> There's a persistent rumor that the Cell was so powerful that Sony had intended for the Playstation 3 to be equipped with two Cell chips, and no true GPU at all. But it seems Sony realized during development that their philosophy had no future.
The original plan was for no GPU at all, relying on the SPUs as pixel processor units. When they realized that that wasn't feasible for a few reasons, they quickly partnered with Toshiba to make a custom GPU, and that ended poorly too, so Toshiba scrambled and licensed an NVIDIA core. The final "RSX" chip was still a Toshiba design, but with NVIDIA at the center.
As games got more and more complicated, the amount of developer support & tooling did as well. The Xbox 360 had incredibly strong tooling (ask someone who worked on the device about 360's PIX, and they'll gush for days), and the PS3 had very little. The PS3 shader compiler infamously had a random search for an optimizer, and Sony's recommendation was to just run it continually with different random seed inputs in hopes it found a better optimization for your shader.
TBF until the early aughts bespoke hardware was the only way to hit a suitable price target and get the performances and graphics snazz you wanted.
The first "consumer" PCs which were competitive with consoles in terms of gaming (late 90s, starting with the Voodoo 2 or so) had the graphics adapter alone costing as much as a current-gen console.
Sounds like machine learning with linear regression.
MSX, PC98. The Nintendo uses a standard 6502 CPU with a PPU and the Mega Drive used the uberknown M68k.
As such... its sad as we will never see any new crazy ass hardware architectures going forward.
It was a different world though, PowerPC was still alive and strong back then.
The PS4 does continue the trend but I think that's more a question of time and investment rather than pure tech considering they have a steady trickle of top notch exclusives.
One thing that made it practical to work with was that we could install Linux on a PS3.
When Sony retroactively killed the ability to install Linux, they did more than make PS3 irrelevant to supercomputing. They made me deeply skeptical of relying on a technology with a single-vendor gatekeeper.
I'd love to poke into it myself. The only barrier is the language you have to use to speak with it.
But on benchmark levels Cell would be competing on different grounds to an X64 and a few PCIe slots right? I've not a clue, I'm curious but I know I don't really know what I'm talking about after this point.
the cell really taught them the trade off between latancy and throughput. That by batching up computations they could do orders of magnitude more than naive pipelining. But, to get that good batching, they had to compromise on framerate.
Which gets to the second big takeaway, which was that standard deviation in the framerate was more important than the framerate and by keeping the framerate low they could also drastically reduce standard deviation in the framerate (Incidently I understand that this was something the amiga demoscene really understood, and low S.D. was a must for any text marquee to look completely smooth).
The different ARMs don't even share a common instruction sets, I think.
Meanwhile off the shelf hardware is cheap and has support from developers. And any kind of enhancement to consumer products involves cheap hardware to keep costs down.
I couldn't help but wonder if it wasn't a functional and yet a bit of a corporate vanity project that had missed the boat and had nonsensical ambitions.
Does this mean the Xbox was pretty revolutionary for showing that you really can make a console with commodity hardware?
It was likely more about making it easy to port existing windows directx based games quickly and cheaply. Similarly, it granted a development stack that a great many developers would already be somewhat familiar with. All good things for a new entrant to a tough marketplace.
Presumably it also allowed them to get to market faster? Much less custom silicon?
No Windows Phone iteration ever had more than a few percentage points of share. iOS and Android both clearly destroyed it in the market. Had WP seen a few years of sustained success it would still be around today, sort of like how BlackBerry the brand is still around, albeit for Android-based devices.
From your comment, it seems like Sony tried exactly this but failed. Is there an inherent flaw in such a design or just poor execution?
Edit: the biggest problem I see with such a design is RAM IO, but I would think that could be mitigated. Maybe even eliminate support for DDR, instead embedding 4 or 8 GB in the package.
From what I understand this is still different from the Sony approach where you'd have a weaker GPU, but would offload shaders etc to the CPU which could do this due to it's powerful dedicated vector processing units. Of course this had the flaw of GPUs eventually develping shader capabilities etc and making it pointless - and harder to program for if you have to target PC/xBox etc as well.
BTW the latest AMD GPU architecture (RDNA) is specific for gaming, in that they get around 40% better framerates for the same raw GFLOPS of their previous architecture (GNC).
and Hallelujah to that
Praise Talos
We really do not need a Wakanda with an independent history of processor technology. Maybe 50 years ago the Cambrian explosion of possibilities was relevant, but this century?
Consoles had to compromise based on heating and costs while being competitive in graphical capabilities, those things haven't been issues that the market actually cares about in 15-20 years. For the market, the graphics pale to the actual experience, they're good enough and would never attract enthusiasts that are willing to use more electrical energy for bragging rights.
General processors and off the shelf graphics processors are good enough.
Interchangeable parts wins again.
Agreed. And that’s a good thing.
PS1, PS2, and PS3 were all underpowered. I’ll never forgive the PS2 for holding back games for 7 years. Grumble grumble.
PS3 may technically not have been slower. But if it takes 2x the effort to get a 10% improvement it is in practice.
Everything’s a PC now. Which means the focus can be on making good games instead of optimizing for specialized hardware to serve a fraction of the audience.
The PS2 for sure was less powerful than the more conventional architectures of the GameCube and Xbox, but it was released 18 months before either of them in a time when Moore's law was still extremely relevant. Yet it could still hold its own against the competition. All pieces of impressive hardware.
(The lack of ram was definitely the biggest issue, and the thing that held back PC games the most as levels had to be made a lot smaller than they could have been otherwise - Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV are two concrete examples, both released expansions with much larger playable areas as soon as PS3/360 support was dropped).
Compared to other consoles of the same generation they were on par though.
Compared to top-of-the-line PCs of the same era yes. But the GPU alone of "PCs of the same era" would set you back as much as a 6th gen console, and you'd have a shiny graphics adapter sitting in a box.
The 7th gen is where consoles started really falling behind (though somewhat ironically also where MS decided to go with somewhat more bespoke hardware than the "PC in a box" Xbox).
The most serious competition at the time was the Nintendo 64, and it lacked storage.
PS2 dominated sixth gen sales. By being the winning console but releasing 18 months earlier it held back everyone. And since, like you said, Moore's law was very much alive this represented a significant reduction in overall quality for an entire generation. :(
PS3 at it's peak was great. But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a very poor value proposition for developers. And 7th gen was a fully multi-platform era so the end result is the average game was held back and only first party prestige titles could justify the extra cost.
It’s funny that this is always a criticism levelled at the CPU and not the developers.
Powerful custom hardware can be great for the developers that invest in it, until it isn't anymore and now you've got a bunch of sunk R&D. And then there's the need to ship on more than one platform...
And even if everyone were a super smart 10x-developer like you surely are, their time would still be better spent on a platform that is more productive. The idea that some technology is difficult but rewards proficiency with incredible productivity is almost entirely wrong, which is why nobody does web development in Assembly. LaTeX vs Word would be the only example I would have agreed with in the past, but if you search you'll find a study showing even the most proficient practitioners are slower and make more typesetting mistakes using the former.
That's not called for. They never implied they were even above average. Just that a bunch of game devs were somewhat lazy.
That's not called for. You don't know those developers, you don't know what work was on their plate or what constraints they were toiling under.
But they still weren't calling themselves some kind of better-than-everyone dev.
Though if you're using "developers" to mean that entire section of the company, including management, then what was on their plate and the constraints are almost all self-inflicted.
Assume you have a developer who is one of the best in the world at writing hyper-optimized SPU code. Imagine this dev WANTS to write micro-optimized assembly. (And there are many such devs). This developer's time would far more efficiently spent if they were writing "normal" code for a "normal" processor.
So yeah. The criticism belongs squarely on the processor. :)
As a result, the PS1, but especially the PS2 and PS3 were engineered to have amazing vector capabilities in the CPU. The PS2's Emotion Engine had extremely high performance vector processing units, and was so optimized for compute throughput it used two different floating point formats, neither of which are compatible with the IEEE754 standard that every other piece of hardware you've ever touched uses. The PS3 was the culmination of that philosophy, with the Cell being explicitly developed to put as much raw number crunching hardware in something that can still be called a CPU. It was just a single unimpressive POWER-compatible CPU core, and 60% of its die area went to specifically engineered number crunching units. This is what made it "supercomputer grade".
There's a persistent rumor that the Cell was so powerful that Sony had intended for the Playstation 3 to be equipped with two Cell chips, and no true GPU at all. But it seems Sony realized during development that their philosophy had no future. Sony compromised and introduced a standard Geforce GPU. Compared to the more conventional architecture of the Xbox 360, the compromised design still had slightly more potential but it was a lot more difficult to work with for games, and more expensive to produce as well.
Starting with the last generation of consoles, homegrown graphics architectures aren't tried anymore. You can only get performance and especially good developer buy-in on commodity hardware. As a result, the PS4 and Xbox One have PC hardware. Their successors will too. The Nintendo Switch shares a chip with the Nvidia Shield TV and Google Pixel C tablet. Console hardware is not really interesting anymore if you ask me.