[HN Gopher] AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's...
___________________________________________________________________
AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's infamous Cell
processor
Author : rbanffy
Score : 221 points
Date : 2024-06-13 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| tithe wrote:
| Peter Hofstee (one of the chief architects of Cell) gave a talk
| at UT Austin around 2008.
|
| At the time, UT was building TRIPS[0], a processor capable of > 1
| teraflop / sec.
|
| In the middle of his talk (with several TRIPS members present),
| he made an off-hand remark "I think I could build a petaflop
| processer...without too much trouble,"* which caused a small stir
| in the audience!
|
| [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/cart/trips/
|
| * I might be misremembering the exact quote, but this was the
| gist of it.
| lhl wrote:
| Perhaps relevant to the story, he was also on the team that
| delivered the first petaflop supercomputer (the most powerful
| supercomputer at the time) around that same time frame (it was
| around 24K processors):
|
| Roadrunner is a 1.38 Pflop/s-peak (double precision) hybrid-
| architecture supercomputer developed by LANL and IBM. It
| contains 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i processors and 12,240 AMD
| Opteron cores in 3,060 compute nodes. Roadrunner is the first
| supercomputer to run Linpack at a sustained speed in excess of
| 1 Pflop/s.
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1413370.1413372
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunner_(supercomputer)
| bbatha wrote:
| What a pain in the ass machine that was to write code for.
| You had 3 different processors to manage with 3 different
| architectures and all of the challenges the game dev
| community had with keeping the SPEs hot. But the SPEs were
| not enough to solely rely on for number crunching performance
| unlike today's GPU compute machines, so you also needed to do
| number crunching on the opterons and the main cell core for
| optimal performance unlike with a GPU where the CPU is mostly
| just keeping the GPU memory full. Then to make matters worse
| the cell had a different endianess than x86 making shared
| memory very annoying to work with.
| sillywalk wrote:
| I'm curious if you've ever heard of or used CellFS[0] ,
| which was supposed to simplify programming for Cell?
|
| [0] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1000498
| bbatha wrote:
| Haven't heard of it. Internal communication was not a
| strong suit at LANL... You also had a ton of different
| teams who all got access to the hardware at roughly the
| same time and were shotgunning different approaches and
| coalescing on the better libraries wasn't really a
| priority at the beginning of roadrunner when I was there.
| LANL didn't really have project management at the code
| base level to direct people to upgrade stuff like that,
| its mostly independent researchers pulling the code bases
| in different directions. Most of those researchers were
| physicists in my world and didn't really care about the
| "engineering" of software, just that their code ran fast
| and correct enough to get to the next deadline. Then
| there is a small core of more computer science
| researchers who did projects like this. If they were
| successful enough they'd attempt to integrate it into the
| mainline codes. But their incentives generally were to
| publish papers about super computer code like this, not
| necessarily to integrate it into the mainline codes. So
| often getting something like this in the codes was giving
| a talk and hoping a physicist would see it and need the
| extra performance for their needs.
|
| I was not running codes that would utilize even a small
| fraction of roadrunner so my projects quickly moved to
| the GPU based test beds for the next gen computer so I
| didn't get to see these research coalesce. My
| understanding from people who stayed on roadrunner is
| that for the most part people didn't adopt too much
| fanciness for roadrunner as the rewrites were too deep
| and GPUs were on the horizon. There was a lot of vision
| about making generic heterogeneous compute frameworks but
| too my knowledge they didn't pan out and just writing
| against CUDA, OpenMP, and MPI won the day.
| wmf wrote:
| FLOPS are easy; programming is hard. Cell was the wrong
| direction and TRIPS/TFlex hasn't happened either.
| peutetre wrote:
| > _The PlayStation 3 pretty much lost the generation handily to
| Nintendo 's cheap, casual-friendly Wii and Microsoft's less
| powerful but easier Xbox 360._
|
| No it didn't. The PlayStation 3 outsold the Xbox 360. Have a look
| at the 7th generation charts on VGChartz:
|
| https://www.vgchartz.com/
|
| It's true the Wii sold the most.
|
| The 8th generation didn't go well for Nintendo. The Wii U was a
| flop. But they're back on top with the Switch.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| You're talking about an extremely end of cycle resurgence. For
| the vast majority of the lifecycle, the 360 outsold the PS3 and
| had better compatibility with multiplatform games.
| nixass wrote:
| PS3 ended up selling more than double what Xbox was sold
| "only because of extreme end of cycle resurgence"? Cmon
|
| It's true the devs have become more comfortable develeoping
| games as the console matured but that's about it.
|
| Xbox was always flop comparing to PS
| busterarm wrote:
| Where do you get "more than double" from? Are you looking
| at the current generation or the PS4/XONE generation?
|
| For PS3 vs 360, the PS3 sold 87.40M units to the 360's
| 85.73M.
| merb wrote:
| PS3 sold more because of blue ray support, but in the games
| compartment they were basically on par
| app13 wrote:
| They're right. Toward the EOL the PS3 had a big resurgence
| as THE console of South America and Southeast Asia due to
| highly available used games, console jailbreaks etc. and of
| course FIFA.
| kd913 wrote:
| Isn't that kind of the ideal cycle though? From what I
| recall, consoles operate on the gilette model, ie the
| console is sold at a loss and games are the breadwinner.
|
| In this case, better to reduce early sales which are sold
| at a loss (production being expensive, significant R&D,
| scale being low), maximise at the end of the life when i
| assume they are maximising profits per console due to
| scale and R&D already being covered.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Consoles haven't been sold at a loss for a long time.
| They're not the Gillette model at all, though a lot of
| people still think they are.
|
| So, no -- it is never better to reduce early sales. You
| want to sell as many units as possible, as many games as
| possible, as many accessories as possible, as soon as
| possible.
|
| (Also, as the same console does becomes cheaper to
| manufacture over the years, the price tends to go down as
| well.)
| causality0 wrote:
| It's not double, it's 87.4 million units vs 86 million
| units. And he's right about multiplatform games. I can't
| think of any games that ran better on the PS3 than the 360,
| and a lot that ran better on the 360 than the PS3.
| ErneX wrote:
| PS3 did not sell double the 360, they sold almost the same
| amount of units.
| peutetre wrote:
| Nope. The Xbox 360 launched in November of 2005. The
| PlayStation 3 launched in November of 2006.
|
| The PS3 started outselling the Xbox 360 for the year in 2007
| and kept steadily gaining on the Xbox in total sales for the
| generation until it overtook it.
|
| Xbox's one year head start kept it level with the PlayStation
| 3 for quite a while but it lost out in the end.
|
| Look at the global yearly sales figures on VGChartz. From
| 2007 the PS3 outsold the Xbox 360 every year except for 2008:
|
| https://www.vgchartz.com/yearly/
| snakeyjake wrote:
| I think a lot of people bought the PS3 as a bluray player.
|
| The charts you link to show game sales that lag way behind
| the xbox. For example Skyrim sold 2.6 million in 2011 on
| the xbox and only a million on the ps3.
|
| I only say this because I got my ps3 for free with the
| purchase of a Sony television at a Sony store (remember
| those?) in late 2009 and never purchased more than a bare
| handful of games which I almost never played.
|
| After the cost-reduced redesign in 2009 Sony gave away a
| free ps3 with every television purchase in Sony stores for
| almost an entire year.
|
| Skyrim was one the games I bought and it was so buggy, even
| for Bethesda, on the ps3 due to ram limitations (I've read)
| that I purchased it again for pc.
|
| Used my ps3 to watch a ton of blurays and Netflix, though.
| My ps3 was, and based on those yearly charts a lot of other
| peoples' ps3s were also, extremely powerful streaming boxes
| and I only retired mine when I upgraded to a 4k tv and got
| an appletv 4k.
| tuna74 wrote:
| "The charts you link to show game sales that lag way
| behind the xbox. For example Skyrim sold 2.6 million in
| 2011 on the xbox and only a million on the ps3."
|
| As you write later, Skyrim sucked on PS3 (like other
| multiplatform games like Bayonetta). It is not strange
| that it sold much less since it was a much worser game on
| the PS3.
| peutetre wrote:
| > _For example Skyrim sold 2.6 million in 2011 on the
| xbox and only a million on the ps3._
|
| You have to consider total software sales, not individual
| titles. And for the PS3 you have to consider its impact
| on blu-ray movie sales (which aren't in those charts).
|
| Blu-ray also launched in 2006 and the PS3 was one of the
| most useful players available because it could do more
| than just play movies.
| tokai wrote:
| Its wild that we are almost 20 years on, and consolewar posting
| about which is bigger/best is still going on.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Hey as long as the PC is still king, let them fight over the
| consoles :D
| bee_rider wrote:
| Nintendo is practically in a different market anyway. People
| who want a Nintendo console are mostly looking for Nintendo's
| first-party characters. Lumping them in with Xbox and
| PlayStation is like combining Barbie and GI Joe under "dolls."
| Technically correct but not very descriptive.
|
| Snark: Nintendo's market is kids, people with kids, and people
| who were previously kids. Xbox and PlayStation are fighting
| over the market of people who'd be better served by a PC but
| don't want to deal with all that. /Snark
| SahAssar wrote:
| > kids, people with kids, and people who were previously kids
|
| Who is not included in that? Toddlers?
| TillE wrote:
| Implicitly, people who are too old (or too European) to
| have grown up with an NES.
|
| But yeah, I 100% agree that the overwhelming draw of
| Nintendo consoles is their exclusives, so it's mostly
| orthogonal to Xbox/PS/PC. If you want to play Mario or
| Zelda or Pokemon or Fire Emblem, you've got one choice. The
| common idea that the Steam Deck is competing with the
| Switch is almost entirely wrong.
| SahAssar wrote:
| The comment doesn't mention anything about the
| "previously kids" growing up with nintendo.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It includes everybody, that's why they sell so many
| consoles!
| r00fus wrote:
| > and people who were previously kids.
|
| That's a pretty damn large market (= all adults). I think you
| meant to say "people who were previously kids playing
| Nintendo"
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'd hoped given the snark tags that that bit would be taken
| as a bit tongue in cheek.
| Clamchop wrote:
| I don't disagree that Nintendo appeals to a market that the
| others don't, and vice versa, but I'd be surprised if there
| wasn't a significant number of people who will reliably buy a
| game console, but won't buy two consoles.
|
| That is to say, I still think there's significant competition
| for sales.
|
| And if Nintendo didn't exist, it would be easier for Sony and
| Microsoft to take in the market for cute, whimsical, child-
| friendly, instead of having to distinguish themselves by
| being the more serious or more powerful option.
|
| And handhelds; Nintendo has more or less stolen that entire
| segment, Steam Deck still being relatively niche and PS
| Portal being a different kind of thing. Sony's handheld
| ambitions are moribund and not for lack of trying.
| vel0city wrote:
| The target market for Xbox/PlayStation are the kind of
| gamers that play games like Call of Duty, Gran
| Turismo/Forza, Elden Ring/Dark Souls/The Witcher, or
| FIFA/Madden/NBA2k.
|
| The target market for the Switch are people who play Animal
| Crossing, Super Mario Galaxy, and Zelda games.
|
| There's some amount of crossover there, but there's also a
| large amount of separation in those markets. I know lots of
| people who play a ton of Animal Crossing and Zelda but
| would never want to play something like Borderlands or CoD
| or Darksouls.
| Clamchop wrote:
| Don't disagree with that, but I disagree that the
| conclusion to be made from it is that there's no
| significant competition.
|
| Put another way, if Nintendo had a Sega-like market
| failure, then Sony and Microsoft would be the heirs
| apparent to the kingdom of cute. I'm sure they'd savor
| the opportunity. Do you think they wouldn't take these
| customers right now if they could?
|
| And again, there's going to be a class of customers that
| could go either way but won't buy into two or more
| consoles, because they're expensive. They are directly
| competing for them.
| vel0city wrote:
| I'm sure they'd savor the opportunity, but I don't know
| if they'd really be incredibly successful and picking
| most of those Nintendo-only gamers if Nintendo just
| disappeared. I imagine a good chunk of those people who
| bought a Switch almost exclusively for Animal Crossing
| would end up just becoming a mobile phone/tablet gamer
| instead of making the jump to Xbox/PlayStation.
|
| But hey, the future is unknown, and my crystal ball is on
| the charger at the moment.
|
| And there's gamers like myself, who mostly play games on
| PC but still have a Switch because while I can play a lot
| of those console games on my PC there's no offical way to
| play Zelda or Mario or the wide range of Nintendo first-
| party titles on PC. I think if Nintendo had a SEGA level
| implosion and started only being a publisher, whichever
| platforms Nintendo publishes for would become the heir to
| those consumers. I know that would be the case for me.
|
| Assuming Nintendo steps away from the hardware biz, would
| they publish games exclusively to one console? Would they
| just start making mobile games? Would they sell on all
| consoles and PCs? -\\_(tsu)_/-
| dehrmann wrote:
| > but SMT wouldn't emerge until 2002
|
| I think they're counting P4 hyperthreading, but I remember dual-
| CPU Pentium II boards.
| buildbot wrote:
| IBM had SMT in 1968 -
| https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/multithreading.ht...
| trynumber9 wrote:
| I am not following. The page says it was investigated but not
| done.
| buildbot wrote:
| It was done - ACS-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Adva
| nced_Computer_Systems_...
| wtallis wrote:
| SMT isn't SMP.
| adrian_b wrote:
| SMT (including that branded as Intel HTT) is something very
| different from multiprocessors, like the dual-CPU boards.
|
| The concept of multiprocessors was already well understood
| around 1963, i.e. the multiplication of the performance of a
| computer by the multiplication of the CPU hardware.
|
| On the other hand, the purpose of SMT is to enhance the
| throughput of a computer by ensuring that the existing
| execution units do not stay idle, by executing instructions
| from multiple program threads in order to keep them busy.
|
| The modern use of SMT has been started by a research paper
| published in 1992, as a proposed improvement to the superscalar
| out-of-order CPUs already popularized by IBM POWER, but the
| name SMT (simultaneous multi-threading) has been coined only
| later, in 1997 (in the IEEE Micro from September/October 1997).
|
| IBM had already used SMT in the experimental Advanced Computer
| System in 1968 (and they have filed for SMT patents in 1971: US
| 3,728,692 & US 3,771,138), but that project has been canceled
| and its superior architecture has been mostly forgotten for
| several decades.
|
| CPUs that could execute instructions from multiple program
| threads, but not during the same clock cycle, like in SMT
| (hence the "simultaneous" of SMT), are older than the IBM ACS,
| for instance such a processor with fine-grained multi-threading
| was the peripheral processor of CDC 6600 (in 1963). SMT can
| exist only in superscalar CPUs, because only there multiple
| instructions are initiated in the same clock cycle.
| buildbot wrote:
| Oh wow, I did not know Lisa Su had a hand in designing Cell -
| that's really cool. In some ways the Cell architecture was very
| ahead of its time - if you look at it a bit funny, the PPE/SPE
| map to something like todays grace/hopper - big branchy core to
| orchestrate smaller but more numerous vector cores.
|
| Made designing/porting games a massive headache though because
| nothing else was like it.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Correction: Cell was ahead of it's time when they started
| drafting the concept for it in mid-2000 and the most powerful
| consumer CPU at the time was the Pentium 3, but by the time it
| launched on the market in 2005, X86_64 was the new undisputed
| king of CPU performance and ARM in mobile lower power sectors,
| with ATI and Nvidia leading the GPU race, leaving the Cell
| processor as an overpriced paperweight that was a jack of all
| trades, master of none and difficult to program to boot, and
| the new market had no use for such a thing.
|
| I think neither Sony nor anyone else expected the consumer CPU
| and GPU industry to evolve so quickly in that time, otherwise
| they would not have spent hundreds of millions developing anew
| architecture from scratch. Intel also made the same mistake
| back then when they tried to reinvent the industry with the new
| Itanium CPU architecture. Hindsight 20/20.
|
| Those years were indeed wild for tech progress. You bought a
| new CPU, suddenly two years later you have 64 bit CPUs as the
| new thing. You then bought a 64 bit CPU to be like the cool
| kids and suddenly dual core CPUs are all the rage.
| scrlk wrote:
| IIRC, the original PS3 design was rumoured to have dual Cell
| processors. It didn't meet performance targets, so the Nvidia
| GPU was wedged in quite late on in the development cycle.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| I think the story was a bit different. Sony had envisioned
| the the final Cell chip to be more powerful than what they
| launched (4 PPEs and 32 SPEs @ 4GHz versus 1 PPE and 8 SPEs
| @ 3.2GHz) and they though that would be enough to render
| graphics with it like they did on the PS2, and only
| realized later in development that it won't be enough so
| they went to Nvidia and asked for a discrete GPU.
| jandrese wrote:
| Also, I think game developers balked at having to
| implement their own GPU in a hard-to-program unique
| architecture.
|
| I wonder how many PS3 games ignored the Cell processor
| and just developed for the CPU and GPU?
| monocasa wrote:
| > Also, I think game developers balked at having to
| implement their own GPU in a hard-to-program unique
| architecture.
|
| It would have been a library.
|
| > I wonder how many PS3 games ignored the Cell processor
| and just developed for the CPU and GPU?
|
| Essentially none.
| ozarker wrote:
| I think I heard the games Valve published for PS3 didn't
| really use the cell stuff
| MBCook wrote:
| At lot of early games were something like that. They'd
| mostly ignore it or maybe use one SPU or shove tasks on
| them that really didn't take advantage of their power at
| all. Just leaving a lot of performance untouched.
| monocasa wrote:
| They absolutely did. The PPEs were far too anemic to run
| anything like halflife on their own.
|
| Gabe Newell famously sounded off about how useless it was
| and wouldn't transfer to any other hardware, but he ended
| up being wrong. The architectural model forced on you by
| the SPEs is the model that the industry (not just games
| but any compute intensive work) has embraced for the
| heavy multicore but coherent system world.
|
| Rather than the "thread per vague activity" model, we've
| embraced a one thread per core with a work stealing
| scheduler walking a DAG of chunked compute tasks.
|
| For a modern view of this, this is exactly how Rust's
| rayon library works.
|
| The whole thing reminds me of a lot of the complaints
| about the N64, a lot of which ended up being the fact
| that DRAM was no longer a single cycle away like it was
| for the SNES. Yes cache conscious code is more difficult
| to write, but that memory hierarchy architecture was more
| a harbinger of the new world rather than a one off
| weirdness of a single console.
| sillywalk wrote:
| There's an interesting book called _The Race for a New
| Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and
| the Playstation 3_ by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps on
| the development of the Cell processor.
|
| I can't recall if if had all the details regarding adding
| a GPU to the PS3, but I remember it had stories about the
| awkwardness of having the IBM Cell team also working on
| Microsoft's Xenon CPU for the 360, which IIRC used
| modified Cell PPE cores.
| fredoralive wrote:
| AIUI it's basically that the plan was similar to the PS2,
| where you have a "smart" CPU (Emotion Engine / Cell) and
| a "dumb" rasteriser (Graphic Synthesiser on PS2), with
| the Cell SPEs taking the role of the vector units on the
| EE for things like transform + lighting. But the
| rasteriser chip project failed.
|
| Then they tried the 2 Cells and software rendering
| approach, to try and keep it as an "in house" solution.
|
| Finally they went to Nvidia and we got the final Cell +
| RSX solution.
| monocasa wrote:
| Eh, the Cell would have been a fantastic processor if it
| weren't for hitting the end of dennard scaling like a brick
| wall.
|
| In the design phase they were expecting almost 5ghz at
| launch, and to hit around 10ghz at the end of the product
| lifecycle. When the process guys came back later to let the
| architects know the reality we've sort of now all
| internalized (high end consumer electronics can expect ~3ghz
| with good cooling solutions) a lot of simple but fast
| pipeline designs stopped making sense. These are the exact
| same pressures that killed off the Netburst architecture too,
| making intel go back to a PIII design and make it smarter
| rather than clock markedly faster.
| wmf wrote:
| Nah, SPEs are a bad idea at any frequency.
| monocasa wrote:
| What specifically about them?
| wmf wrote:
| Mostly not having caches.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| The TCMs were cool. But unless your work fits that...
| foobarian wrote:
| Those years were amazing because every new console generation
| had a wildly different artisanal design. NES to SNES to N64
| to Switch, Jaguar, Sega, PS to PS2 to PS3, Xbox... and then
| at some point they all turned into disguised PCs.
| dtech wrote:
| Up until the early 00's specially designed components could
| get more performance/$.
|
| Now it's impossible to beat commodity SoCs on that front.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| The arcade industry also went through a couple waves of
| that, with one major shift to console-based hardware in
| the mid-90s and another to PC-based hardware in the
| mid-2000s. Namco made a PS3-based system board (System
| 357, notably the original platform for Tekken 6), but I'm
| not sure if anyone else did.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| There were memes circa this time on places like 4chan about "the
| power of the cell" and implying that it was capable of doing
| anything. Sony marketing about how good this chip was circa
| 2005-7 was strong.
| scrlk wrote:
| The power of the Cell bought us real time rendering of Giant
| Enemy Crabs, as well as real time weapon changes. All for 599
| US dollars!
| toast0 wrote:
| It's a shame they didn't license blast processing.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The cell processor was pretty good at some calculations.
| Unfortunately, it wasn't great for writing video games and
| neither was the tooling.
|
| I recall various news stories about governments buying up PS3s
| because they could be used for cheap and effective computation
| at scale.
| astrange wrote:
| Outnumbered by "the PS3 has no games" memes though.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/playstation-has-no-games/phot...
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Had a heterogeneous programming class, where we had to implement
| various things on the PS3, like a basic MPEG-ish encoder and
| such.
|
| Was an interesting experience, though all I remember now is how
| it required careful exploitation of the vector units in the SPEs
| to get any decent performance out of it, and how annoying it was
| to synchronize between the SPEs and the PPE.
|
| For each assignment the prof would include a benchmark, so we
| could compare the performance in class. Was a huge difference
| between the students that spent time optimizing and those which
| did a basic implementation.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm super curious what program/course was set up with
| developer/jailbroken PS3s to use as lab material. Was this
| specifically about game/console dev?
| selykg wrote:
| I believe the PS3 had an option to install Linux on it at
| some point. No? That would've made it a neat option for
| classes like this.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, it was called OtherOS.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Oh right... I think somewhere around 1st gen they were cool
| with that. But didn't they end up getting killed in the
| market because they had to sell it for less than _Five
| Hundred and Ninety Nine U.S. Dollars_ , effectively at a
| loss, and people were making compute centres out of them?
|
| I think a later gen locked it right down.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Reportedly the US government had no problem paying $599
| per PS3 to build ML/AI supercomputers out of them.
| scott_s wrote:
| Any source on that? It sounds unlikely to me. There was a
| supercomputer that IBM built for Los Alamos that used the
| Cell processor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunne
| r_(supercomputer)
| brianleb wrote:
| Probably referring to:
|
| https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-
| playstation-3s-supercomput...
|
| >>About the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world right
| now is the US Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL)
| newest system, which has a core made of 1,760 Sony
| PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles. In addition to its large
| capacity, the so-called "Condor Cluster" is capable of
| performing 500 trillion floating point operations per
| second (TFLOPS), making it the fastest interactive
| computer in the entire US Defense Department.
|
| >>It will be used by Air Force centers across the country
| for tasks such as radar enhancement, pattern recognition,
| satellite imagery processing, and artificial intelligence
| research.
| xattt wrote:
| OtherOS was a way for Sony to work around higher tarifs.
| General computing devices (enabled by OtherOS) had a
| lower schedule than consoles.
|
| It was retroactively removed when people started getting
| close to enabling full GPU access. This was previously
| crippled under OtherOS to prevent games developed without
| the PS3 SDK.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Ah interesting. I do recall we never utilized the GPUs on
| them, just the Cell.
| chaorace wrote:
| Rumor has it that Sony axed OtherOS in response to Geohot
| using it to exploit & compromise the PS3 hypervisor.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| If I recall correctly that was a stated fact. OtherOS was
| removed due to "security vulnerabilities".
| trelane wrote:
| Yes: https://blog.playstation.com/archive/2010/03/29/ps3-
| firmware...
|
| (From wikipedia references)
| gamepsys wrote:
| For the most part the cluster of PS3s supercomputer was a
| myth used to hype up how powerful the PS3 was. The amount
| of RAM per compute was so low that it limited the type of
| workloads it was good at. Then server CPUs became more
| powerful as the PS3 processor stayed the same.
|
| However PS3 clusters did find niche success as a super
| computer. There are a handful of notable examples. The
| fastest one ever built was by the US Airforce, consisted
| of 1,760 PS3s, and was the 33rd fastest super computer at
| the time. It was used for satellite image processing.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| There was a time when supercomputers had no GPUs.
| Nowadays the top list is all GPu accelerators.
| frou_dh wrote:
| When I was paying attention during the 90s and 2000s I
| remember this being the hype in magazines / on the web
| for pretty much EVERY upcoming console. Namely that it
| was so outrageously powerful that it might be considered
| a supercomputer in its own right. Needless to say, I was
| hyped up and obsessing about them myself.
| krs_ wrote:
| Let's not forget the Japanese government applying export
| restrictions on the PS2 because it might be powerful
| enough to be used for military purposes [1]. It even went
| so far as claims that Iraq ordered a bunch of them for
| that purpose [2]. That's some serious hype marketing
| haha.
|
| [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/716237.stm
|
| [2] https://www.theregister.com/2000/12/19/iraq_buys_4000
| _playst...
| Arrath wrote:
| I always thought it was a bit odd that we went from
| super-compute clusters built out of PS3 to the PS4/Xbone
| generation consoles being meh-grade laptop chips in a
| fancy case.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's the performance vs programmability tradeoff.
|
| The article references it.
|
| As one goes back in console history, the performance to
| achieve contemporarily visually-stunning results required
| exotic architectures + hand-tuned code.
|
| Over time, state of the art PC + GPU hardware improved,
| to the point there wasn't a functional difference vs
| exotic architectures. Additionally, the _cost_ of
| developing leading-edge custom architectures exploded.
|
| Microsoft really pushed this with the original "PC in a
| box" XBox, but you saw the console OEMs outsource
| increasing parts of their chip solutions after that.
|
| Why keep / buy entire chip design teams, when AMD will do
| it for you?
|
| Especially if the performance difference is negligible.
| sillywalk wrote:
| The article also references the cost of developing a AAA
| "HD" title is so high that it pretty much needs to be
| released on multiple platforms to be profitable.
| scott_s wrote:
| Yes. My research lab in grad school had a cluster of 24
| PS3s. The back of that rack was _hot_.
| htrp wrote:
| Please tell me you guys called it "SuperCELL"
| ben7799 wrote:
| I was out of school for quite a bit by the time the PS3
| came out but I remember installing linux on mine and being
| pretty excited to program on it.
|
| I did a little bit, but it ended up being a super PITA
| because I didn't want to put my PS3 on my desk and give up
| playing games on it on my TV.
|
| Because I wanted to keep it with my TV I had tried to use
| it with Bluetooth KB/Mouse so I could use it from the
| couch.
|
| And well typical Linux you always end up spending time on
| the most mundane thing. Bluetooth on the PS3 in Linux at
| that time didn't seem to work right.
|
| That to me is like peak Linux right there. At some point I
| had said to myself "I wanted to play with the cell and
| instead I'm working on Bluetooth" and I lost interest cause
| of course I had real work too. Then eventually Sony
| disabled the whole thing.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| They had Linux on them. Don't think I ever saw them, just had
| network access.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Not OP, but we had PS3s at school as well. Early units ran
| linux. It was sandboxed to a degree in order to prevent it
| from being used for software piracy. OP's project was cool,
| ours was basically implementing PCA on one.
|
| I got the impression that Sony encouraged this use of the
| console early on. They were probably aiming to establish
| themselves in the scientific computing niche. We also had
| nvidia-sponsored labs where they taught CUDA (or at least
| tried to - it was pretty difficult to do without support and
| most people took the class for access to computer labs
| equipped with amazing gaming machines). We all know nvidia
| won that war.
| skavi wrote:
| that sounds like a super fun class. wonder if it's still
| offered?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Seems like they still do[1], though I doubt the PS3 is still
| in the mix.
|
| Though from the published material for 2024 it seems not to
| have changed too much in principle, eg the codec63 I recall
| implementing parts for.
|
| edit: oh and yes, one of the highlights of my degree.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/IN5050/index-
| eng...
| crote wrote:
| The Program Optimization course I followed did something
| similar with regular CPUs / GPUs. It started out as "don't do
| stupid things", but it quickly went into SoA vs AoS, via
| hand-writing AVX intrinsics, into eventually running OpenCL
| code on the GPU.
|
| Part of your grade depended on the performance of your code,
| with a bonus for the fastest submission. It led to a very
| nice semi-competitive semi-collaborative atmosphere.
| hmottestad wrote:
| I really wanted do take that course. I had taken the OS course
| where you build an OS from scratch, so this seemed like the
| next thing to do. The OS course was for 20 points, but the
| heterogeneous programming course was only 10 points. People
| said it was way more work than 10 points though and I ended up
| dropping it because I couldn't justify spending that much time
| on it when I had other courses to take and a thesis to write.
|
| Here is the OS course:
| https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/IN4000/index-eng...
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Hah yea I quickly discovered that matnat[1] study points
| weren't like other study points. Felt like we had to do 2-5x
| the work compared to the students I knew going to other
| faculties. But in general the courses were very rewarding I
| feel.
|
| I heard about the OS one, sounded super cool and also a _lot_
| of work from what I gathered. Heard about it too late and
| required a buddy. Oh well, can 't have it all.
|
| [1]: faculty of math and natural sciences
| Rapzid wrote:
| ATI developed the graphics chips for 360 and Wii. Feels a little
| too revisionist to say AMD produced the chips even if they did
| purchase ATI a number of months before Wii released..
| fourfour3 wrote:
| It's a bit tricky even to say that ATI developed them - they
| were designed by ArtX (mostly ex SGI staffers who had also
| worked on the N64), who were bought by ATI.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Perhaps but ArtX was acquired by ATI long before. The ATI
| logo was already on the GameCube at launch.
| wmf wrote:
| Maybe Wii was ArtX but wasn't the 360 using a mainstreamish
| Radeon GPU?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm curious about how such a bad idea made it to market. Not that
| the technical concept is bad, but the business decision to build
| an entire console generation on such a unique, ultimately
| migraine-inducing architecture.
| MBCook wrote:
| Remember Cell was "the future". It was going to go into the
| PS3, but also TVs and computers and whatever else. If you
| squint it's a bit like Apple putting a ton of investment in the
| A series chips that then went into iPads and Macs (via the M
| series).
|
| Problem is: no one wanted it. So none of that panned out. If it
| had gone on to be something like Intel's Core 2 Duo that showed
| up everywhere in hindsight it would look smart.
| initplus wrote:
| Difference is that Apple invested heavily in backwards
| compatibility, even old x86 code performs well on their
| chips. Meanwhile cell requires a reworking of your entire
| program to take advantage of it.
| MBCook wrote:
| That was common for consoles at that time. The PS2 couldn't
| actually run PS1 games, it just fell back to a PS1 embedded
| in the system. Same way the GBA played GB/GBC games.
|
| Apple wasn't a great example but it was the best I could
| think of. It took Apple 10 years to go from the A4 in the
| first iPhone with an Apple chip to the M1 in the first Mac.
| They also were just using Arm, the same instructions that
| they had been using before and something well understood.
|
| They didn't suddenly release something people weren't
| really prepared for like a Transputer and just declare
| "this will be everywhere within three years". They let the
| switch take its time as necessary.
|
| Sony had the arrogance to do both of those.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > That was common for consoles at that time. The PS2
| couldn't actually run PS1 games, it just fell back to a
| PS1 embedded in the system.
|
| Also, the PS3 did the same for PS2. Sony eventually did
| away with that to cut costs, but the launch models had
| it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| The software emulator was terrible, sadly. A whole
| collection of games didn't work well.
| astrange wrote:
| > They also were just using Arm, the same instructions
| that they had been using before and something well
| understood.
|
| Apple switched to (and largely invented) ARMv8/AArch64 in
| the middle of that, which is very different from the
| ARMv7 they started with.
| initplus wrote:
| It's less a confusing one off decision to use a weird
| architecture, and more a failure to reconsider the status quo
| and stop using weird architectures.
|
| Previous PlayStation hardware was just as odd. Ps2 reused old
| surplus Ps1 processors just for audio, and had coprocessors
| just like cell.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I don't think Sony expected Xbox 360 so soon. PS2 was sales
| were still good and there was no console on a market better
| than PS2 at that time.
|
| Then out of nowhere Xbox 360 comes out, Halo that was a macOS
| title suddenly a main and a well selling IP on Xbox. Not just
| that, it also picked HD-DVD as its format posing a threat to
| Blu-ray.
|
| Sony had to put something out.
| cmpxchg8b wrote:
| Halo first came out on the original Xbox, not sure it ties
| into the PS3/360 calculus other than being a launch title.
| vel0city wrote:
| There wasn't even a Halo game as a launch title, but there
| was backwards support for the original Xbox Halo games on
| the 360.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_launch#Titles
|
| There wouldn't be a Halo game released for the Xbox 360
| until September 2007, nearly two years after the release of
| the console.
| Talanes wrote:
| The 360 didn't pick HD-DVD as it's format, the built-in drive
| was just regular DVD. The HD-DVD drive was an external add-on
| that they sold along with the 360 Media Remote.
| vel0city wrote:
| Halo came out in 2001, four years before the Xbox 360 was
| released.
|
| The Xbox 360 released its HD-DVD drive a few days before the
| PS3 hit store shelves in North America. Sony had established
| the PS3 would use Blu-Rays a year before the Xbox 360 was
| even publicly announced.
|
| I think there were a number of things Sony wasn't expecting
| about the Xbox 360, but HD-DVD or Halo wouldn't have been any
| of those things.
| failuser wrote:
| You forget that it was normal before. PS2 had many separate
| chips you need to program and balance throughout and latencies
| to make the most of hardware. PS2 was able to achieve 60 fps in
| many impressive games. Console hardware was very specific, the
| original Xbox being just an Intel PC was an exception.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I have a weird problem with the article. It does start with a
| question over 'infamous' qualifier, but it goes into something
| deeper that has been bothering me over the past few years.
|
| Lets start from the end, game consoles these days are basically
| optimized PCs. They are effectively nothing like the first,
| second, or even third generation consoles that had fairly unique
| hardware, desirable exclusives and so on.
|
| Cell may have been difficult to program well for, but it speaks
| volumes about the current state of consoles that devs worry about
| being able to be lazy with ports. The idiot consumer will buy
| whatever anyway. The side effect of the first generations'
| relatively unique hardware profile is that games actually had to
| be optimized and tailored to the hardware. No lazy ports ( I
| still get pissy sometimes over ps3 dragon age port ). Exclusives
| had to be good or at least showcase what the console could do.
|
| So is that what makes Cell infamous? The thing made news when
| could be run in a cluster[1].
|
| I have a different take. Cell is the remnant of the consoles,
| when they were still worth one's time.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
| MBCook wrote:
| The article gives the answer.
|
| It's not about being lazy with ports. It's that the asset
| budgets are so large that making games is way too expensive.
| For any normal company you basically _have_ to launch on
| multiple systems if you want a financial payback.
|
| And every time graphics get better the problem gets worse. More
| models, more textures, more detail, more everything. $$$
|
| Unless you have a monster hit (Zelda, Last of Us) you may be
| unable to make your money back on one machine. Even if you
| could, why not just make more money by adding in the other
| machines?
|
| There's a reason pretty much only 1st party studios do
| exclusives.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| If there is one thing that Steam has proven, it is that games
| absolutely do not have to focus on 8k assets, celebrity
| likeness and voices. In other words, that is not really an
| answer. Or at least not a real answer. It is, at best, a part
| of it that glosses over why people play games.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Not once ever have I purchased a game because of a
| character's voice and looks. In fact, most of the time, I'm
| skipping the "I wanted to be a director, instead I make
| games" cut scenes. Does spending money on that actually
| increase sales for games? I get having great looking
| assets, but voices?
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I've never understood people who enjoy the Diablo end-
| game but I love playing the games through for the story,
| vibe, and lore. The voice acting definitely contributes.
| The voice of Deckard Cain is instantly recognizable to
| me.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think it's largely about the marketing aspect. Imagine
| creating marketing for Crusader Kings 2, Mount and Blade,
| Terraria, and the countless other games which sold a
| zillion copies and are unbelievably fun, but just look
| pretty bland on the surface. With high end voice acting,
| lots of cut scenes, and so on - all of the marketing
| basically writes itself.
|
| You have your actory voice intro the game, set the stage
| of the plot, show some brief segments of critical moments
| in cut scenes, and then occasionally intersperse a half
| second or so of actual gameplay. No idea why this gets
| some people fired up, but it seems to work reliably
| enough. I suppose it's just targeting a demographic that
| isn't you nor I!
| MBCook wrote:
| I don't know that it's that it makes marketing easier
| because the clips/etc already exist. I suspect they often
| just don't know how to market it without shiny
| screenshots.
|
| Indies don't have this problem. But no big companies seem
| to be able to not spend a ton on graphics.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| when ffx released the very first thing they advertised
| was the inclusion of voices, second was real-time facial
| expressions
|
| https://m.media-
| amazon.com/images/I/91-wkX5SugL._SY679_.jpg
| MBCook wrote:
| > If there is one thing that Steam has proven, it is that
| games absolutely do not have to focus on 8k assets
|
| Totally. Thomas Was Alone is one of the best games I've
| ever played and it's just a bunch of boxes. It's basically
| high resolution Atari.
|
| Great graphics are nice and can certainly help, but the be
| all end all race to always look the best is not working
| well.
|
| Some kind of reckoning has got to be coming. We're getting
| to the point where it's like 5+ years between sequels to
| big titles just cause that's how long it takes. Much like
| mega budget Hollywood movies no one's willing to take a
| risk when it costs that much.
| tuna74 wrote:
| Games like The Last of Us have been really big hits. For
| certain types of games presentation really matter.
| MBCook wrote:
| Oh sure. There's a place for it. But not every game needs
| to be that way. We mostly get AAA and now "AAAA" games.
|
| We need to get back to AA and maybe even A games.
| Cheaper, faster to make, still fun.
| MisterTea wrote:
| To me the infamy is owed to Sony's "super computer on a chip"
| hype marketing (similar to the hype around the Emotion Engine
| int he PS2) surrounding the architecture coupled with the
| difficulty in programming it. The big issue was SPE's had no
| way to access main memory so you had to copy the data from RAM
| into each SPE which had its own local memory.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| They did a similar marketing push when the PS2 was developed,
| saying it couldn't be exported to certain countries due to
| dual-use restrictions because it was "too powerful"
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| While I too miss exotic hardware (N64 being my all-time
| favorite), ultimately what people want to play is great games
| and the hardware is just a means to an end.
|
| The bigger issue with current consoles imo, specifically the
| PS5 and XB, is their input homogenization and stagnation.
| Consoles have historically been forward-looking via their
| controllers to enable new ways to play games:
|
| [NOT including optional accessories, _only out of the box
| abilities_ ]
|
| - N64: Analog controls, 4 controller ports, controller
| expansion ports
|
| - PS1: _Dual_ analog controls
|
| - PS2: Pressure-sensitive buttons, built-in rumble
|
| - Dreamcast: ...
|
| - Xbox: ...
|
| - Gamecube: ...
|
| - Wii: Motion controls
|
| - PS3: ...
|
| - Wii U: Gamepad screen
|
| - 360: ...
|
| - PS4: [Correction!] Touchpad
|
| - Switch: Detachable and sharable controllers
|
| - XB1: Kinnect
|
| - PS5: ...
|
| - XB1X: ...
|
| I'm definitely not implying that every new input type was
| successful (See Wii U, kinnect), but consoles up until about
| PS3/360 had something new to offer regarding ways to experience
| games. This has all but stopped, with Nintendo being the only
| one to consistently introduce new ways to play that cannot
| easily be replicated on a PC. Plugging a PS5/Xbox controller
| into a PC yields the same or better experience as buying a
| dedicated console these days, so why buy the console at all?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _why buy the console at all?_
|
| Putting console exclusives aside, I can build a PC that does
| everything I need it to do but play _some_ new games + a
| console for less than it costs to build & maintain a "gaming
| rig". Also, my PS4 is still working after ~10yrs. I would
| have to upgrade my PC more frequently than that to keep up
| with new games.
|
| You're also forgetting the two-point capacitive touch pad on
| the PS4 controller. It's OK, almost all the video game
| developers did too.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| >It's OK, almost all the video game developers did too.
|
| Haha, good catch, corrected!
| DuckConference wrote:
| PS5 controller replaced rumble with fancy haptics and force
| feedback on the triggers
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| I thought about that, but at its core the PS5 triggers are
| just another form of feedback akin to the rumble, and
| didn't really introduce new types of gameplay.
|
| Fancy haptics were introduced by the Switch.
| MBCook wrote:
| While the switch had higher resolution haptics, the PS5
| is another advance past that. They do not feel the same.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| I'm not saying they feel exactly the same, but pointing
| out the fact that _no new gameplay experiences are
| unlocked by said advancement_. This is evidenced by the
| fact that games are ported between the PS5 and Xbox 1X
| with _little to no gameplay changes between the two_ ,
| the feel of triggers and rumble aside.
|
| Before haptics became standard, game designers could not
| base any significant gameplay experiences on the presence
| of haptics. Early games like Ocarina of Time had neat
| _optional_ side quests enabled by haptics, but in no way
| required because they couldn 't rely on all customers
| buying an optional accessory.
|
| The presence of the Switch's HD Rumble (And novel
| controllers in general) _enabled new types of play_ on
| games like 1-2-Switch, and Nintendo 's Labo series that
| use the rumble to control cardboard toys' movement.
|
| The same cannot be said for the PS5's more refined rumble
| or triggers.
| MBCook wrote:
| > why buy the console at all?
|
| It's easier. I don't have to fiddle with drivers. Or
| settings. Or choosing which card to upgrade to when. Or
| debugging mismatches. I don't have to have the OS +
| Steam/Epic/whatever + games.
|
| The games are written to what I have and I don't need to
| worry about it. The OS is completely built around playing
| games and making it easy for me to acquire them and I don't
| have to think about any of it.
|
| I had the years of building gaming PCs and messing with all
| of that and doing all the research. And I had fun. And at
| this point in my life I just don't wanna deal with it I just
| wanna play a nice game.
| driscoll42 wrote:
| There's a wonderful blog post on the PS3 Architecture -
| https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/ that
| gives a good overview of the Cell processor with linked resources
| if you want more detail.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| Wow this website is absolutely amazing! Full of details about
| consoles, and with a really pleasing mixture of text, images,
| and even 3D models.
| kevvok wrote:
| There's a great book about the development of Cell and Xenon
| (which went into the Xbox 360) called "The Race for a New Game
| Machine" that was co-written by a couple folks who worked on them
| at IBM.
| khalilravanna wrote:
| My biggest lament with the PS3 is the forward incompatibility
| making many great games locked to the platform (MGS4, Demon's
| Souls, etc.). Meanwhile in Xbox land there are *633* 360 games
| you can play on any new Xbox by just slipping the disc in. Now
| some of this is no doubt due to differing approaches to business
| by the corporate masters but from what I've read a lot of it is
| the unique and befuddling architecture of the PS3.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_...
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Xbox canceled development on their emulator though.
| copx wrote:
| Despite its exotic architecture the PS3 can be emulated well on
| "normal" machines, though.
|
| I was amazed that I am actually able to play PS3 games on my
| (older, not at all top of the line) laptop thanks to the
| brilliant RPCS3 emulator.
|
| A PS5 is way more powerful than my laptop, so in theory SONY
| could just make all those PS3 games available through
| emulation.
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| She's low-key one of the most successful engineers ever in terms
| of bringing cutting edge technology to the mass market, but AMD
| never gets the fawning press attention of NVIDIA, and still has
| the lingering image of being the poorer cousin of Intel.
|
| Of course, as a woman engineer to make it this far she's used to
| not getting the limelight in a male dominated industry - which
| may also explain some of AMDs recent success.
| noobermin wrote:
| The death of the powerpc is a bit sad to me as it feels like the
| lineage of the 6502 has really ended as of now. As much as
| everyone hates too on x86, I fear one day it too will disappear
| and everything will be on some arm isa
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| PowerPC's sort of descendant/predecessor POWER is still
| developed and sold. Raptor Computing seems to be the only
| company selling POWER based systems to the general public.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| Trivia: Lisa Su and Jensen Huang are relatives:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jensen-huang-and-lisa-su-f....
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| If China ever takes over Taiwan, America is so screwed.
|
| Actually, there is such a scattered supply chain for
| semiconductor chips, that any war that disrupts international
| trade in a material way, would bring that entire industry to
| its knees. So many critical suppliers in the semiconductor
| supply chain are single companies, or single country
| oligopolies.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >The interviewer points out that Sony's PlayStation 3 is viewed
| as one of its least successful consoles, which is true. The
| PlayStation 3 pretty much lost the generation handily to
| Nintendo's cheap, casual-friendly Wii and Microsoft's less
| powerful but easier Xbox 360.
|
| In Europe, PS3 was widely popular especially in conjunction with
| Call of Duty because Xbox never really gained ground in EU, at
| least that was my impression growing up as an EU gamer. Wii was
| also popular af at the time but PS3 and Wii buyers were different
| audience, Wii was more casual type of gaming and it was suitable
| for family gaming while PS3 was for more serious gamers who
| played more hardcorish titles like COD, FIFA and PES and ofc
| there was and is PC master race for real hardcore gamers.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| That may be true but overall, the PS3 was the loser at the time
| and it took until basically the end of that console generation,
| consisting of many price cuts and years of developing a strong
| catalogue, for them to (narrowly) outsell the 360 worldwide.
|
| Considering the absolute dominance of PSX and PS2, it was
| definitely not what they were hoping for. Not quite as dramatic
| as Nintendo with the market loss from SNES to the N64, but I'm
| sure Sony had a lot of similar conversations. You also have to
| consider that Xbox was the distant third place console in the
| previous generation, so barely losing to Sony at the last
| minute was definitely considered a huge success. Especially
| after the disaster that was the RROD. If that hadn't happened
| Microsoft likely would have beaten Sony's sales.
| mrkramer wrote:
| My last gaming console was PS2 and yea I loved it because
| gaming consoles are meant for "couch gaming" with big TV
| screen and as one gaming friend of mine told me: "When you
| buy gaming console, you are set for the next 5 years."
| Moore's law kinda kills the fun for us PC gamers but I still
| prefer gaming on PC than on gaming consoles.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| There's something really nice about consoles for me still.
| I love just dropping on my couch, pressing a button on my
| controller to start run console, pressing one more button
| to launch a game, and I am exactly where I left off last
| time with no load times. Takes me about seven seconds to
| get back in. As somebody with 2 kids it makes gaming more
| feasible haha
| tekla wrote:
| You must not have been there for the nogaems memes.
| kimixa wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
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