So is the cell spe's "downgrade" confirmed ?

The OS serves the purpose of the device, and thus the choices are not the game devs to make. As an example, perhaps digital recording to HDD is possible on PS3? If so, the resources needed to do that might well be reserved so the PS3 console can record programs while someone is playing games. You can't leave it to the game developer to enable/disable that feature. That would confuse the market too much, needing owners to be sure to only run games that allow for certain other features to be multitasked whioe gaming.

True, but i think the future is one where multifunction implies a degree of multitasking. As in my above example, sooner or later, if not in PS3, it's probable a Sony PlayStation will offer some sort of TiVo like functionality, and that will have to multitask. Another marketable feature could be VoiP and similar, which you don't want only available when the console isn't gaming. Or you want downloading music and transferring to your PSP with selectable compression on the fly. That's the likely future for most consoles as they all strive for the convergency market. Expecting 100% of resources to be dedicated on gaming is being unrealistic. There's even resources 'wasted' on BC too.

 

Yeah I love the thought of me being able to watch movies or listen to music off of my PS3's HDD from my PSP anywhere in the world, while not having to call my house and tell my cousin or sister to stop playing PS3.

 

Yes that fraction of a second(ok like 1-2 seconds is the longest pause I've ever seen) it takes me to get to the 360 menu to shut the console down or do smoothing else online just really kills my gaming experience, gimme a break.

I highly doubt reserving one SPE to the OS is going to hamper game development or gameplay, in fact it may be just the opposite.

 

Personally I hate the idea of a world where millions of consoles are left powered, on the off-chance they'll occasionally be accessed to broadcast some content. I think the conveniences aren't worth anything like environmental costs. They are plenty of less-costly pasttimes. An portable with rechargeable batteries and a solar-charger sat on the window sill is the sort of direction tech companies should be pushing.

*sigh*

 

5% on the Xbox 360 for the OS? I always thought it was a whole hardware thread reserved, both for audio and OS functions. That would make it more like 17%.

Or am I oversimplifying it?

 

Your living in a dream world man. Let's try to consume less oil first, by using ethenol and electric cars first.

 

It's 5% of two cores, AFAIK, for the 360 OS. One of the cores is left totally free.

Audio is not a responsibility of the OS, it's an application responsibility. You might indeed have a thread or core doing the audio.

 

A thread isn't a defined quantity. With two threads on a processor, you have a 'main' thread and another thread that uses resources as and when they're available. It would thus be possible to have the OS occupying a thread and consuming virtually no resources one minute as the OS is idle, and then do something important and gobble up a whole core's worth of goodness suddenly dropping available processing to the game by a third (though you could get round this of course with timeouts/interrupts, but you couldn't reliably ensure resource availability).

To reserve time for the OS it's better to take a percentage of the cycles that will be a constant amount. Or reserve a whole core if you happen to have one spare

 

afaik

X360 uses 30% of core 2 (the third core). CELL has 1 SPE for redundancy, 1 SPE for dedicated OS use and 1 SPE for on-demand OS use (which means it can take priority over software running and use it)

Basically that leaves 5 SPEs +1 unreliable SPE since you can't count on it being there because it could break a game

 

It might be better to rephrase the original statement like this:

"So, the PS3 is only using one SPE for the OS, running all the common tasks including the UI and audio and stuff, and leaves the PPU and six whole SPE's for the developers and their game! WOW!"

 

Really? Where's that info come from? At this rate the OS will be using all but a percentage of the PPU left for games!

 

I forgot that also a portion of the PPU is used by the OS, but it is not a defined figure.

Mind you... Sony can change it. So while the launch PS3 games could be built on these constraints, future games with updated OSes on disc might have more to work with if Sony refines the OS more.

 

What

 

More concerning than the fact that they are reserving one SPE for the OS is the fact that they are reserving 3 times as much memory as MS for OS functionality. Given the way the memory is already split in two on PS3 it makes it even more painful. Hopefully they'll be able to reduce the amount they reserve later on.

 

Okay so now the PS3 is using 192 MB of RAM just for the OS and 2 SPE's and part of the PPE? My god why is it hard to believe this?? What the hell is Sony doing to the PS3?

 

Simply: they're not doing that. A single SPE is quite capable of doing everything but paging, interrupts and priorities, thank-you-very-much. While using at most 32 MB or such. It's overkill and a complete waste of resources to do it any differently. Although that SPE might claim more memory when you make it do things that require that.

Really, this whole discussion is more about: what do we want the OS to do, and what do we want to do ourselves? While the latter might offer the possibility of some minor performance tweaks, a Cell has much more performance to offer than just about any developer knows what to do with. And you're not allowed to change things yourselves, as a consumer, in any case. And a good thing that is.

 

No, the 360 only reserves 32MB. PS3 currently reserves 64MB of main memory and 32MB of video memory.

 

Which makes sense, if you want the OS to do all those common tasks.

"Going down to the metal" is a vastly overrated thing. It isn't what developers want, if the OS can do it as well, for starters.

 

Where are you getting this from ?

 

Oh okay I was under the assumption that the 360 had 64 MB of RAM reserved for the OS.

Do you know why 32 MB of video memory is reserved in the PS3?