penguinboy

November 24, 2009 at 8:14am

I'm not surprised that IBM's killing the next one, and I wouldn't be surprised if they let the Cell quietly die.  The vast majority of supercomputers they sell are Blue Gene and Power based, not Cell.  Also, game developers tend to just use wrappers that others have written to port games to the PS3 after they write the games for the XBox 360.  Programming for the Cell just isn't worth the effort; you have to micro-manage everything.  The only way the Cell is ever going to take off is if they do a major re-design of the processor to make it easier to program for or they put a ton of effort into designing a compiler that does all the micro-management for the programmers.

QUINTIX256

November 24, 2009 at 7:16am

Imagine what the cell would have been like if Microsoft didn't butt in and insist that their gaming system have Simultaneous Multi-Threading and a rich set of SIMD units.

The toshiba/sony team, from what I've read, was strongly against those additions to the PPC core.

You can have your recession. I'm not participating.

Caboose

November 24, 2009 at 6:17am

 You know, I've yet to see what the PS3 is supposed to be able to do, that another console can't. So far everything looks almost the same. There are a number of games that look better on the PC and 360. The only thing that is coming out for the PS3 that I can see being better than on Wii and 360 is the Physics engine. Dedicating an entire SPE or two to physics would have a major impact on games. Especially shooters and 3rd person platformers.

I think Sony's decision to go with the Cell in the PS3 was a rather stupid one which did nothing but drive up the cost for pointless reasons.

 

-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-