Cell benchmarked
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Jawed
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Yes, that's why it's called the Broadband Engine.Edge said:
Nowhere in that article is there evidence of Cell's suitability for a game console processor.
That would appear to be justification for hours of FMV in PS3 games. It would seem that certain E3 videos were more prescient than we thought: that PS3 games will be short bursts of interactive action in-between long periods of FMV
Jawed
Yes, because that's the format of the current hardware. PS3's Cell is also a 1:8 config, but one of those won't be being used either because its broke, or to preserve uniformity between broke and working processors.hongcho said:
Right. Misunderstandings are ALWAYS the listener's fault.Mordecaii said:
I claim that IBM's goal is to get people interested in Cell primarily and to put forth truth secondarily (if it was on the list at all). From there it's obvious which will pull rank when it comes to phrasing, wording, editing, graphing, etc.
I guess I should exempt all Terrain Render Engine companies from what I said.Titanio said:
I'm not talking about gamers or individuals. I'm talking about companies where the decision making process is incredibly often started or bottlenecked at people who can't truly read that article. Just because it's a technical audience doesn't make the audience insusceptible to PR. I bet up to half of MS couldn't understand that article more than the concluding chart.
Edge said:So a Broadband Engine is not good for a game console?
I think thats the million dollar question at the moment. We know it will work well, obviously (from the little we've seen it shows it should work at very least acceptably enough that it shouldn't be a detriment)... but what we don't know is if the Cell's actual power can be leveraged while avoiding the things its not good at, in a game. Can dev's get the kind of 10x increase over a typical processor using the Cell for games? That's the real question, and I don't think anyone here has the answer (at least none of those that can talk).
I'm willing to bet that it's likely not the case (where Cell will be 10x vs a comparable CPU)... there are certain things the Cell should be fantastic at that games should be doing, but there are also things mixed in that the Cell won't be so hot at. Game's don't consist entirely of doing thousands of 1m by 1m matrix operations or video decoding/encoding, etc, etc -- the more developers are able to convert their algorithms and ideas into a form that the Cell will rock at the better, but there is some stuff it won't rock at that games include that these benchmarks don't show. I think we'll be surprised in some cases though.
Bobbler said:
First off, I don't think anyone realistically expects a general 10x speedup in games over competing processors. Second, a related question - not all tasks are created equally, so if you're optimising for a game, what do you optimise for? Does it matter if the things you are "not so hot at" are only taking a small percentage of CPU time (and can, for example, be done pretty trivially on the PPE)? (That's not to suggest that everything Cell isn't good at is trivial, of course..although there was a slight whiff of that in some dev comments sofar).
I guess I'm saying, we can't just consider the numbers of tasks Cell is good or bad at, we need to consider their relative importance. If you had 10 tasks to do per frame in a game, and I told you I had a chip that was really brilliant at one of them, and not so good at all at the rest, would that be telling you enough to say if that chip was good or bad? No. If that task it was really good at was taking 90% of the frametime, then it would be good, but if it were taking 1%, it wouldn't be so good.
I think we should also move away from the notion that Cell is either going to really outperform, or underperform, competing chips. There is a range there, there'll be things Cell is a really excellent at, very good at, average at, poorer at etc. I dunno, I just get the notion that a lot of people are thinking in extremes all the time.
Oh, I agree with you Titanio -- I wasn't really trying to answer the question, but just point out that these Benchmarks really don't relate to game performance.
I mostly didn't want someone answering him with a "yes" or a "no", because its simply a question we don't have an answer to outside of "it works." And, frankly, I'm happy with "it works," but I know a lot of others aren't.
I mostly didn't want someone answering him with a "yes" or a "no", because its simply a question we don't have an answer to outside of "it works." And, frankly, I'm happy with "it works," but I know a lot of others aren't.
mckmas8808
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Inane_Dork said:
Why do you see this as PR? If the numbers went so hot would it be PR then? And if half of MS couldn't understand that article then I guess that $250,000 per programmer is going to waste. Must be why my OS keeps crashing.
Bobbler said:
Nonsense! Maybe you should try reading the section "Optimization of Triangle Transform and Lighting".
The other benchmarks clearly show a processor that allows HUGE performance advantages in processing large matrices over a traditional CPU like the XeCPU, and your saying that is not gaming related?
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If there are any open questions about how a single cell does the Terrain demo:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwor...reeDisplayType=threadmode1&forum=739#13762062
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwor...reeDisplayType=threadmode1&forum=739#13762062
Jawed said:
Well do we know the paper peak transform rate of a 7800GTX, for example? Or better, do we have a benchmark? The benched peak of one SPU is >200m verts/sec.
I'm not saying Cell would make a good replacement for vertex shading on the GPU, but you would think it would speed it up to do some in parallel with the GPU if possible. If you happened to be in a position where your vertex shading was the bottleneck, any help would have an impact. It's not about favouring the CPU to do this work instead of the GPU, doing it on both. Cell wouldn't have to be better than a GPU for that to be of benefit.
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That in theory is what the Cell<>RSX interconnect is for, though I don't know how it'll be used. As has been said, why transform verts on Cell if the GPU can do it? Though I guess like Xenos has a prepass, perhaps you could use Cell to calculate some vertex parameters as a precursor to filter what's sent to the GPU, or say to calculate shadows in tandem with the GPU calculating pixel shaders and composite them over the top?ralexand said:
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