I always wondered about the legacy of the Cell architecture, which seems to have gone nowhere. I’ve never seen a developer praise it, and you can find devs who love just about every silly weird computer thing. Like, surely someone out there (emu devs?) have respect for what Cell was doing, right?
I’ve never understood it. Multicore processors already existed (the X360 had a triple-core processor, oddly) so I’m not clear what going back to multiple CPUs accomplished. Cell cores could act as FPUs also, right? PS3 didn’t have dedicated GPU, right?
Such a strange little system, I’m still amazed it ever existed. Especially the OG ones that had PS2 chips in them for backwards compatability! Ah, I miss my old PS3.
It was very experimental, that’s really the reason Sony went with it and it was at the genesis of multi threaded processing, so the jury was still out on which way things would go.
Your description of it is a little wrong though, it wasn’t multiple CPUs, at least not gore would be traditionally thought. It was a single dual core CPU, with 6 “supporting cores” so not full on CPUs. Kind of like an early stab at octocore processors when dual core was becoming popular and quad core was still being developed.
I remember that the ability to boot Linux was a big deal too and a university racked 8 PS3s together into basically a 64 core super computer. I’m actually sad that didn’t go further, the raw computing power was there, we just didn’t really know what to do with it besides experiment.
Honestly I think someone had a major breakthrough in multi-core single-unit processors shortly after the PS3 launch that killed this. Cell was just a more expensive way to get true multi threaded processing and a couple years later it was cheaper to buy a 32 core processor.
Maybe in a different timeline we’re all running Cell processors in our daily lives.
Ah, that sounded familiar as you described it! Thanks for the correction and context! I’d forgotten how early into multicore we still were. Well that also explains why it doesn’t have specific fans then, it’s “basically” “just” parallel programming (which people still don’t understand!)
Yeah the university running a PS3 cluster was fun news! I recall there being a brief run on the devices as people thought there’d be sudden academic demand for them as supercomputers. I think you could run “folding at home” on them as a screensaver? Which (if I remember right) kind of would make ps3 the biggest research computing cluster around for a while!
I think the application of it was wrong.
You basically had game devs that wanted to build cross platform easily. PC, Xbox, and Nintendo used standard architecture while ps3 was unique.
That basically meant you had to develop for ps3 as an entirely separate game than the other major systems.
Xbox One plays a number of 360 games fine.
Apple used QuickTransit for their PPC apps on Intel migration to great success.
I guess Sony just didn’t want to pay the emulator tax?
Apple did the same again with their ARM migration and in my experience it worked great. I believe Microsoft also has a solution for running x86 software on ARM.
But Apple’s solution isn’t pure software emulation, the SoC has special hardware inside to make it translate a lot faster.
The original Rosetta, which was emulating PPC on x86 is directly comparable to the situation of PS3-game-on-PS4 hardware. I was able to play Halo CE for Mac on x86 with Rosetta and it felt native.
The point is that this isn’t a limitation of technology, this was a decision on Sony’s part.
There’s some weird online connection issues on 360 that occur with certain modern routers. You get dropped randomly from the game. Annoyingly, the emulated 360 on One doesn’t skirt around the issue. It was annoying for Borderlands but made Left 4 Dead worthless on anything besides easy
The whole point of bringing out a new generation of hardware is to make it work in much better ways of operation than the last one. By default it is not going to run the older generation of games because it doesn’t work in the same way. Now they could spend a lot of effort in making it able to play the old games and work in the old way, but what is their incentive to do that, compared say in starting work on the next generation or releasing the console earlier?
