Supercomputer Game Machines

Posted 07/07/2005 at 8:00am | by

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By Tom R. Halfhill
Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have revealed some tantalizing details about their next-generation home videogame consoles, and the technology is breathtaking. Not long ago, these game machines would have been called supercomputers. Should PC gamers be jealous? The answer is no, for three reasons.

First, the computer and console markets aren’t mutually exclusive domains; millions of people are comfortable owning both consoles and PCs. This fact is often overlooked by online flame monkeys who insist on pitting PCs against consoles, as if it’s another PC-vs.-Mac feud.

In reality, avid gamers can’t keep their gamepad-hands off either PCs or consoles. There will always be some gotta-have-it games that run on only one particular platform, or appear on one platform first, or simply work better on one platform. And despite mighty efforts by Intel and Microsoft to invade your living room with “media centers,” their thinly disguised PCs aren’t as friendly or as foolproof as game consoles.

Second, videogame consoles improve their performance as a step function, with sudden leaps every few years when a new generation of console technology hits the streets. Between those generational leaps, the performance of game consoles doesn’t improve at all. By contrast, PCs slowly but steadily improve their performance on an almost daily basis, with each new release of a faster microprocessor, graphics card, disk drive, memory chip, or I/O interface. Even if a new console has a technical advantage when it first hits the market, your PC is stiff competition in the long run, and pretty soon you’ll get it upgraded and be on top again.

The third reason why PC gamers shouldn’t be jealous of consoles is that the new machines will be sheer hell for game programmers, especially in the early phase of software development. History indicates that programmers will need at least two years to master the new hardware and begin writing their best stuff.

Consider what’s inside the Cell chip for Sony’s PlayStation 3. The control processor is a dual-issue superscalar 64-bit PowerPC processor core with two-way hardware multi-threading. They have a new instruction-set architecture, which means Cell programmers must wrangle two different CPU architectures while writing multi-threaded, multitasking, parallel-processing programs using strange new software tools on a strange new chip.

Maybe it’s called Cell because that’s where the programmers will end up—bouncing off padded walls in straitjackets.