Why would xenon be so hard to program for?

I have never tried but it should be possible.
However it shouldn't be very efficient unless the communications between the threads and memory access are lightning fast.

I know but i said that the job would be easier,not much easier, with a language such as Java.
Off course the virtual machine or the compiler should be optimised to get much better performance.

 

I completely agree.
I don't think developpers asked to have such exotic architectures to work with so both MS and Sony must provide the tool to make games development significantly easier.
After all one of the main reasion why they have chosen those architectures(especially MS) is to reduce their cost.
However their choice shouldn't significanlty increase games development cost and troubles for developpers.

 

For that particular case, so-called stream processing will work on Cell rather than plain multithreading.

 

So is the cell architecture better suit for multithread gaming as you have the main core which will could deal with AI,physics and geometry and using the SPE to help it for floating point intensive operations and other stuff like that ?

 

Well that would be the theory. It's all to be seen how things actually turn out, and how tappable all that power is.

 

It seems there is going to be more attention paid towards data access, I wonder if this will lead to threads being created more around what data they access rather than the logical concerns they address.

 

Then perhaps it is possible to do the same with the XeCPU.
One core to play the role of the PPE and another or the two others to help it.
However there would be the problem of the communication between the cores which can't be as fast as the Cell's.
Sometimes i seriously wonder if MS has really taken the time to develop the best CPU solution possible or if they have just decided to surf on the mutithreading wave,to overeact to the Cell FP power and especially to reduce their cost by all the means.

 

The shared L2 on X360 is pretty hard to beat for communication speed.....