Gabe: I think PS3 is a waste of everybody's time

[thor1182]

The thing is the Cell has better uses than how the PS3 uses it. If the Cell had a useful application in a PC, then it would have been a good gamble, but with the current direction of the PC industry, the Cell is backwards development, or like people have said, its code techniques that will be thrown away at the end of the PS3's lifespan.

It has potential for data center type applications, as it many researchers have proven, but who besides people under Sony's payroll have said it was good for gaming?

[msxyz]

Originally Posted by thor1182

The thing is the Cell has better uses than how the PS3 uses it. If the Cell had a useful application in a PC, then it would have been a good gamble, but with the current direction of the PC industry, the Cell is backwards development, or like people have said, its code techniques that will be thrown away at the end of the PS3's lifespan.

It has potential for data center type applications, as it many researchers have proven, but who besides people under Sony's payroll have said it was good for gaming?

QFT

Cell is not either the first processor with such an architecture. Texas makes a DSP which is remarkably similar, the TMS320C80 which has been around for a few years.

Local memory is the way to go in massive parallel computing scenarios or when it's posible to spread computations across several CPUs with little data dependency between them.

But in a personal computing device made for games ? Is Cell wasted as a general purpose processor ? I'd say yes. Also, games are a difficult beast to treat as a multi-threaded application. I can understand that programmers, if they HAVE to go mutiprocessor would prefer a SMP approach because of the greather flexibility.