3 ms·

Yes, for much of it's lifetime it was behind the 360 in worldwide sales, and might have been a disappointment for Sony, especially after the PS2 domination, but

by kimixa 2y ago

Yes, for much of it's lifetime it was behind the 360 in worldwide sales, and might have been a disappointment for Sony, especially after the PS2 domination, but I wouldn't say it "Lost Handily" to the xbox360. It may have taken time, but it did outsell it. It seems an incorrectly strong wording by the interviewer. And people seem to sleep on how powerful the xbox360 was - the CPU was a fair bit smaller than the cell, true, (~150m transistors vs 250m in the cell) not not really the multiples some articles seem to imply. And the GPU in the xbox was arguably a fair bit more advanced - being a little larger (~300m vs ~335m transistors), and being a unified shader architecture that came to dominate GPUs from then on. And the more flexible architecture enabled more GPGPU-like tasks that the cell SPUs might have handled on the PS3. And these early GPGPU models were also a bitch to program for - like the cell SPUs were. So it's not like one was simple and easy, the other crazy complex and advanced, but more one had the fancy experimental stuff on the CPU/Cell die, the other on the GPU die. Just the techniques used on the GPU continued to be developed and supplanted much of the Cell-style tech.

mrkramer 2y ago
>Yes, for much of it's lifetime it was behind the 360 in worldwide sales, and might have been a disappointment for Sony, especially after the PS2 domination, but I wouldn't call say it "Lost Handily" to the xbox360. It may have taken time, but it did outsell it. As far as I understood, Halo was the killer app for Xbox but I suppose it was the killer app only in US, because like I said, from my EU gamer's point of view, Call of Duty was all the rage first on PC and then afterwards on PS plus FIFA and PES were huge on PS as well.
sillywalk 2y ago
> how powerful the xbox360 was Interestingly, the Xbox 360 (Xenon) CPU cores were based on the Power Processing Element (not the Synergistic Processing Elements) from the Cell processor. From [0]: "When the companies entered into their partnership in 2001, Sony, Toshiba and IBM committed themselves to spending $400 million over five years to design the Cell, not counting the millions of dollars it would take to build two production facilities for making the chip itself. IBM provided the bulk of the manpower, with the design team headquartered at its Austin, Texas, offices. Sony and Toshiba sent teams of engineers to Austin to live and work with their partners in an effort to have the Cell ready for the Playstation 3's target launch, Christmas 2005. But a funny thing happened along the way: A new "partner" entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft's rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. In 2003, IBM's Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core. Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony. All three of the original partners had agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other clients. But it does not seem to have occurred to Sony that IBM would sell key parts of the Cell before it was complete and to Sony's primary video-game console competitor. The result was that Sony's R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it." ( From the WSJ ) [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150129121858/http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123069467545545011 https://web.archive.org/web/20150129121858/http://www.wsj.co...
- kimixa 2y ago
  Sure, but the PPE was "just" an iteration on their existing PowerPC core line - that wasn't really the focus of the "unique" Cell changes in the first place. If they just asked for a 3-core SMP version of a PowerPC and the Cell project never existed, I suggest it's likely it would still look very similar to what was released in the xbox. VMX already existed, POWER5 already had SMT. I don't see there being a huge amount of new technology made for the Cell's PPE for the Xbox project to import in the first place.
  - sillywalk 2y ago
    > Sure, but the PPE was "just" an iteration on their existing PowerPC core line I'm pretty sure the PPE was an entirely new core design. It used the PowerPC ISA and had features similar to earlier designs, but it was new. From [0]: "although the central processor is based on IBM's PowerPC architecture, it's a new design, not an existing PowerPC core. Cell's central processor is similar to the current PowerPC 970 chip, although it's not an exact match. " > If they just asked for a 3-core SMP version of a PowerPC and the Cell project never existed, I suggest it's likely it would still look very similar to what was released in the xbox. VMX already existed, POWER5 already had SMT. I don't think at the time IBM had anything else that Microsoft could've used. It's PowerPC 7xx wouldn't have been an improvement (or not enough of one) over the Pentium 3 in the original X-Box. The PowerPC 970 was hot / power hungry - the dual-core models that Apple used requiring liquid cooling and weren't out until 2005. The POWER5 with SMT was in development, but it was designed for IBM's servers and existing customer workloads. I don't know if it could've modified it to add another core, plus the VMX128 stuff that Microsoft needed, if IBM would've been willing to do that, or if that chip would've been too expensive for a console. [0] https://www.embedded.com/a-glimpse-inside-the-cell-processor/ https://www.embedded.com/a-glimpse-inside-the-cell-processor...

by kimixa 2y ago

mrkramer 2y ago

>Yes, for much of it's lifetime it was behind the 360 in worldwide sales, and might have been a disappointment for Sony, especially after the PS2 domination, but I wouldn't call say it "Lost Handily" to the xbox360. It may have taken time, but it did outsell it. As far as I understood, Halo was the killer app for Xbox but I suppose it was the killer app only in US, because like I said, from my EU gamer's point of view, Call of Duty was all the rage first on PC and then afterwards on PS plus FIFA and PES were huge on PS as well.

sillywalk 2y ago

> how powerful the xbox360 was Interestingly, the Xbox 360 (Xenon) CPU cores were based on the Power Processing Element (not the Synergistic Processing Elements) from the Cell processor. From [0]: "When the companies entered into their partnership in 2001, Sony, Toshiba and IBM committed themselves to spending $400 million over five years to design the Cell, not counting the millions of dollars it would take to build two production facilities for making the chip itself. IBM provided the bulk of the manpower, with the design team headquartered at its Austin, Texas, offices. Sony and Toshiba sent teams of engineers to Austin to live and work with their partners in an effort to have the Cell ready for the Playstation 3's target launch, Christmas 2005. But a funny thing happened along the way: A new "partner" entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft's rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. In 2003, IBM's Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core. Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony. All three of the original partners had agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other clients. But it does not seem to have occurred to Sony that IBM would sell key parts of the Cell before it was complete and to Sony's primary video-game console competitor. The result was that Sony's R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it." ( From the WSJ ) [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150129121858/http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123069467545545011 https://web.archive.org/web/20150129121858/http://www.wsj.co...

kimixa 2y ago
Sure, but the PPE was "just" an iteration on their existing PowerPC core line - that wasn't really the focus of the "unique" Cell changes in the first place. If they just asked for a 3-core SMP version of a PowerPC and the Cell project never existed, I suggest it's likely it would still look very similar to what was released in the xbox. VMX already existed, POWER5 already had SMT. I don't see there being a huge amount of new technology made for the Cell's PPE for the Xbox project to import in the first place.
- sillywalk 2y ago
  > Sure, but the PPE was "just" an iteration on their existing PowerPC core line I'm pretty sure the PPE was an entirely new core design. It used the PowerPC ISA and had features similar to earlier designs, but it was new. From [0]: "although the central processor is based on IBM's PowerPC architecture, it's a new design, not an existing PowerPC core. Cell's central processor is similar to the current PowerPC 970 chip, although it's not an exact match. " > If they just asked for a 3-core SMP version of a PowerPC and the Cell project never existed, I suggest it's likely it would still look very similar to what was released in the xbox. VMX already existed, POWER5 already had SMT. I don't think at the time IBM had anything else that Microsoft could've used. It's PowerPC 7xx wouldn't have been an improvement (or not enough of one) over the Pentium 3 in the original X-Box. The PowerPC 970 was hot / power hungry - the dual-core models that Apple used requiring liquid cooling and weren't out until 2005. The POWER5 with SMT was in development, but it was designed for IBM's servers and existing customer workloads. I don't know if it could've modified it to add another core, plus the VMX128 stuff that Microsoft needed, if IBM would've been willing to do that, or if that chip would've been too expensive for a console. [0] https://www.embedded.com/a-glimpse-inside-the-cell-processor/ https://www.embedded.com/a-glimpse-inside-the-cell-processor...