Duo Core 2

Chrisss · 16 Mar 2007 at 19:17

wannabedamned said:
So patches and updates released for the Xbox 360 version wouldnt bring the games onto even terms?

I'm guessing it's a lot easier to make a game look better if you have 9+ months development time, rather than trying to patch up old code.

Joebob · 16 Mar 2007 at 19:29

Like a lot of you, I read stuff from a lot of different sources on console games and I havent read anywhere that theres a lack of developers for Cell or that they will be porting 360 games to the PS3 - it all just seems to be peoples opinions rather than going by whats actually being said imo. I do recall reading developers say it's more difficult to code for the PS3 than the 360, but they also say it's a hell of a lot easier than the PS2's emotion engine and they came to terms with that ok!!!

deSade · 16 Mar 2007 at 20:58

Kreeeee · 16 Mar 2007 at 21:05

Joebob said:
the PS2's emotion engine and they came to terms with that ok!!!

They had to, sony absolutely dominated the market and if they didn't bend over backwards to work with the architecture then they lost immense amounts of profit.

wannabedamned · 16 Mar 2007 at 21:22

Kreeeee said:
They had to, sony absolutely dominated the market and if they didn't bend over backwards to work with the architecture then they lost immense amounts of profit.

and they could lose profit once again. So chances are they have to this time too

Joebob · 17 Mar 2007 at 07:31

Kreeeee said:
They had to, sony absolutely dominated the market and if they didn't bend over backwards to work with the architecture then they lost immense amounts of profit.

Well they have made the cell easier to develop for than the emotion engine and as someone said earlier they are rolling out a new dev kit soon, so I guess they learnt their lesson from last gen.

Kreeeee · 17 Mar 2007 at 07:51

Joebob said:
Well they have made the cell easier to develop for than the emotion engine and as someone said earlier they are rolling out a new dev kit soon, so I guess they learnt their lesson from last gen.

I hope so

wannabedamned said:
and they could lose profit once again. So chances are they have to this time too

We have no idea yet

PiKe · 18 Mar 2007 at 01:26

Is sony still hoping to have the cell in all manor of devices then be able to offload processing to say.. a tv to help improve the gaming experience?

Or have they binned that?

Kreeeee · 18 Mar 2007 at 07:16

PiKe said:
Is sony still hoping to have the cell in all manor of devices then be able to offload processing to say.. a tv to help improve the gaming experience?

Or have they binned that?

They are still desperate to get the cell processor into a lot of devices but I don't know about offloading onto said processors.

Joebob · 18 Mar 2007 at 07:18

PiKe said:
Is sony still hoping to have the cell in all manor of devices then be able to offload processing to say.. a tv to help improve the gaming experience?

Or have they binned that?

They have already put it into some TV's IIRC, and IBM have started using it in some of their mainframe servers too.

Jokester · 18 Mar 2007 at 07:31

wannabedamned said:
and they could lose profit once again. So chances are they have to this time too

Or they could turn to coding for the Wii and 360 instead of making exclusive titles for the PS3.

Jokester

KNiVES · 18 Mar 2007 at 11:59

This is a pretty similair situation to when the PS2 first came out. My prediction is that eventually, developers will get the hang of Cell, but it won't be as impressive as Sony has been touting it. I also think that Cell (and the PS3) will be successful enough for Sony to be satisfied (ie, meets expectations in the end).

I think it's a reasonable prediction

Kamakazie! · 26 Mar 2007 at 21:31

titchard said:
It is an amazing piece of hardware and it shows amazing promise - just trying to show people that Intel X64 CPU is about 200 Miles from a Cell, you can't compare!

How is it amazing? Its a good idea but it is far from an amazing piece of hardware. It offers little that a GPU can't already do. As said infact, Sony originally intended the 7 SPEs to handle graphics but it turned out to be pretty poor at this compared to a decent GPU.
In terms of FLOPS, GPUs from the last generation are significantly faster and are much more massively parallel.
In terms of general purpose computing, any CPU from the last 2-3 years is faster.

JUMPURS said:
Isn't a to of the range core Duo like £700??

Also the cell would wipe the floor with anything when it comes to multi processor environments, which iirc is why IBM wanted it, so they could whack 50 into a mainframe.

It is superb at Floating Point operations which is what a lot of modelling software needs to do quickly. It is not to do with multi-processor environments.
Infact IBM is building the fastest supercomputer in the world over the next year or so by pairing 10k Opterons with 5/6k Cells. The Cells will basically acts as coprocessors with the Opterons handling the rest.

Joebob said:
Well theirs 8 SPE's in total and one is kept for redundancy, so if you use another for OS then it leaves 6.

There are 8 in the Cell originally, but it was said that Sony only use 7 because their yields on the cores with 8 intact SPEs was too low. They therefore dropped the need of 1 SPE to up the yields of the chips. Not really for redundancy.
As said, another 1 is used for the OS but apparently it can be used if needed with some special coding.

Joebob said:
They have already put it into some TV's IIRC, and IBM have started using it in some of their mainframe servers too.

The Cell was co-developed between IBM and Sony. IBM have been using it for quite a while. In fact rumour has it that IBM engineers were sent in to help improve Sonys yields.