Sony To Sell Cell Processor Factories?

Oh look at this...Next will be SONY stop production of PS3...Can't wait for that announcement.

Why?

I was kidding, the thing is Sony hyped up the CELL soo much and look where it has got them.

What is amusing though is Toshiba are the backers and creators of HD-DVD fancy Sony selling off Cell production to them...Interesting.

All in all I think the PS3 has been one huge mess its not focused as a games console its more focused as a blu-ray player.

I think you've got your head in a very strange place.

Sony will have built these facilities to manage the huge launch requirement of CELL for PS3 launch.

Now that that spike has passed AND teething problems with yield are in hand, they just don't need the capacity any more.

Anything more than that you are imagining

And this obsession people have with Sony focussing more on Blu-ray than games - WTF has CELL got to do with BR? CELL is about the PS3s games function, not video playback.

Err the CELL is a CPU, the GPU is supposed to handle the visuals in this case however since the GPU is extremely old and lacking the advanced architecture the 360 GPU offers the PS3 might as well be just a super blu-ray player.

If you were capable of reading and understanding words you'd have seen in the story that Toshiba also collaborated with Sony and IBM in the design and production of the Cell chip.

Companies are capable of working together where it's in their best interests as well as competing where they have offerings in the same market.

Not everything is as black and white as the fanboy mindset.

Having a slight programming background I do not envy those who have to program for that chip. Sony would have to release some very high-end dev tools to take the work out of assigning individual routines/processes to those individual SPEs. As far as I know developers don't have those hence games looking sometimes sub-par to 360 versions and usually months later (Bioshock).

Its such an expensive chip to make but it has yet to return what it promised because of the difficulty of programming for it. PS2 was similar with its "Emotion Engine" being split into 3 different chips and a measly 4Mb RAM but because games didn't cost as much for that generation and the console was shifting millions of units developers put the time in. PS3 doesn't have that luxury....yet.

The Cell is usually used in PS3 programming to do a lot of the pre-processing of graphics that it can do really quite well due to the nature of the task and the chip its self. The system then passes those pre-processed graphics off to the RSX (the GPU) to render to the screen bufffer for display.

The Cell is used as part of the graphics pipeline, in fact at one point there wasn't going to be a separate GPU in the PS3 at all. Many of the early demos of the PS3 ran without the RSX supporting the Cell. The stand-out example is the petrol station explosion demo from E3 2005, that was Cell all the way from physics to geometry, texturing to lighting.

As to the RSX being very old, it's basically a suped-up GeForce 7800 GTX, which is a 2005-2006 era PC GPU. The Xbox 360's Xenos is an ATI R500 processor with extra routines to handle procedural geometry and texture synthesis. The R500 processor is also a 2005-2006 era PC GPU. It's a "swings and roundabouts" comparison between the PS3 and 360 due to the Xenos' extra routines and the PS3's use of Cell. They are both much the same in power.

Good explanation but how does a CPU handle graphics when the features that allow visuals to render are handled by the technology in the GPU? Like pixel shaders, unified shaders, texturing, pipes etc.

Since as you said the CELL handles most of it and gets the GPU to do the rest look at the 360 and the way it does it, its the way it should be without putting too much strain on the CPU.

The 360 GPU is less powerful in numbers i.e. clock performance but more than makes it up with its 10mb EDRAM, unified shader, multi texturing and a custom API based on DX9 and DX10 technology.

The PS3 GPU is not a custom design and its just a 7800GTX nothing more.

Xbox 360 will always have the better visuals because of the way the CPU and GPU work and also it has more system memory available as 32mb is used as apposed to 96mb in the PS3.

Do you know what a CPU or a GPU are? Let me point out to you the "P" word in both of the acronyms; "processing". What they do is process instructions, mostly maths. Essentially they move electrons.

Your "pixel shaders, unified shaders, texturing, pipes etc" are just sets of instructions and can be implemented on any processor. Apart from the fact that you don't have pixel shaders and unified shaders on the same GPU, of course - the "unified" refers to the unification of pixel and vertex shaders.

The difference between the two chips is that a CPU handles general-purpose instructions and a GPU handles a much smaller set of instructions that are aimed at processing graphics. A CPU can do the same electron moving as a GPU, but for a given clock speed a GPU will do it faster because it's tailored towards those instructions.

For example, a CPU will do several multiplication operations to transform a polygon into the visible space in order to render it, a GPU will usually have a matrix multiplication engine that will perform the operation in one go.

The same is true the other way round, some operations require the flexibility of a CPU to do well, AI and other branch-heavy code is best done on a flexible processor like a CPU.

Using either a GPU or CPU to process graphics will result in some memory location being updated with values that represent the picture being generated, this is sent to the display via an output system geared to the output method (VGA, DVI, HDMI, etc).

In PC graphics cards, this memory and output processor are on-board the card. In the PS3 and 360, there are no such things as a graphics cards, the components are mostly all on the motherboard. In neither case is the output processor part of the GPU.

Another comparison of the similarities between the CPU and GPU types of chips is that there are systems out there that can do physics processing using the GPU hardware. There is also a version of Folding@Home that runs on GPUs.

Then of course, the Cell comes along and it's sort of a mixture of the two approaches. The central core is a normal CPU, whereas the SPUs are stripped down and very efficient. If the core processes code to be used on the SPUs, you can see a huge increase in performance over a normal CPU. Just look at the Folding@Home figures for an example of this; the PS3 is contributing much more power per CPU than normal PCs are.


I didn't say that the Cell handles "most" of it, I said it was capable of handling all of it, but it's usually used to do "a lot of the pre-processing of graphics". The Cell is capable of doing this faster than the RSX, so it makes sense to do things that way round.


You're starting to sound less like you know what you're on about and more like you're quoting from the Xenos page on Wikipedia.


Well, the RSX runs at 550Mhz and the 7600GTX runs at 430 MHz, so it's at least a "souped-up" version, like I said.


The reasons you quote are not really that important to graphics quality. The quality of graphics comes from the amount of processing that a CPU/GPU pair can do per frame and the resolutions and bit-depths that they can do it at. In those areas the RSX wins out since it can do more matrix multiplications and shader operations than the Xenos and it can render at 128 bit quality. Remember that Bungie had to do some trickery to get 64 bit rendering into Halo 3.

The thing is that we haven't see the full potential of either system (PS3 or 360) being realised yet. Look at the difference between launch PS2 titles and God of War II or Shadow of the Colossus for example. We have that level of increase over Gears of War and Heavenly Sword to come. Frankly, I can't wait.