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What’s particularly interesting here is that Sony and IBM spent a billion dollars to make the Cell. It was designed to be completely different from previous con
by tetrisgm 1y ago
What’s particularly interesting here is that Sony and IBM spent a billion dollars to make the Cell. It was designed to be completely different from previous console CPUs. Even more so than the PS2’s “emotion engine” combo. So the fact that it’s so well emulated and also performant is remarkable!
- deaddodo 1y ago> It was designed to be completely different from previous console CPUs. Sure, but they used a PowerPC core with specialized SIMD processors that they then extensively documented: https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/arch/SPU_ISA_v1.2_27Jan2007_pub.pdf https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/a... If they hadn't done the latter, it would probably have taken a lot longer to reverse engineer. It also would have made it near impossible for developers to code effectively for it, however.