> AI is a an interesting real-world problem. AI is massively parallel.
> Gaming is an interesting real-world problem. Gaming is massively parallel.
> So are physical simulations.
A couple of real-world game developers comment on the Cell:
Gabe Newell of Valve:
on Sony's Cell processor ("tiny little errors can grind [a program] to a
halt, and there is no visibility into why that's happening")
http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000350057192/
John Carmack of ID:
So John's first impressions are, "360 great, PS3 - pain in my ass."
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=60510
For those of you who don't follow gaming, ID and Valve are among the most
respected technology-oriented game developers.
Anandtech:
The Cell processor doesn't get off the hook just because it only uses a
single one of these horribly slow cores; the SPE array ends up being fairly
useless in the majority of situations, making it little more than a waste of
die space.
We of course asked the obvious question: would game developers rather have 3
slow general purpose cores, or one of those cores paired with an array of
specialized SPEs? The response was unanimous, everyone we have spoken to
would rather take the general purpose core approach.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.games.video.sony-playstation2/msg/62ff83d
96ea78ea9?hl=en
I don't mean to entirely harsh on the Cell. It does some things very well,
and the PS3 will probably do very well as a platform. But anyone who thinks
it's a radical new improvement in computer architecture simply doesn't
understand the problem.
-mattb
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