Cell in PS3, was it worth the wait?

[London Geezer]

sony confirmed they are putting a hardrive in ?

Nope. So read my post with the assumption the HDD is in there. Speculation!

Besides, what the hell does "Detachable HDD Slot" mean?

How is a slot detachable? It's a hole!

 

[jvd]

They mean the hardrive is detachable . Not the slot .

I don't think its in there .

However ms does provide everything u need for online . They have a hardrive (For lvls , mods , maps , models whatever ) and they gave a ethernet jack . Which is better than nintendo did this gen

 

[London Geezer]

I don't think sony has put much thought into the online aspects of the console .

If you think so then you should watch what SCEI CTO Masa Chatani had to say in the E3 conference.

i don't need to watch. Just listen and thats because they didn't show anything . Ms already has a fleshed out world that works .

The 2 conferences are quite different, Sony showed pretty much EVERYTHING about PS3, MS has shown very little.

I think the networking "vision" they showed at the conference was quite cool, whether it's actually put together or not is another story.

 

[jvd]

Err ms has shown basicly everything and unlike sony they had a fleshed out working online community .

There is no contest between them at this point .

 

[London Geezer]

Err ms has shown basicly everything and unlike sony they had a fleshed out working online community .

There is no contest between them at this point .

I mean everything about the platform itself.

 

[jvd]

Err ms has shown basicly everything and unlike sony they had a fleshed out working online community .

There is no contest between them at this point .

I mean everything about the platform itself.

well what hasn't ms shown ?

 

[Megadrive1988]

Yes, worth the wait.

Look, from the way the fabs were shaping up a lot of us who were not over projecting were looking at a 1:8 cell under 4GHz. 3.2GHz is surprising a little, but a 1:7 makes sense (and I believe nAo even had mentioned that a few months ago as a possiblity due to yields).

Still, you are looking at 218GFLOPs and an INSANELY fast memory architecture/bus.

What I think is more surprising is how the xCPU outdid itself. Many of us were skeptical that it would break 3GHz. In fact they hit 3.2GHz and hit 115GFLOPs. Impressive indeed.

Not as impressive as 218GFLOPs, but these are just all paper numbers. I tend to think the CELL, once gotten under control (especially the SPE cache size) it will be better because it is designed from the ground up to be multithreaded/stream.

The CELL also is totally scalable--to judge CELL this gen misses the big picture. PS is now officially a PLATFORM. I suspect we may see something like a 4:32 CELL @ 8GHz in 6 years, maybe even 8:64. The tools will already be in place, and progammers will have the basics handily whipped. And since it is built to scale I see the PS4 as potentually a "dream machine". Not sure what MS will have an answer for this... there will be something, but I doubt anything as high performing as CELL. Call me pessimistic. But we have already begun to see diminishing returns soo...

I think CELL lived up to its expectations--at least mine.

xCPU over achieved. It should be fairly easy to program for also, it has 1MB of L2 cache (compared to 512K for the CELL). And I really see the 3 PPC cores downplayed.

Maybe someone here can answer this: The PPC cores take up a ton of realestate, much more than a SPE. But we tend to focus on the SPE/VMX units. Obviously the PPC core is valiable, if not MS could have gone with a PPC with 8 VMX--but they did not. The PPC is good at Integer and basic processing.

True, it may not be great at physics (VMX for those) or vertex shaders (VMX and VS units on the GPU), but it can do a lot right.

So, what am I missing? If the PPC cores are useless why use all the realestate for them? Why do we rarely mention the performance of the PPC cores? If the PPC cores are usless for gaming why did not MS just go with more VMX units or something? PPC are useful for something, right?

right on. I see PS4 achiving what Sony wanted to do with PS3 or what they said they were going to do with PS3. a Teraflops CPU was just not feasible in 2006 it seems. but by 2012 it will be. a multi Teraflops CPU. and probably something like a "50 Tflops" GPU. but whatever the case, I expect PS4 to be everything Sony wanted the PS3 to be.. the PS3 that is now almost a reality, certainly is nowhere near as powerful as some had once hoped, but its still a beast, and will still be a huge improvement visual quality wise thanks to the SGI technology in it (Nvidia).

 

[dess]

Johnny_Physics: Yes, the SPE's can do branch, therere is a branch unit in them - just like DMA and MMU unit, too. So, they are much more than like an SSE unit in the x86's, they are really sinergic processors, just like their names say.

 

[London Geezer]

well what hasn't ms shown ?

All the technical stuff that made the Sony conference quite a bit more successful than the other 2.

We know that the X360 will have a CPU and GPU and we know what they are, but Sony shower tech demos, they showed the features they're going to use predominantly, they showed how those features will help making games more realisic, they showed the whole "PUH-RAY-STATT-ION'S CE-RR IZ A SUPP-AROH COMP-UTAROH" thing...

 

[Johnny_Physics]

Johnny_Physics: Yes, the SPE's can do branch, therere is a branch unit in them - just like DMA and MMU unit, too. So, they are much more than like an SSE unit in the x86's, they are really sinergic processors, just like their names say.

Well, that's what I meant and what I tried to say.

 

[dess]

Johnny_Physics: Yes, the SPE's can do branch, therere is a branch unit in them - just like DMA and MMU unit, too. So, they are much more than like an SSE unit in the x86's, they are really sinergic processors, just like their names say.

Well, that's what I meant and what I tried to say.

You said you think it can't do that, didn't you?

Edit: uhm, okay, sorry, you said it about the VMX'es in the PPC/PPE core, instead.

 

[Johnny_Physics]

You said you think it can't do that, didn't you?

The VMX units, yes, I don't think they can do that but I'm simply drawing that conclusion from what I remember from other SIMD-units. I then speculated a bit, I wondered if a single PPC might have trouble feeding a fistful of VMX units and still have time to drive other types of operations, and added that if you wanted to have a bunch of VMX-like units coupled to one processor and avoid this hypotetical problem those units would need to be more self reliant, i.e more like a mini-processor instead of just a raw number cruncher like ordinary SIMD. All-in-all I was trying to say that CELL, or something like CELL, is more or less the logical step to take if you're heading in that direction.

At least that's what I tried to say, I wrote it in a hurry.


edit: ooops, I posted before I saw your edit, oh well

 

[Tacitblue]

In terms of what was expected and what was delivered, I think they did pretty good, being a complex piece of architecture, getting yields of 7 working SPE's out of 8 is a lot more than some gave a chance for the final console. Even clocked modestly it seems to deliver. And programming on it doesn't seem such a pain at all......2 month port of Unreal 3 engine for instance.

 

[Sindre]

2.5 inch removable HDD, which is the same format as 360 i think.

The HDD-slot is what I am confused about too. Will it come with a built-in HDD or not? :?

 

[London Geezer]

2.5 inch removable HDD, which is the same format as 360 i think.

The HDD-slot is what I am confused about too. Will it come with a built-in HDD or not? :?

Well they said "detachable HDD slot". Which to me sounds like "there's a HDD in there from the beginning and it's detachable (and possibly upgradeable if need be)".

I mean, a PS3 without a harddrive as standard would really make no sense, considering all they've already included and all they've said PS3 is supposed to be doing. But hey it's Sony, it's not like they have never made stupid decisions.

 

[Nite_Hawk]

Johnny_Physics: Yes, the SPE's can do branch, therere is a branch unit in them - just like DMA and MMU unit, too. So, they are much more than like an SSE unit in the x86's, they are really sinergic processors, just like their names say.

That actually makes me wonder a bit if it might infact be easier to write code to work on the Cell processors than writing code that needs to be run across all of the VMX units on the 3 PPC cores.

How exactly would you write multithreaded VMX code? I'm behind on the times, is this all still done in asm or will MS have some nice abstraction for it?

Nite_Hawk

 

[lauris71]

How about a little extra sugar with Cell scalability:

Average dies + dies with max. 1 faulty SPU:
- clocked 3.2 GHz
- 7 SPU PS3 Standard

Above average dies:
- Clocked 4+ GHz
- 8 SPU PS3 with PVR functionality

I feel 1 extra SPU + 800MHz higher clock should be enough for HD
recording during gameplay. And because such Cells are already available,
games can be developed and tested to work correctly on a beefed
up system.
Now the question will be, of course, whether PS3 OS can timeshare PPE
extra 800+MHz smoothly enough, but this should be achievable too.

 

[Sindre]

2.5 inch removable HDD, which is the same format as 360 i think.

The HDD-slot is what I am confused about too. Will it come with a built-in HDD or not? :?

Well they said "detachable HDD slot". Which to me sounds like "there's a HDD in there from the beginning and it's detachable (and possibly upgradeable if need be)".

I mean, a PS3 without a harddrive as standard would really make no sense, considering all they've already included and all they've said PS3 is supposed to be doing. But hey it's Sony, it's not like they have never made stupid decisions.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. Why on earth would they not fit in a HDD when they have all that other stuff already in there. I guess they still haven't decided the how big the HDD will be and will tell us later. With the already estimated high launch price, it would be a pain in the arse to have to pay even more for an extra HDD-add-on. . .

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Didn't we already have commecnts from somewhere of a two-tier launch, a vanilla console for games and an HDD equipped media-centre version? I guess the HDD will be sold with software to run HD encoding/deciding in the background or something.

 

[Ty]

i don't need to watch. Just listen and thats because they didn't show anything . Ms already has a fleshed out world that works .

And yet why did you say Live failed? What criteria are you using to judge this?