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The PS3 Licked the Many Cookie
s post is inspired by I want a good parallel computer It is important to understand why the PS3 failed. The perspective here was juniorish dev working on simulation and rendering in triple-A.
CPUGPUManyFew Complex CoresWide SIMDMany Simpler CoresLow latency, OOO, SuperScalarvector instruction pipe, High latencyRISC-like, scalarCached and Coherency ProtocolFences, flushes, incoherenceMessage passing, local storage, DMAExplicit coarse synchronizationImplicit schedulingExplicit fine synchronizationAt first glance, the SPEs of the PS3 fit the bill. The PS3 had cool features but these were never general purpose and could only be exploited by careful attention to detail and sometimes significant engine changes. 5 Of course this is maybe easier as a first party developer as you can at least focus on this exotic hardware and craft your engine and game features around the type compute available.
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