Gamespot Playstation 3 Audio Article

[-NakedZ-]

Too bad I may end up not taking full advantage of next-gen sound. Unless of course they release a decent 5.1 headphones with DD/DTS decoder and PS3 compatible microphone (for online gaming). Maybe release receivers with 3.5mm 6-channel outputs.

.Z

 

[expletive]

The article gave me the impression that they (or developers in general) will be dedicating an entire SPE to the sound for MGS4? Can SPEs share duties or, for something like sound which is omnipresent, do they need to be 'dedicated' to that task?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

SPEs do whatever you want them to do. You can task switch, though with a substantial overhead you won't want to do that frequently. Certainly its realistic to have a SPE work on audio for part of a frame and then switch to some other task if the developers want. One of the Cell programming models is actually not to dedicate task to cores, but distribute tasks across avaialble processing resources. This is essential to the scalablility of Cell and KK's dream of a Cell network sharing jobs, but in a closed box gaming console like PS3 assigning cores specific tasks is fine.