Another Super Scientific B3D survey! How do you feel about 'diminshing returns' between generations?

That’d make the ps generation ’longer’ aswell since its near impossible to get a ps5 either?

 

More haptics? More VR?

 

Yes, Cell absolutely has the performance edge. The seven 3.2Ghz SPEs on top the 3.2Ghz PowerPC (SPU) could crunch through a crazy amount of operations and data, even allowing for in-order versus of out-of-order differences. In CPU terms, PS4 was a step backwards for PlayStation.

 

I've always kind of thought of cell as an AVX machine, as that's essentially what it is. Exception is that each SPE had it's own cache so it didn't run into trashing problems competing with other SPEs. But I think you're not going to see significantly better performance on CELL vs Intel/AMD using AVX. But in non-vectorized computation, Intel/AMD is going to blow by cell.

 

Many devs struggles to utilise the SPEs, absolutely. It took some effort. The SPEs weren't designed for general workloads, but if you were able to micro-thread a task that benefited from for super fast linear vector operations, it's the dog's bollocks. In a 3D world, there are a lot of such calculations for motion, collision detection, ray pathing, animation..

I did a lot of Cell programming (not PS3) and wouldn't want to do it again, but there's no denying the potential of this arrangement.

Cell development ceased almost a decade ago so you're comparing modern chips to 40nm monsters. Had the conventional processor kept pace with modern architectural improvements, it could have remained competitive.

 

It’s early to tell for sure but I think the move to really fast SSDs for the current gen consoles improve both the dev and player experience dramatically, beyond just loading times. We’ll just have to wait a little bit to get out of the generational transition period to really see the benefits though.

 

Absolutely. There will be many game designers who are deeply ingrained to design around problems that no longer exist. It can take a while to come to terms with the lack of technical barriers when you've lived with them for years, if not decades.