PS3 600 dollars? Sony is on crack

[reanjr]

Ummm... what is the point of 7 procs if they shouldn't be used for game control, AI, and physics? What else is there besides audio and video? Why not SLI in another video card or add a nice dedicated sound card in the mix?

What gaming benefits does this architecture provide?

 

[drothgery]

Ummm... what is the point of 7 procs if they shouldn't be used for game control, AI, and physics? What else is there besides audio and video? Why not SLI in another video card or add a nice dedicated sound card in the mix?

What gaming benefits does this architecture provide?

Originally, the idea was to use the Cell (or two Cells) as both a CPU and a GPU. When the 360 was ramping up, it became pretty clear that wasn't going to work well enough (Sony had used a similar approach in the PS2; the Emotion Engine is the same kind of design as the Cell, except that the sub-CPUs are simpler, there are only four of them, and the main core is MIPS-based rather than PowerPC-based), nVidia was hastily brought on board to provide a GPU, which is pretty much a GeForce 7900 (though of the less-extreme variety; keeping within a console power envelope means the GPU and video memory aren't clocked anything like top-end PC cards). Sony denies this these days, but there's really no logical explanation otherwise.

I'm not a fan of any of the CPU choices in this round of the console wars, though I think the 360's sucks the least. Nintendo's is massively underpowered (if rumors are correct, and the Wii CPU is nothing more than a die-shrunk, higher-clocked version of the GameCube's G3). Microsoft and Sony both committed to highly parallel, in-order designs which just suck for conventional programming. The Xenon's effectively better than the Cell (though the Cell's got a higher theoretical top-end) because it's got three identical cores, so conventional approaches for taking advantage of parallelism work. And Microsoft and Sony like oddball designs because they're harder to hack. But I still think a dual-core x86 or G5 variant would have worked better.