How powerful are you expecting Cell to be

I am not worried: APUs work as fast in FX/Integer math as in FP math ( according to IBM patents and Suzuoki's patent ).

 

BUUUUUTTTT, Erp... You're talking about the majority of game code NOW!

What if, in some rosy-shimmering future, game code for Cell for, say, an RTS or such is subdivided into say, four main branches for geometry tesselation+stuff, game engine stuff+physics, player unit pathfinding/AI and enemy unit pathfinding/AI, each running on their own PE (assuming 4 in the BB). Separate APUs cound handle a unit each in round-robin fashion as sub-threads, and pathfinding and AI could be massively more complicated than it is now with the extra processing power afforded by a chip like the BB.

Remember Total Annihilation? Great RTS for its time, absolutely stinking-awful pathfinding. It had a true 3D terrain system, but it was very easy for units to get clogged up inside your base, in chokepoints on the map, or simply stuck on an incline too steep for the vehicle to get over. When the player clicked on the map, the units selected all turned and tried to head off in the new direction. Works great with planes, but poorly for land-based vehicles, especially of mixed types. They invariably got clogged all over again.

Of course, this game was new in 97, and processors were super slow back then. That's why I expect greater things of coming games. I think game code of tomorrow will be more FP intensive simply because it CAN...

 

What I'm saying is transformation code is an absolute ideal for FPU usage and it only manages 40%efficiency.....

The majority of things you wnat to see better, AI, Path finding are not FPU bound problems, they are search problems, they are constrained predominantly by random access to large central datastructures.

After graphics physcis is the other major FPU hog, but it's much harder to get the significantly more efficiency.

Yes I agree future games will use more fpu ops thn previous games, but I think that the balance will actually shift towards more AI ops relative to the total frame time.

 

"How powerful are you expecting Cell to be"

IMHO feasible ... just thinking about all the variables Sony needs to consider to make a successful mass market product, makes my head spin.

 

To tell you the truth,I don't know what to think about the Cell.Every time I start to doubt its performance,I end up reading a report about someone getting close to the performance in which Sony states this Cell will do.And when I think about the PS3 becoming another failed project like the PS2,then I think about the partnership Sony has with IBM combined with their previous partner,Toshiba.As far as I know,Sony might just pull this project off.I don't know how far it will distant from the Xbox 2 and NR,but I'm sure it'll look good.

 

if PS2 was a "failed project", I'd like to see what that PS3 will be like, if it is a success

 

What an utterly bizarre person you are!

 

What was the quote Deadmeat had in his signature again?

 

he's not the only one I thought the ps2 was a horrible failure on the hardware side... luckly it has some great games.

 

I'm more curious to how you folks are quantifying 'success' or 'failure' from a 'hardware side'... :?

 

Well I'm still looking at 1tflop for the cpu and 512gflops for the gpu.

 

Well,it's true.Sony was reaching for something that ended as a dead end because they didn't have all the resources back then.But after the PS2 launched,they found a way to make it more powerful,but it was to late.That was the GScube;the box that was originally suppose to be for the PS2.From what we know,the thing was able to do work from some CGI movies or,in short, nVidia's GF 6800.

Now,Sony is starting the project once more,but they are actually building it this time and with IBM at that.It serves the same purpose as the original GScube but with a Cell chip instead of multiple motherboards,which is how Sony came up with the idea for the Cell technology.With assistance from IBM and Toshiba,Sony may succeed with this project.

But,you all have to admit,for a console that is almost two years older than the Xbox,even Sony's failed project holds its own with some of its specifications in which the Xbox has not surpass or reached to this day.

Although this is very old information,here's something you all should read:
complete source
"Sony is already ramping up from 16 to 64 GS chips. And the PS3 will be made even more powerful, possibly by merging the parallel GS processors onto a superchip. (Sony has contracted the job to IBM.) But until the chip is built, the 16-processor GScube is enough to get at least some coders excited about sticking with Sony."

 

Well,Sony was looking for 1000 fold and only got 300 fold (which is still good).It was still a failed project,however.But like I said before,only Toshiba and Sony were working on the project at the time,and the workstation didn't even make it into construction at the time of the PS2's development.IBM is on the project this time.They are the ones that will be building the workstation and the OS with Sony supplying the other stuff.That is why I say they might succeed this time.

 

So, how exactly are the - what's that phrase of yours, "Cell fanatics" - wrong when they point towards massive concurrency?

What are you going to do, keep throwing resources at singular (or near singular) scene based objects? I think games of the future are going to be about pervasive worlds filled with interactivity and gameplay potential, not the seemingly perpetual evolution of Doom and the corridor.

You're comment strikes me as totally odd, I'm sorry. And here's why so you can explain why I'm wrong... Why should we keep throwing ever greater amounts of potential logic at acclerating something which (as you stated) will never pass a rough bounding around ~40%? Why not accelerate N entities with the potentiality? It's not very likely that any of the processing elements viewed singularly will be underpowered. In my eyes, the future isn't in accelerating a single data set in a smaller timeframe, but solving a plurality of them in parallel during the timeframe.

Where am I wrong?

 

FWIW I do believe parallelism is the future.

I just think Cell is somewhat oversold on this forum by a few people.

When I look at the patents I just don't see the revolutionary thinking that some of the people here do. It's certainly an extreme architecture, but I'm not sure that makes it a good thing.

Like I've said before, you could almost describe cell PU's as a super EE a core with 8 VU's. It just doesn't sound as exciting. Looking at them in this light you have to start asking just how good they are going to be at general computing tasks.

I don't honestly know the answers, and I'm fairly excited to see how the final system looks. But a lot of people around here seem to see it as some sort of panacea for all computing problems.

 

What's not to be excited about???

If all goes according to plan with the Broadband Engine, the thing will have a theo peak performance of a Teraflops and a TOPS, with a good chunk of e-dram at a few hundred GB/S.

Am I missing anything here? I'm being absolutely serious and non sarcastic, share your vision with me and we'll come to a agreement somehow.

 

Whether or not it's trivial to do a certain operation like mipmapping?

Anyway I predict the CELL cpu will be able to do 1TFLOPS peak using water cooling...

BTW wasn't the SH-4 capable of 1.4GLOPS peak?

 

Write a game on a PS2 and then think about the architecture that's proposed.

PS2 is very good at a very small subset of problems. Games are more than graphics engines. And in my vision of nextgen a graphics engines are a much smaller part of the overall picture (i.e. they don't consume the bulk of the CPU time).

It's certainly possible that Sony IBM and Toshiba may well have addressed some of the limits in the PS2's architecture, but I'll wait until I seee the final box before I make that determination.

 

[source: http://ne.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/2001/30aniv/int5_1.html ]


(I first found out about that article from this thread: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8856 )

 

Well, maybe you're right. I just am of the opinion that being from B3D we're only talking of a strict subset of the larger set of computing tasks when speaking about an IC.

And, as for Cell being a "panacea" (hehe) I'd posit that when we see an Rx00 running the same set of tasks that Cell can execute at comparable speeds then, and only then, will you'll have a valid point. And then throw in the [non]local processing aspects... While I agree with you, I think it has the potential to be a very compelling system.

IMHO, it is the wildcard of the generation -- perhaps any generation this far in the history of computing since the primordial days when the current paradigm burried the NN concept within the reseach communities of the Defense establishment. It has the greatest varience in what it can rise to greatness on and, conversely, fall over.