Sony Ditching Cell Architecture For Next PlayStation? 276
RogueyWon writes "According to reports in Kotaku and Forbes, Sony is planning to ditch the Cell processor that powered the PlayStation 3 and may be planning to power the console's successor using a more conventional PC-like architecture provided by AMD. In the PS3's early years, Sony was keen to promote the benefits of its Cell processor, but the console's complicated architecture led to many studios complaining that it was difficult to develop for."
Doesn't matter (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Insightful?! Come on, /. How does this user's gaming/buying preference and overall irrational heated opinion of a consumer electronics company add any insight whatsoever to the fact that said company is opting to use an AMD chip in their next product?
Please try your best to stop continuing to cheapen the already out-dated rating system as well as feeding blatantly obvious karma whores. Shameful.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
There's nothing shameful about the /. masses agreeing that Sony abuses its customer base. Perhaps what is truly insightful is how quickly the comment leapt up to +5 and stayed there, implying that far more people agree than disagree.
If you look to /. for balanced, impartial fact-based discourse... keep looking! And if you ever find such an impossible thing, do let us know.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't buy it. They screwed us with Linux on the PS3. Their consoles are done in this house.
You seriously believe people who wanted to use Linux on the PS3 are a significant market for Sony. And that they really care about what you have to say about that. How adorable.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
It is more a matter of principal. Personally I only briefly used Linux on the PS3, but the fact they removed the option after promising people it would be there as a selling point is just dishonest business. I don't like doing business with dishonest people. The only games I have bought for PS3 since then are the console exclusives. I don't know yet if I will bother with a PS4, but if I don't, it will be solely because of the Linux thing even though I didn't use it.
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I don't know yet if I will bother with a PS4, but if I don't, it will be solely because of the Linux thing even though I didn't use it.
For being a matter of principal, you don't seem to be fully adherent to it...
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The principle is that in so far as I can avoid it without hurting others I do. I want to support a game studio that makes a quality game, the fact it is only on a platform that I don't like the maker of is secondary to supporting the quality work of an innocent third party. It used to be my platform of choice that I purchased all my games on, but I have switched to PC where available or XBox 360 when not. I'd say that is the best I can do in terms of sticking it to Sony's Playstation group while not hurt
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Let me clarify it another way. I was simply stating that I was not personally harmed by the removal of other os, however as a matter of principal, I dislike it when a company says they will provide something and then recants. It was perhaps not that grand of an issue, and thus doesn't merit all that strong of a response, but I altered my buying habits out of principal regardless of my personally being impacted. I would rather do business with a company that I can trust than one I can't and my response is
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Oh sorry, about the console itself. I am not one to nay say a platform until I see it. If they make a compelling enough deal, and if they are selling at a loss, then I would not be opposed to purchasing one to tinker with. Most of their profits come from games and if I don't buy games on their platform, they don't make much money. I'm a technologist. I get technology to toy with it and see what it can do, even if I don't get games for it as my platform of choice.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
The only games I have bought for PS3 since then are the console exclusives.
I sympathised with you up to that point; then I realised that this is the same weak-willed, half-baked, not-putting-one's-money-where-one's-mouth-is posts about "principles" or "boycotts" that appear endlessly on Slashdot and aren't worth the hard drive space they're stored on.
Your stern-willed resolve to stand up for your vaunted "principles" doesn't extend past foregoing the game of the month if it's only available on the PS3? Don't make me laugh.
I think it's pretty clear why Sony aren't too concerned, when of even the tiny percentage that supposedly care about this sort of thing, most of them will rant endlessly about it, but give Sony their money when push comes to shove anyway.
I don't know yet if I will bother with a PS4
Such resolve!
I'm sure you will though- it's been confirmed that "Call of Metal Gears of Modern Warfare 7" will be exclusive to the PS4 for at least 3 1/2 days after launch, and it would be unfair for you to have to forego your shiny toys for that long.
Please do come back and post another wishy-washy diatribe about "principles" after you do so though.
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Thank you.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe not, but they also gave the finger to universities using PS3 clusters [wikipedia.org]. The fact that Sony participated assisted said universities with setting up these clusters speaks volumes as to how ridiculously contradictory Sony's response was when they blocked OtherOS.
These types of applications are what attracted me to the PS3, not because I necessarily wanted to do this myself, but the fact that the console was powerful and flexible enough to be used in this way was very attractive to me. Most people prefer having an option to having the option taken away out of nowhere.
It's as if Sony gets a list of options and always picks the one that will most piss off their customers. They're sabotaging themselves...
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You have a lot of things you can be angry at Sony at, but I doubt the universities cared about the removal. How many of them that were using PS3 clusters needed them to access the PSN or play the latest games? You could continue to use linux as long as you wanted if you didn't care about these features.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Interesting)
So, where were the universities going to get replacement hardware when their machines start breaking down? Newer consoles that come with the firmware update blocking Linux and can't be downgraded? PS3 Slim consoles that never had Linux at all (officially speaking; they can run it just fine in reality)?
The only thing that stops me from hoping that Sony dies in a fire is the risk of what level of unethical behavior it will permit their direct competitors to stoop to, when there's one less alternative for people to switch to. I'm under no delusion that any megacorp is going to behave any more ethically than its bottom line dictates. The disgusting thing is that Sony can't even measure up to that.
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That's a baseless argument. Sony could have stopped production of the PS3 altogether, at any time. Unless the University has a contract which guarantees replacement parts, they are out of luck no matter what. That's just the way it is when you build a cluster out of non-commodity parts.
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There's some truth to the breaking down issue. However, I would think the blame for that falls more in the hands of the universities for not planning ahead if they did have such issues. It's much the same as any piece of hardware. It's not evil to stop producing it. Yeah there were no more new units being made that could replace the ones they originally had. At least there were tens of millions of them out in the wild already. If they hadn't bought enough to last the life of their project prior to change, t
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That's just too bad. Sony could have stopped production of PS3's completely. That they produce a product with most of the same capabilities and the same name is immaterial.
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The fact that Sony participated assisted said universities with setting up these clusters
They did? Do you have a citation stating that Sony was helping set these clusters up?
The earlier PS3s, all the way up until they introduced the Slim models (and possibly later), were sold by Sony as loss leaders... they intended to recoup that money selling games since they gets license money for every PS3 game produced. Therefore, intentionally selling PS3s in large quantities to places that weren't going to buy games would be just stupid.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
It's in my link.
In Summer 2007, Dr. Gaurav Khanna, a professor in the Physics Department of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth independently built a message-passing based cluster using 8 PS3s running Fedora Linux. This cluster was built with support from Sony Computer Entertainment and was the first such cluster that generated published scientific results. Dubbed as the "PS3 Gravity Grid", this PS3 cluster performs astrophysical simulations of large supermassive black holes capturing smaller compact objects
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who worked with a PS3 cluster, the removal other OS functionality did not impact me in the slightest. If you're using them for a cluster you aren't using them for gaming. If you're using them for a cluster you don't download the updates that have absolutely no impact on your console, which is all of them.
What they did that impacted the PS3 cluster business was they took away the other OS option in future consoles, which makes sense since it was a waste of money on their part anyway, but that means there's no way to replace broken parts of the cluster. Though as it turns out, it wouldn't be worthwhile anyway, since GPU's do the number crunching better, and for less money.
The Cell on clusters suffers the same problem it has in a console. It's not enough better than a CPU for the extra time needed to learn to use it properly. And it's not good enough to compete with a GPU for pure computing needs. It was an amusing project, and sure, once the cluster is running you want to churn through some data with it, but by the time they ditched the Other OS feature in software they were beyond viable to build new (since you couldn't get consoles that would do it).
That doesn't mean it wasn't illegal to remove the other OS feature after the fact. It probably was on principle. But don't misrepresent who it mattered to. The fraction of a percent of people who ever actually used the other OS feature *and* games did get screwed, no doubt. But if you seriously used the OtherOS functionality you didn't use them as gaming machines at the same time. Remember a lot of people 'used' the other OS feature in the same way 90 million people 'use' google plus. And yes, that small collection of power users, and that larger but still small collection of pirates got screwed on the deal. That's why these things are illegal.
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Significant not in number, but in the fact that they dismantled the console's security in less than a year of concentrated effort.
Negligible in numbers, sure, but it destroyed the image of invulnerability and supreme competency they were trying to use.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
PS3 Clusters [slashdot.org] were already covered here many years ago, where Sony donated PS3 consoles specifically for use as cluster nodes using OtherOS. It was cheap promotion for them, which most assuredly led to a few sales of multiple consoles to curious geeks. I don't know how many "a few sales" actually turned out to be, but I'd safely guesstimate 10,000 units at the least. Enough to spark class-action lawsuits that were clumsily thrown out of court, after which Sony updated its EULA to remove users' right to sue the company [arstechnica.com].
So yes, people wanted to use Linux on the PS3, which Sony initially embraced with open arms. Then they turned around and legally told all these users to fuck off and die. Perhaps I'm a bit too zen for the average sucker, but if the only way you (Sony) can stop people from suing you is by forcing them to digitally sign a contact with a covenant not to sue, I'd say you fail at business. It's kind of like when little kids say "I can hit you, but the rule is you can't hit me back"... those little fuckers need to be curb stomped, and so does Sony.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Funny)
Market research clearly supports your theory that removing linux had any effect whatsoever in how well it performed.
No, really, it did! It shows that all the 5 people that used that feature stopped buying sony! That'll show them!!!
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Market research clearly supports your theory that removing linux had any effect whatsoever in how well it performed.
No, really, it did! It shows that all the 5 people that used that feature stopped buying sony! That'll show them!!!
Are you including the government agencies and universities using them as linux cluster nodes? You're a fucking idiot.
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We'll when just one of those customers buys around 1500 PS3's that is one hell of a customer to lose.
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What's the alternative? XBox is obviously out if you're concerned with a parent company's treatment of the Linux user base. Wii doesn't seem to be considered a competing platform to XBox or PS3. i.e., different target audience. Linux PC gaming doesn't seem to be taking off too fast either due to Windows applications barrier to entry. ???
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Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, fuck those guys! DRM included on audio CDs, fraudulently advertising their product as able to use Linux and then disabling that feature ex post facto, fake astroturf blog ad campaigns that insult human intelligence, spending money to purchase censorship laws and immoral copyright extensions, suing tinkerers playing with products they legally own.
Fuck Sony! They are an icon of much that is wrong with the world right now.
Sony is what you get when you allow companies to grow too large in scope. I try my best (imperfectly, of course) to not give money to companies that are large. There are almost always smaller alternatives that won't fuck you 8 ways from Sunday with corruption, greed, and control like a large company like Sony can't help but do.
Please help kill companies like Sony by decentralizing your purchasing power! Next time you're thinking about buying a game licensed by Sony, check out what smaller, independent alternatives like the Humble Bundle guys are doing!
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Of which none of it had to do with the Linux crowd, or the DRM whining if you had actually read the article. Weak economic times, supply disruptions and a strong yen is behind this not people protesting over Linux on the PS3.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
You really think it has nothing to do with Sony?
Apple don't seem to have a problem with making money.
The trouble is that Sony have a hate-hate relationship with their customers. They have a long history of producing excellent hardware then utterly screwing over the customer with the software. That annyos people and they stop paying for that stuff.
Some examples off the top of my head:
They hobbled the computer version of minidiscs because of "copy protection".
Sony used to produce nice music players. Of course they used a proprietary format (ATRAC3) and the upload program was appalingly badly written and only ran on a specific version of Windows 98 because of "copy protection", giving it a rather short service life.
The Sony-BMG rootkit. A differnet branch of sony screwing their paying customers for "copy protection".
Leaking a massive bunch of credit cards then lying about it rather than trying to help their customers ASAP. No copy protection excuse there.
UMD, because of "copy protection".
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The reason I stopped buying Sony is because their product quality became crap. I we had an old Sony Trinitron from the late 70s that worked fine until only a few years ago. These days, you're lucky to find a Sony product that lasts more than a couple of years before mysteriously dying.
It's kind of funny how Sony traded places with companies like Samsung and Goldstar (LG). Both of the latter now make excellent quality products while Sony churns out shit.
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The vast majority of Sony customers not only don't give a fuck about removing Linux from a PS3, including rootkits on CDs, or anything about MiniDisc, they don't even know what those things are in the first place.
You're a goddamned idiot if you think any of these things has the least bit to do with Sony's financial troubles. Their troubles are caused by a combination of the general, prolonged downturn in the economy and selling expensive devices (primarily TVs) that have features (3D) to which most customer
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
While you are probably correct that the DRM & Linux people have little to do with it you are way off base as to what is the real problem at Sony. Sony finds themselves on the wrong side of pretty much every quickly evolving high tech consumer device.
They were very slow to move away from CRT production which they were very strong in. The ramped up their LCD production just as the bottom fell out of LCD pricing. They are now attempting to catch up in the OLED space which ironically wouldn't exist in its current state without Sony R&D.
They were slow to move from tape to CD to digital music and lost the entire market.
Their once dominant position in the console market is gone. They are actually being out innovated by Microsoft. This isn't even the Microsoft of 15 years ago that was trying. They are losing to the Vista Microsoft.. it boggles the mind.
tldr; They are losing tons of money because they have become really slow in the fastest moving consumer markets.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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I have always thought Sony as a high-quality brand, but frankly the company has quite a lot on its shoulders already. From the top of my head:
- exploding laptop batteries
- hard-to-service laptops which require bunch of proprietary little drivers
- rootkit music CDs
- disabling "other OS" in PS3
- screwing with PSN customers
- cranking up prices of Whitney Houston's music after the girl died
I personally have not established any boycott campaign against them, I just hear these things. After all, Sony has jum
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you. Sony makes good products.
You have nicely listed many of the reasons why they are a morally bankrupt corporation that doesn't give a damn about their customers.
On the one hand, it would be difficult to point out corporations that aren't, on the other hand, perhaps we can have an influence on corporations in general if we refuse to do business with the ones that screw us over directly.
FTFY (Score:3)
I agree with you. Sony made good products.
FTFY
It's a Sony used to be a sign of quality. Nowadays it's a stigma and a representation of our disposable electronics society.
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Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, IMO it's been a while since they were really a high-quality brand in many ways.
Their BD players are mostly crap - slow, clunky UI and takes FOREVER to boot and load a disc.
Their digital cameras are mediocre (never could compete with Canon or Nikon) and until recently required a proprietary expensive flash card.
Their TVs use LCD panels manufactured by Samsung and Sharp, with little value added (and a lot of cost added).
Their stereos and home theater receivers are now all basically mass market crap as well - anyone who does their research would go with Denon, Yamaha, Onkyo, etc instead.
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I'm willing to give Sony another chance in a couple of years, once they have had time to correct and make up for the years under Howard Stringer.
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I have a PS3, but I bought it and nearly all my games used. I have no intention of directly supporting them in any way.
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What are the developers complaining for? (Score:5, Funny)
We all know Sony will just remove the cell processor functionality in a few updates time.
And there was much rejoicing (Score:2)
I can practically hear game programmers everywhere cheering.
Why not PC + 360? (Score:2)
Re:Why not PC + 360? (Score:5, Insightful)
If game programmers dislike the Cell, why can't they just convince their bosses to target their next project at PC and Xbox 360 instead of PS3 and Xbox 360?
$.
Re:Why not PC + 360? (Score:4, Insightful)
-GiH
Programmer time is money (Score:2)
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Most of the time they do. A lot of developers just went XBox, XBox first, or dual release with the PS3 going out "however the hell it turns out I won’t bother optimize for that mess".
THAT backlash, plus the fact that all that amazing specialized R&D resulted in a chip that just got outperformed by an off the shelf Intel CPU (a year before the PS3 ended launching) likely made Sony realize it was a waste of time to keep pushing proprietary CPU architectures.
Re:Why not PC + 360? (Score:5, Informative)
As a game developer who has made a game for the 360 and PS3, I can tell you that my biggest complaints about the ps3 were the memory limitations (cpu and gpu memory is separated), the horrible software for the devkits, and the devkits themselves, which suck so much power that they require you to run air conditioning even in the winter.
The main difference that you hit when making a cross-platform title is DirectX (d3d) versus OpenGL ES. Those libraries need to understand the lowlying architecture, but they pretty much take care of everything for the developer.
Re:Why not PC + 360? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll join you on the Sony SDKs being horrible. I still think the SN debugger is the best debugger I've used for multithreaded debugging. I'd also venture that you weren't a particularly serious PS3 dev house if you were using Sony's GL implementation, we ditched that shit the second GCM became available.
The Cell architecture itself isn't difficult to program for, Sony just screwed themselves by coming out a year later then the 360. The big issue is that developing parallel software on the 360 is in a homogeneous environment. Game devs (myself included) started building engines around those constraints. After we had 360 devkits for a year or so, Sony comes by with PS3s and they are different at a fundamental level. We already have over a year of engine design and development into the 360 and we have commitments on both consoles. Now what? You can't afford the time to throw it all out and re-design from the ground up. It also didn't help that Sony's SDK was completely in flux before the launch - and for some time after. The end result is any game that wasn't first party was a horrible compromise on the PS3 at first. As time went on we changed large parts of our engine to be more PS3 friendly and it helped quite a bit. It also didn't help that the PS3's GPU is about 15%-25% slower on average and that the OS takes up a bunch more memory then the 360's does.
All in all, the PS3 was a clusterfuck for the first few years and still hasn't recovered.
Re:Why not PC + 360? (Score:5, Informative)
While fitting the game into the local and main memory is a pain it can usually be mitigated by proper planning. Developing your memory footprint for PS3 can immediately be translated to the 360's unified memory but going the other way is a special hell. While it's true that some engines are main memory intensive that you have to resort to crazy tricks (like streaming your audio from local memory to main) in general it's not too bad as there aren't two different implementations.
But going from 3 ppu cores to 2 ppu cores and 6 spus does cause a problem if you're anywhere near utilizing the CPUs. Generally it's easier to optimize the game until as much as possible runs on 2 ppu cores and specific tasks run on the spus (as the 360 gains the benefit from the optimizations too).
It sounds like you haven't worked on the PS3 in a while. Sony has actually stepped up the game and the ps3 sdk actually surpasses the xdk in some regards. Most of the complaints I hear about the ps3 sdk are more related to windows oriented people not understanding the unix mindset. And the ps3 dev kits are now tiny and sleek and not the 2U heater units of old.
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Because developing for PC is even harder than Cell. Cell still has a known platform, where as PC opens up a whole new can of crazy. That said, I wish they would.
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You're talking about two different things - developing for PC is hard because the hardware varies from person to person. Developing for Cell is hard is because you have to do a lot of manual tweaks to eke out every bit of performance because the architecture/compiler is too immature to do it for you. If you have a stable platform based on a stable and well known architecture, you should have far fewer problems. Anyhow, most game programming is going to GPU these days, with only things like data structures a
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They do it for the money, but there is a reason some games that appear on the 3 platforms end up having the PS3 as the "worse" version. Most recently skyrim, but fallout 3, for example, ran and looked better on the xbox 360 and the pc.
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POWER7 baby. (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably. But they'll probably use a POWER7 based CPU instead of an AMD x86 CPU. Given how much Cell influenced POWER7, I'd actually say that's a huge likelyhood they'd go POWER instead of x86.
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POWER7/8 with AMD engineering and GPU tech?
I'll buy like 9.
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You're counting on Sony to provide backwards compatibility? Didn't you learn anything from the PS3's history?
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They did for while - if you got a launch PS3. No one else did. Microsoft didn't even try, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them. So Sony responded, and removed it.
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Dunno where you're getting your infomation, but Nintendo have full hardware backwards compatiblity between the Wii and gamecube, that's not no-one. The 360 has a list of about 400 Xbox games it can run from the original discs; that functionality is available on any 360 with a hard drive and internet connection (so it can download the emulator profile). It's not hardware compatability, but it's still able to run the titles.
Playstation 4 Released with Zero Games at Launch (Score:5, Funny)
TOKYO, Japan -- Sony released their heavily anticipated and much hyped Playstation 4 Entertainment System today, but the games are nowhere to be found. Developers agree the hardware specs are extremely impressive, but nobody knows how to actually make games for it. Thankfully, the latest member of this venerable line of consoles is backwards compatible with the games of all previous generations.
"I think we got it perfect this time," says Sony chairman Kaz Hirai, "we expect our internal studios won't figure out how to make games for at least another few months. Third party developers should take even longer. We figure the PS4 should be hitting its stride right when the PS5 hits the market several years down the road."
How difficult will it be to develop games for that one? When asked the question, Hirai rubs his hands together, a gleeful smile spreading across his face.
"Impossible."
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Good parody. When I think about the PS3's processor, I always remember them bragging at launch that devs will still be trying to optimize for the PS3 when it's lifetime is over. I'm still astounded that they thought that was something to brag about.
It is a pain (Score:5, Interesting)
I programmed a Cell processor (for HPC, not gaming) a few years ago, and it was definitely a pain in the butt compared to just targeting a multi-core x86.
The problem, at least back then, was that you had to write explicit code to have the various cores communicate with each other (DMA transfers, etc.)
I imagine compilers/libraries/SDK's have improved the situation since then, but really the modest performance premium offered by the chip just wasn't worth the hassle.
Re:It is a pain (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, writing code for CELL is much harder than MT x86. However when you do the DMA the right way (16B boundary aligned, and fetch the next work batch while computing the previous), use the predicated instructions (which the compiler wasn't very good at when I used it, so I had to use c-intrinsics ) instead of conditional jumps and make sure you schedule your instructions so you get the dual issue going; The Cell is an absolute monster in terms of raw computational power. You always complete a memory access (you never get cache misses) in 6 cycles which at 3.2GHz which the Cell has is around 6-10 times faster than the fastest DDR3 memory. You rarely get branching misses if you use the correct instructions for loops and predicated instructions where possible. Effectively eliminating the two biggest performance bottlenecks in modern microprocessor design. At the COST that you have to manually shuffle data and make sure the machine performs at it's max.
This is a well known trade off in microprocessor design: Make a chip that runs excellent code at break neck speed and poor code like porridge; Or make a chip that runs excellent code at an okay speed and also runs poor code at a decent speed. Cell is designed as the former, which actually all of Sony's hardware are, while X86 is designed as the later. One can argue which is better, I'd say it depends on the application and who is going to program it. Most programmers are not proficient enough program such strict machines as the Cell properly because you need a deeper understanding of computer architecture than what most programmers have.
In closing: Yes it is difficult, but it is by no means a slow chip if you program it the way it was intended to. And it might not be the best chip for all applications.
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The problem with that idea is that in practice the PS3 isn't really any more powerful than the 360. 360 games usually look better and often play smoother. So the tradeoff was actually between an efficient system that works fine, or an efficient system that you have to be a genius to master and to merely get the same results.
See, you forgot the really important tradeoff in microprocessor design, cost vs. utility. And so did Sony. They designed their own chip when something off the shelf would do. When you co
Will game devs prefer common architecture? (Score:2)
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Where as the PS3 had crap tools and was much harder to code for. The idea being the first games got about 60% out of the kit, then around the 80% it surpasses what the 360 is capable of and only the best can get the full 100%. This give the console a long life and lets products get b
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In the long run? You mean after a year, when PC hardware makes the console look lame? That long run?
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XBox 360 was DirectX based. It was/is basically a PC with fixed spec's that hooked up to a TV, so the same stuff they'd been using for PCs for a long time was the stuff they used for XBox 360.
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Very few game devs are PS3-exclusive. The majority of them already have to deal with a few different architectures. Anything that brings one of the outliers closer to the rest of the pack is probably good for them.
Re:Will game devs prefer common architecture? (Score:5, Informative)
> Not being a game developer I wonder what game devs would prefer,
You are asking two questions:
What do game devs prefer for software?
What do game devs prefer for hardware?
When I used to work with PS3 developers -- they almost _always_ lead their development on the XBox 360. It was _very_ rare was it to see a studio lead on the PS3 -- but those that did -- tended to have a better engine for load-balancing at the end of the day (it is easier to scale down, then scale up.)
Easier: Multi-Core --> Few-Core (PS3 --> Xbox360)
Harder: Few-Core --> Multi-Core (XBox 360 --> PS3)
Microsoft is a software company,
Sony is a hardware company.
The tools MS provided were _perceived_ as being easier and better. (I can and will not comment on the reality.)
WRT hardware, game devs appreciated the power the PS3 + SPUs even if it involved the crap load of work to get it running 100% load-balancing. Having to worry about LHS (Load-Hit-Stores) was a total PITA for PS3 developers -- memory access was pretty much ignored on the XBox 360. The bigger problem was Sony using a 64-bit OS (all pointers were 64-bits !!) when the dam console only has 512 MB address space?!?! This kind of "Sony ignorance/arrogance" being out of touch with developers was not uncommon.
PC + Xbox Developers tend to want a AMD/Intel approach to hardware for _ease of _use. Sony / Nintendo developers tend to prefer multi-core / dedicated CPUs for everything for _performance_.
One or the other isn't wrong -- just a different focus.
Just What We Need (Score:2)
NIH Syndrome (Score:5, Interesting)
I've shipped PS2 games and worked with numerous developers that have shipped PS3 games.
Sony's problem is the Not-Invented-Here syndrome. They have yet to learn the lesson that Apple mastered years ago in the 80's -- use off the shelf commodity parts!! Why? They will become DIRT cheap in a few years. Why waste millions of dollars investing into R&D of new hardware when in 5 years somebody else will have a no-name version of it at a fraction of the price??
e.g.
Sony is _slowly_ learning this lesson. After how many man-years of a buggy PS2 GS (Graphics Synthesizer) that couldn't even properly do z-tesing (!?!/!) the PS3 RSX is (mostly) a GTX 7800+
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX_'Reality_Synthesizer [wikipedia.org]'
When the PS2 first came out everyone bitched how difficulty it was, yet it was a beautiful thing to see all of its 7 CPUs working full speed load-balancing the system. It laid the foundation that multi-core programming was the future. When the PS3 came out everyone bitched how even more difficult it would be. Developers just sucked it up and now we are even seeing A.I. running on the SPE/SPUs on second-gen and 3rd-gen PS3 games! That's pretty cool to see a modern game engine utilizing every core it can.
Using stock parts: CPU + GPU is a great way to minimize costs. You don't get the same performance benefits of true dedicated design but the commodity parts are cheap enough that the pricing curve naturally takes care of that. Kind of a no-brainer if Sony decides to use an AMD or Intel CPU for the PS4.
References:
See: PS3 games list & SPE usages
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=184843 [neogaf.com]
i.e.
and
Re:NIH Syndrome (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple learned that in the 80's? Haha
Cell Failed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cell Failed (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I used to teach Cell programming classes for people who were looking to do HPC on the blades.
Cell failed. But the reasons behind the failure are more interesting.
The obvious answer is that it was hard to program. On a single chip you had the PowerPC processor and 8 SPUs. Communication was through mailboxes for small messages and DMA transfers for larger messages. To get the most out of a chip you had to juggle all 9 processor elements at the same time, try to vectorize all of your ops, and keep the memory moving while you were doing computation. That is the recipe for success for most architectures - keeping everything as utilized as possible. But it is also hard to do on most architectures, and the embedded nature of Cell made it that much more difficult.
There were better software tools in the works for people who didn't want to drop down to the SPU intrinsic level to program. There were better chips in the works too; more SPUs, stronger PowerPC cores, and better communications with main memory. Those things did not come to fruition because IBM was looking to cut expenses to keep profits high (instead of boosting revenue). The Cell project was killed when a new VP known for cost cutting came in. We finally had a good Cell blade to sell (QS22 - two chips, 32GB RAM, fully pipelined double precision, etc.) and that lasted four months before the project got whacked. And we lost a lot of good people as a result. (That VP, Bob Moffat, was part of the Galleon insider trading scandal.)
So yes, Cell failed. But not necessarily for the obvious reasons. IBM has been on a great cost cutting binge the past few years - it lets them meet their earnings per share targets. But it causes collateral damage.
Re:Cell Failed (Score:4, Informative)
I don't remember hearing about low yield problems. Sony took delivery of quite a few chips ...
No, to be quite blunt a big part of the problem was a lack of vision. Without a roadmap nobody was going to use to product. IBM stumbled when it did not backup the roadmap with real dollars to fund the new chips and programming tools.
The return of the original Xbox? (Score:2)
I guess we should dust off our old Xbox hacking skills if that's the case.
I mean, if the Playstation 4 is going AMD Fusion, it'll probably be x86 with GPU, and we all know the fun that was had breaking into the original Xbox (which was originally done with AMD parts before they switched to Intel)
Of course, they could always take the lessons of the Xbox and fix it so it won't be a problem. Oh wait, it's Sony, nevermind.
Not enough memory per Cell (Score:5, Interesting)
The trouble with the Cell processor is that there's not enough memory per processor. Each of the little processors (the "SPE" units) in the PS3 only has 256KB of RAM. That's not enough to store a frame. It's not enough to store a game level, or a significant amount of geometry. It's more like having a number of DSPs available.
This forces redesigning the program to work in batch mode. A batch job is one frame, but it's still a batch job. Data for one frame cycle is sequentially pumped through one or more SPEs. There's not much random access, because access to main memory from an SPE is in big blocks, transferred in the background.
This is both limiting and a huge pain. Especially when the competition is selling shared-memory multiprocessors. I used to do game physics engines, and when the PS3 came out, my reaction was "I'm glad I sold off that technology and got out of the business." I knew some people at Sony's SCEA R&D center, and they basically threw all their smart people at trying to figure out how to use the Cell effectively. Many of the early games really ran in the main CPU, with the SPEs managing things that didn't affect gameplay, like particles for fire, explosions, smoke, and such.
If each SPE came with a few megabytes of RAM, instead of only 256K, it wouldn't be so bad. Then you could probably have the physics engine in one CPU, the AI in another, the background object management in a third, and so on. But each of those things needs more state than whatever fraction of 256K is left over after the code is loaded.
There's a long history of Cell-like architectures in the supercomputer field. The BBN Butterfly, the NCube Hypercube, and the Connection Machine also consisted of a large number of processors, each with a small memory. None were successful. One of the lessons of multiprocessing computer architecture to date is that the two extremes - shared memory multiprocessors and networked clusters of separate computers - are useful. None of the partially-shared machines have been successful. The Cell is the only one ever to be mass-produced.
Great for audio, though. The audio guys like having their own processor, and audio processing really is a streaming process of tight loops without much state.
Re: (Score:3)
Then you could probably have the physics engine in one CPU, the AI in another, the background object management in a third, and so on.
That's a bad way to design your engine, even in a homogeneous multi-core system like a PC. You'll be wasting a lot of resources because only a few of those tasks will require a whole processor for themselves, so it'll be idling most of the time. A better approach is to break down your engine into a large number of small more or less self contained tasks, then implement a jobs system that takes those tasks and runs them on whatever processor is free at that moment. This is how most current high end game engi
Re:Not enough memory per Cell (Score:4, Interesting)
A better approach is to break down your engine into a large number of small more or less self contained tasks, then implement a jobs system that takes those tasks and runs them on whatever processor is free at that moment.
That works fine on a shared-memory multiprocessor. On a Cell processor with 256K, switching a processor from one task to another requires moving in new code and data, not just CPU dispatching. That's not something you can do many times per frame cycle.
Memory Limitations (Score:2)
Good, it's the worst mistake in the PS3 (Score:2)
It took years for PS3 to get good games. It was 10x harder to work with than the X360 or Wii.
Uncharted 3 is a thing of beauty (for a console) and Naughty Dog is squeezing amazing performance out (for a console), but they're the best devs Sony has and it took 5 years. Was a new proprietary architecture that works unlike anything else on the market worth the billions of losses and the ramp-up time? No. Xbox 360 has power parity (better in some areas, worse in others, but you can do about the same games on bot
Perfect Sense (Score:2)
In fact, the Xbox 360 is essentially "fusion" at the motherboard level -- The CPU can lock and share portions of the cache directly with the GPU -- th
A thing of beauty (Score:5, Informative)
I used to program SPUs for a living for a game studio. (Worked on SOCOM Confrontation and some unannounced titles).
I disagree with all this bitching from devs: the CELL SPU is a thing of beauty.
If an engineer is worth his salt, and knows his trade well, what he can do with it is amazing.
I was blown away with how incredibly fast this SPU is, once properly used.
But only if you know how to do branchless code, and you know the difference between structures-of-arrays and arrays-of-structures.
Once the data is lined up properly, and you eliminated those nasty branches, carefully crafted code (intrinsics, not vanilla C++) will make that thing fly like nothing else. Insanely fast, think GPU-fast, but with a more generic programming model.
I regret the death of the Cell architecture.
Re:A question for you. (Score:4, Informative)
What are 'all the low level details' you refer to?
The main difference is the separate address space of the small local memory of the SPU.
I believe linux on Cell has made some nice abstractions. ./a.out | ./b.out | ./c.out > output.txt
It's been ages since I ran ps3linux, but from what I heard you can execute filter like objects on the SPU from the OS level.
Thus:
$ cat intput.txt |
This would put 3 SPUs to work, and do the DMAing for you.
You would need to lookup the status of OS-level support for SPU on linux to get more info on this.
Personally, I did the DMA stuff manually.
What you cannot abstract away, is the data-oriented programming that you should be doing.
As Noel Llopis puts it so eloquently: You need to program your entire game as if it was a particle system.
http://gamesfromwithin.com/data-oriented-design [gamesfromwithin.com]
e.g. for 1024 particles, you do:
float x[ 1024 ];
float y[ 1024 ];
float z[ 1024 ];
and NOT:
struct
{
float x,y,z
} particles[ 1024 ];
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Or (Score:4, Informative)
Game developers too stupid to deal with complex systems.
Sorry, but 'it's complex hardware' excuse pissed me off.
Right. Because parallel programming on a processor with completely manual cache management is just so easy. The supercomputer people find it tricky too.
I guess you're just so much smarter then everyone else.
Re: (Score:2)
It was less that, and more that learning and targeting that platform simply wasn't worth it. All that effort (i.e. additional cost) earns you some niceties, to be sure, but also makes a multi-platform release much more difficult and costly.
Arguably that was even the goal of the cell: to provide a technical carrot for publishers to make really awesome PS3 only titles using the advanced hardware. It wasn't a bad idea, actually, but ultimately the PS3 came out too late and too expensive. Everyone had an Xbo
Re: (Score:2)
It's not that developers are too stupid (although some may be).
It's that if you have to spend a bunch of extra time managing the complexity inherent in the system, you've either got to put less time in to other parts of the game or you've got to spend more money making the game.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Counterpoint: The prime researcher and developer of the Cell architecture abandoned it as a dead end.
Re: (Score:3)
The PS3 has probably provided the biggest software leap in game architecture in the last 3 years. This is in comparison to typical XBox or PC platform. I argue this only because the forced paradigm shift to fully utilize the Cell architecture should be directly transferable to multi threaded programming on an 8 core AMD/Intel processor.
Programming SPUs is really very unlike programming on a 'normal' multi-core processor. Experience with the six hardware threads available on the Xbox360 is going to be more useful on multicore PC CPUs than experience with the Cell.