.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    I believe the GP is referring to the entire computer architecture, not the instruction set architecture. I seem to recall that it had three distinct heterogenous processors that had to be coordinated to get the most out of the system, so porting from, say, PC to PS5 wasn't necessarily straightforward, without leaving performance on the table.
    - ChoGGi 3y ago
      The xbox 360 was the one with the triple CPU, PS3 had the odd combo of one "main" CPU and 7 auxiliary ones.
      - fluoridation 3y ago
        I think the 360 had a regular homogeneous tricore CPU, so programming it was just normal multithread programming. As you say the PS3 had several auxiliary processors that all needed to be told what to do in specific, non-portable ways, which is what made it inconvenient to work with.
      - hughesjj 3y ago
        Iirc there were 8 chiplets on the cell die, one was disabled for yield rate and one was dedicated to the os itself, leaving 6 of them for gaming. Then they had the super riced out rsx (Nvidia GeForce 7000 series) for the GPU, but there wasn't really a "main" CPU was there?
        fredoralive 3y ago
        The Cell had a PowerPC core (the Power Processing Element) as its main CPU, alongside the Synergistic Processing Element co-processor units.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Fun fact about the 360, MS bought a bunch of PowerMac G5 towers and installed a PPC build of Windows XP on them to turn them into Xbox 360 dev kits. Makes sense because those were the most readily available and most cost effective PPC boxes at the time, but kind of funny.
- Narishma 3y ago
  IMO they went AMD because that was the only real option left. PPC was dead by then outside of big IBM servers and ARM was just getting into low-end x86 performance levels. If PPC was still getting improved in the embedded space I think they might have went that way for backwards compatibility reasons.
  - MegaDeKay 3y ago
    AMD was also able to offer up an APU (GPU integrated with CPU) vs separate chips that would have increased cost and complexity.
  - wmf 3y ago
    IBM put in a bid for PS4 (based on Power7 IIRC) but it wasn't selected. I think the convenience of getting everything from AMD helped them take over consoles.
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  Developers had to be more creative when the hardware shaped the kind of game you were making. that's what's fascinating to me
  - zirgs 3y ago
    In practice it made multiplatform games to look and run worse. For example - GTA IV ran @ 720p on x360, but only @ 640p on the PS3. Another reason why both the PS and XBox use basically the same hardware under the hood.
    - captainbland 3y ago
      I think the other aspect as well is that the 360 ended up with the somewhat better GPU in Xenos. I'm not sure if it was obvious at the time in-between the Cell BE and "reality synthesiser" marketing etc. but I understand that gave the 360 an edge in a lot of cross-platform titles. I think this really influenced the design of the PS4 which actually had a really weak Jaguar CPU but a solid GPU in its APU.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    On the other hand, weird hardware architectures are the worst from a preservation standpoint. If no one had made a PS3 emulator, MGS4 was at serious risk of becoming lost media.
    - jmkni 3y ago
      Is MGS4 really that difficult to port to a different architecture?
      - fluoridation 3y ago
        I don't see Konami interested in doing that anymore, and I don't see how else it could happen.
        3y ago
xattt 3y ago
One of the hooks of the PS3 architecture was that it sported a core count greater than 2 in consumer hardware (albeit as a very simplified core). Rumours about Intel Larrabee were also flying around at the time, so it seemed like the future was here.
derstander 3y ago
> For some reason, I am very fascinated by the architecture of PS3. You’re not alone. I also am enchanted by non-standard architectures: the PS3’s Cell, its predecessor the PS2’s Emotion Engine, the Transmeta Crusoe, etc. There’s a sibling comment to mine that talks about needless complication and dead-ends. That’s fine, but marching along with essentially optimizations to a basic architecture seems boring to me from a creative point of view (not that the achievements made haven’t been, of course, profoundly technically impressive). And that’s on top of the fact the designing computer architectures can probably be thought of as a huge multidimensional optimization problem (where optimal can change over time or between customer demographics). I think of the approach of iterating as helping us march up that manifold to a local maxima. I think of these “exotic” architectures as sampling far away from those points to see if maybe we can find a more global maxima. And that’s not to say that the main platforms aren’t innovating: with big-little, NUMA, etc. But there’s a soft spot in my heart for those wild, long shot bets.

zirgs 3y ago

The architecture is unnecessarily complicated and it turned out to be dead end. Which is why SONY dropped it and now uses x86 like everyone else.

opan 3y ago
Everything from this generation (PS3's Cell included) was some sort of PowerPC, many previous gens also had consoles using PPC or MIPS. Sony and MS went x86 during the same generation (PS4 and Xbox One). Nintendo went from PPC to ARM (though arguably they'd already used ARM for a while because of their handheld stuff).
- ericlewis 3y ago
  OG Xbox was x86 and was released similar time as PS2. Then they went PPC for 360. And now back to x86.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  I believe the GP is referring to the entire computer architecture, not the instruction set architecture. I seem to recall that it had three distinct heterogenous processors that had to be coordinated to get the most out of the system, so porting from, say, PC to PS5 wasn't necessarily straightforward, without leaving performance on the table.
  - ChoGGi 3y ago
    The xbox 360 was the one with the triple CPU, PS3 had the odd combo of one "main" CPU and 7 auxiliary ones.
    - fluoridation 3y ago
      I think the 360 had a regular homogeneous tricore CPU, so programming it was just normal multithread programming. As you say the PS3 had several auxiliary processors that all needed to be told what to do in specific, non-portable ways, which is what made it inconvenient to work with.
    - hughesjj 3y ago
      Iirc there were 8 chiplets on the cell die, one was disabled for yield rate and one was dedicated to the os itself, leaving 6 of them for gaming. Then they had the super riced out rsx (Nvidia GeForce 7000 series) for the GPU, but there wasn't really a "main" CPU was there?
      - fredoralive 3y ago
        The Cell had a PowerPC core (the Power Processing Element) as its main CPU, alongside the Synergistic Processing Element co-processor units.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Fun fact about the 360, MS bought a bunch of PowerMac G5 towers and installed a PPC build of Windows XP on them to turn them into Xbox 360 dev kits. Makes sense because those were the most readily available and most cost effective PPC boxes at the time, but kind of funny.
Narishma 3y ago
IMO they went AMD because that was the only real option left. PPC was dead by then outside of big IBM servers and ARM was just getting into low-end x86 performance levels. If PPC was still getting improved in the embedded space I think they might have went that way for backwards compatibility reasons.
- MegaDeKay 3y ago
  AMD was also able to offer up an APU (GPU integrated with CPU) vs separate chips that would have increased cost and complexity.
- wmf 3y ago
  IBM put in a bid for PS4 (based on Power7 IIRC) but it wasn't selected. I think the convenience of getting everything from AMD helped them take over consoles.
RockRobotRock 3y ago
Developers had to be more creative when the hardware shaped the kind of game you were making. that's what's fascinating to me
- zirgs 3y ago
  In practice it made multiplatform games to look and run worse. For example - GTA IV ran @ 720p on x360, but only @ 640p on the PS3. Another reason why both the PS and XBox use basically the same hardware under the hood.
  - captainbland 3y ago
    I think the other aspect as well is that the 360 ended up with the somewhat better GPU in Xenos. I'm not sure if it was obvious at the time in-between the Cell BE and "reality synthesiser" marketing etc. but I understand that gave the 360 an edge in a lot of cross-platform titles. I think this really influenced the design of the PS4 which actually had a really weak Jaguar CPU but a solid GPU in its APU.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  On the other hand, weird hardware architectures are the worst from a preservation standpoint. If no one had made a PS3 emulator, MGS4 was at serious risk of becoming lost media.
  - jmkni 3y ago
    Is MGS4 really that difficult to port to a different architecture?
    - fluoridation 3y ago
      I don't see Konami interested in doing that anymore, and I don't see how else it could happen.
      - 3y ago

xattt 3y ago

One of the hooks of the PS3 architecture was that it sported a core count greater than 2 in consumer hardware (albeit as a very simplified core). Rumours about Intel Larrabee were also flying around at the time, so it seemed like the future was here.

derstander 3y ago

> For some reason, I am very fascinated by the architecture of PS3. You’re not alone. I also am enchanted by non-standard architectures: the PS3’s Cell, its predecessor the PS2’s Emotion Engine, the Transmeta Crusoe, etc. There’s a sibling comment to mine that talks about needless complication and dead-ends. That’s fine, but marching along with essentially optimizations to a basic architecture seems boring to me from a creative point of view (not that the achievements made haven’t been, of course, profoundly technically impressive). And that’s on top of the fact the designing computer architectures can probably be thought of as a huge multidimensional optimization problem (where optimal can change over time or between customer demographics). I think of the approach of iterating as helping us march up that manifold to a local maxima. I think of these “exotic” architectures as sampling far away from those points to see if maybe we can find a more global maxima. And that’s not to say that the main platforms aren’t innovating: with big-little, NUMA, etc. But there’s a soft spot in my heart for those wild, long shot bets.