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AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's infamous Cell processor during her time at IBM

Elios83

Member
Cell was very advanced and way ahead of its time for the parallelism and SIMD capabilities.
The issue was learning how to use it to extract the full theoretical power out of it.
That was done in the second half of the PS3 generation by Sony's top studios and some top third party developers and the results were unmatched.
But other studios just didn't have the time or incentive to do that kind of research.
That generation proved that ease of development was way more important than peak power.

There was also the issue that Cell was used to cover some of the weaknesses of the RSX and do some graphical tasks in its place while with a more competent GPU it could have been used for physics, procedural content generation and other more interesting stuff.

I don't remember if the Cell based GPU that Sony wanted to use before going with nVidia had some if its specs leaked.
Certainly it would have been a nightmare with developers struggling to implement even the most basic graphical functions and zero standardization for multiplatform publishers "pie_tears_joy: 🤯 even if the RSX was not as powerful as expected it probably saved the console in terms of development tools and standardized development.
 
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SonGoku

Member
2) I don't expect anything like that, most innovations in the IT space have already been discovered.
I dont expect Sony to come up with something nvidia/amd have not thought of either.
They would have to add a exotic/custom enough accelerator that provides substantial speed up on a certain task like RT for example but requires custom tailored code which would explain why said hypothetical accelerator would not be practical to implement on off the shelf cards
I won't say it's worse this way, the way development cost and timelines have gone already systems that are easier to use are an overall boon, but it also flattened out outliers
Definitely the current systems are better than having a exotic arch that produced lemons the first half of the generation.
What i would add however is customs accelerator block(s) for those willing to put extra effort, so in essence some extra block to take advantage of the close nature of console development
 
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And if you liked that, you'll love this.
 

GAF machine

Member
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