IEEE Spectrum On The PS3 Learning Curve

An anonymous reader writes "The Insomniacs is the cover article in the December issue of IEEE Spectrum, discussing developers ramping up to the PS3 hardware. The article features Insomniac Games, who developed the PS3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man. Despite mixed reports in the press, the Insomniac folks are delighted to be working with Sony's technology, and describe the process of helping to make or break a console launch." From the article: "Despite the delays, there's something inside the PS3 that burnished Sony's reputation as a hardware company. The heart of the machine is the powerful new Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor. Developed over the last five years by Sony, IBM, and Toshiba on a reported budget of $400 million, the Cell is not just another chip: it is a giant leap beyond the current generation of computer processors into a nextgen muscle machine optimized for multimedia tasks."

Re:Oh man....

[Broken scope]

If that was not a canned response I don't know what is. OMG IT TEH CELL!!!! IT SO FUCKING AMAZING LOLZ!!!! HAX!!!!!!
Cellular processing. DO something with it on the console that could only be done on the console then TOUT IT DAMNIT.

Re:Oh man....

[AKAImBatman]

You heard Hirai at the E3: "The next generation doesn't start until Wii say it does!"

I don't think Nintendo has remembered to make the announcement yet. :P

Unbiased Source

[HappySqurriel]

" article features Insomniac Games, who developed the PS3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man."

Which is a game that is published by Sony developed by a company that is owned by Sony ...

What's next "Bungie, the Developers of the XBox 360's highly anticipated shooter Halo 3, have announced that the XBox 360 is Super Powerful and that Sony Rapes Babies!"

I want to hear from EA, Ubisoft, Activision and Sega (ie. companies which have little interest in the platform) on which is easy/hard to develop for; so far EA has said that next-gen development is insanely expensive.

Re:Just wait

[badboy_tw2002]

Can a compiler flag redesign your code? No? Then it can't do what you're asking. In order to take full advantage of the cell, you have to break your task up into parallel units and have them run on the SPUs. The SPU has a low memory overhead so you can't just throw any old piece of code at it. If you were writing something for a similar architecture I could see it, but otherwise just enabling "cell mode" won't get you much.

Re:Oh man....

[Quantam]

I think you're overreacting. While they may be exaggerating a bit, the Cell is a pretty insane piece of hardware. I'm a professional programmer (though not on the Cell), and I've been reading various architecture specs for the Cell. Its peculiar architecture means that it's difficult to make use of its full power for many types of tasks (don't ask me why they're selling Cell-based blade servers; it doesn't make much sense to me); but if you have an application that fits with what the Cell is optimized for, that thing is ungodly fast. Expect to see it become popular in rendering and scientific clusters. Whether it's a good fit for a game console requires more industry-specific knowledge than I have.

Re:Sony Hype Machine

[androvsky]

Last I checked, both systems had the same amount of memory. 512 MB. The Xbox 360 cpu and gpu have to share it, while in the ps3 the Cell gets 256 MB, and the gpu gets 256 MB. As simple as the math here is, this is the second time today I've seen someone post the "fact" that the 360 has twice the memory. Where is the 360 supposed to store geometry and textures? The ps3 nvidia chip really isn't anything special compared to the 360's ATI chip... the only really interesting thing is that the Cell has easily twice the vector processing capabilities of the three-core xbox cpu. That probably won't translate into better graphics for at least a year, if ever. It could make for some interesting background applications, like enhanced physics processing or doing something interesting (read: Wii-like) with the HD eyetoy. We won't know for a while though. I agree Sony needs the competition, but it's not as if Microsoft doesn't need to be taken down a couple notches also.

Re:Oh man....

[Pojut]

noted, but something that raised the red flag for me:

If it is truly as powerful as they say (for gaming purposes, of course) they wouldn't need to talk it up. They would simply say "hey, you will see...what you will experience will be beyond what I could convey to you here today"

I THINK nintendo did something along those lines, if I remember correctly...and now they have the little console that could going

Re:Oh man....

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Its peculiar architecture means that it's difficult to make use of its full power for many types of tasks (don't ask me why they're selling Cell-based blade servers; it doesn't make much sense to me); but if you have an application that fits with what the Cell is optimized for, that thing is ungodly fast.

So is a GPU. So is a DSP. So is an FPGA. So is an ASIC.

There have always been ICs that are "insane" compared to CPUs - the CPU's power comes not from its raw performance, but in its ease of programmability and flexibility. My GeForce 6200 can do more GFLOPS than the fastest Core 2 Duo, but you're not going to run Linux on it.

Cell is a very interesting piece of hardware, and it will no doubt see wide use in many different applications. But calling it a "revolution" is just plain wrong. It's just a better, more integrated version of what we have been doing for years.

Re:Oh man....

[xero314]

But the problem is, for all the power increase you get, you have to spend that much more time and money to actually take advantage of it.

This is only true in the sense that unified libraries or processes need to be conceived and/or developed before it becomes easy to take advantage of the more complex architectures. This can be seen in the history of GPUs where originally it took specialized knowledge of the specific GPU to get the most out of it, but now standardized APIs have been developed which allow one to make effective use of the GPU (though not necessarily maximum) with out need to understand the specific hardware. The same thing will happen with the Cell Processor, in that common libraries will be converted to effectively use the power of the processor (or more specifically it's SPEs). In the end developing for the Cell will be as easy as developing for any processor, and yes something will be better on the cell (single precision floating point intensive applications) and some not(double precision floating point intensive applications, though I assume a good library will get around this as well by using single precision operations when ever possible even if they have to do more total calculations).

The question is, are game companies ready and willing to take advantage of this power to its full extent?

Ready? Probably not, but some are certainly willing. Insomniac (Ratchet and Clank), Naughty Dog (Jak), and SCEI(Ico) are just a few that I am fairly confident we will see some amazing works from.