Hardware -- The popular opinion is that PS3 was a failure, but profit and market share aren't the only measures of success. Technological success can be a measure, but it isn't valued in quarterly/yearly reports and "console wars". Nonetheless, Kutaragi knowingly sacrificed PS3’s near-term profit and market share (he was
“aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households”) for technological success, mid-term profit and maket share. It didn't go exactly as was hoped (didn't make bank and sell 100 million units), but in the end PS3's sacrificial fate made
asynchronous compute engine architecture mainstay tech on PC and console. It's the
major aspect of CELL that
ranger Mark Cerny
knows well, now marketed as 'ACE' for AMD GPUs. These GPUs closely
mimic CELL's task submission/job execution (i.e.,
SPURS), but PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5’s GPUs mimic CELL the closest. They
“replicate” CELL’s SPU Runtime System (SPURS)
and are SPU task manager (STM)-style efficient.
STM (entries [0012], [0015] and [0016] explain what and why; [0070], [0071] and [0072] touch on non-CELL implementations and STM results) allows an SPU to load portions of task queues into its local store (i.e., memory) used as “cache”, select the tasks that match its current program code and return the ones that don't to main memory to minimize costly context switching/"cache" flushing. PS4/PS4 Pro's GPUs imitate this process by means of a
"volatile bit" that selectively invalidates cache lines to reduce cache flushing when L2 is used for compute and graphics at the same time. PS5 keeps with PS4/PS4 Pro’s volatile bit process and has a similar process for its I/O complex. Coherency engines in the complex tell cache scrubbers on the GPU which address ranges to scrub away so as to avoid full cache flushes when the SSD is read. Without these STM-inspired efficiency measures, PS4 Pro and PS5 are easy marks with no way to effectively counter the brute-force asynchronous GPU compute of One X and Series X or outduel SX’s Velocity architecture. That despite both Xboxes being hobbled by D3D12’s
Multi-engine Resource/
Enhanced Barrier requiring
full GPU cache flushes after work is completed. The unpopular fact is that CELL’s system architecture is the saving grace of post-PS3 era PS consoles. They and future PS consoles are Kutaragi's
standard-bearers. His due honor for attempting to make CELL a fixture in the world of computing, which unintentionally yet consequently gave Cerny/SIE the privilege of putting certain CELL related features on AMD's GPU roadmap for the benefit of AMD, SIE and industry. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. 'The Road to'
begins with CELL tech/PS3.
. What a LEGEND.
