PS3 (first or second generation Cell)

Neila · Post by **Neila** » Sun May 08, 2005 4:35 am

The Cell - first generation (DD1)
ask ooPo, she knows

J.F. · Post by **J.F.** » Sun May 08, 2005 5:51 am

Cell is a stripped down G5 with several coprocessors akin to the VPUs in the PS2 EE. All the rest is marketting aimed at PHBs. I don't doubt it'll be a great CPU, but try not to get too caught up in the buzz-word battle. There's nothing magic about Cell - it won't walk the dog or cure cancer. It's just a normal CPU with some vector processors together on the same chip.

Neila · Post by **Neila** » Sun May 08, 2005 6:05 am

hmm I don't know... the numbers look impressive..
here's what Toshiba demonstrated with the Cell:

Toshiba's demo is
1. Load 48 SDTV-resolution MPEG2 streams from HDD simultaneously then decode them with 6 SPEs
2. Another SPE resizes them to thumbnails, then displays them tiled on a 1920x1080 screen. (The remaining 1 SPE is idle throughout the demo)

It's done on Toshiba's software platform where threads are automatically assigned to SPEs so programmers can write programs without doing thread scheduling by themselves.

and the 256 Gfps puts the PS3 projected power on the bottom of the Top500 supercomputer list (along with Xbox360). Yet game-industry analysts expect the "next game cycle" to start only after the PS3 is released (not the xBox360)... this may be based mostly on game-sales expectations, but on other side there are reports that insider was saying that the PS3 will have 3 times the juice of XBox360 (that has 3 dual-core PowerPCs), and everydeveloper who had some experience with both consoles were saing the PS3 had more power than the XBox360...
so... I'm impressed :)

J.F. · Post by **J.F.** » Sun May 08, 2005 9:09 am

Yes, it has plenty of horsepower, but that's it. How difficult is it to decode MPEG2, resize the frame, then tile it? Easy, easy, easy. The horsepower of the Cell simply allows you to take such an easy demo and make it look impressive (and let me tell you, decoding 48 SDTV MPEG2 streams and resizing them ON THE FLY is pretty damn impressive).

Just don't let the power impair your judgement. Like I said, it's not a magic chip. No magic is used in that demo, just sheer horsepower. The real magic will be when game makers like Id and EIDOS and LucasArts (and many others) start making REAL use of that horsepower. Decoding a bunch of MPEG2 streams is a nifty demo, but that's it. I wanna see DOOM3 Enhanced Edition on PS3. :-D