Sony - redeemed!

State of the art kitchen and serves me a ham sandwich.

I put 87 octane in my vet.

I will certainly not believe that this poorly designed chip out classes an i7 in any measurable way.

Yeah I remember Sony saying the ps3 was capable of 1080p 120 FPS. That didn’t happen

Being more complex does a console no favours, PS2 was supposed to be a lot more powerful than Dreamcast but look how close visually most of the games were there.

It’s a shame we never really got to see the true potential of the cell CPU.

According to the developers, it was real pain in the buttocks to use.

We saw in shine in Sony’s first party games, but not so much with third party titles.

Yeah, sure.

Oh I remember getting downvoted tremendously when I pointed out that Ps3 cpu was better than the Ps4 and Xbox one Cpu, I guess yall were so happy with your new toys that the truth disrupted your happiness now that the new cycle is coming people finally admit Ps4 and X1 are the weakest most minimal upgrade we ever had In gaming it was basically ps3.5 vs 360.3 it was hilarious I bought the Alienware Alpha console and it still runs games better higher frames and textures plus Ps2 and Gamecube emulation in 4K, I didn’t buy an 8th gen consoles until the Ps4 Pro came out

I remember it being almost universally despised by studios outside Sony's own. That's it's legacy.

You can all the power in the world but if you can't harness it effectively and efficiently it is not a good chip design.

Why did Sony not continue working on CELL? For the PS5?

That’s great and all but if it’s too difficult to develop for than it’s time to upgrade and Sony knew that. At least it said it “it was visionary”

they r talking about the end or moors law and this dude may have a solution for that.ps3 cell architecture !

This was, in short, Sony's attempt to make ARM-like legacy-free platform.
ARM became successful because;
1. They completely kicked out x86-type legacy for benefits of power efficiency.
2. They found completely new hardware platform, smartphone.
3. Efficiency outweighed speed in the mobile platform in early days.
4. Microsoft's monopoly policy did not work.
CELL did not have any of above.
Gaming programming and hardware already existed for long time, so Sony themselves weren't quite capable of doing 1 and 2, actually. Plus regarding 3 and 4, they had to ask 1 to existing PC game programmers without any short-term tangible benefits.
Timing was also unfortunate. Shifting of SD to HD console required massive renewal of development resources to console game developers. I guess Sony hoped it was good opportunity for console developers to adapt completely new techniques. Reality was that they just adapted already existing HD programming resources, PC game, for console in the end.
That's how CELL failed.

They would say something like this, but multi console owners know the truth

It’s probably better suited as a specialized co-processor than it is as the main general-purpose CPU, though. It’s only really good at running certain kinds of code and certain types of calculations. It’s only average at performing as the main system processor which then takes away resources and processing cycles from doing what it’s actually good at. A well-designed general purpose CPU may have a lower peak potential but it’s easier to use the available power for more things and will result in code that easier to port to other platforms as well. That helps 3rd party multi-platform devs as well as first party devs if backward compatibility on newer hardware in the future will be a concern.

Cell was a bad CPU and it was a bad GPU. It tried to be the best of both and ended up being the worst of both.

So in terms of parallel and vector processing yes, it's still better than modern x86 CPUs because they are not designed that way!

However compared to a modern programmable GPU which is designed that way then it's not even remotely as fast.

This is a bit like saying a 1950s fighter jet is faster than a 2019 passenger airliner. Yes it is, but that's not very useful if the job you need to do is to move as many people as quickly as possible. You might be able to do three trips in the fighter in the time it takes the airliner to do one trip because it's still faster. Problem being you can only take one person at a time, whereas the airliner can take 500 people at a time.....

In short a modern x86 CPU is vastly superior to CELL for branch predicted, general purpose computing, and a modern GPU is vastly superior at parallel workloads and vectors.

Which is why the best gaming systems have the best of both, top end x86 CPU, top end DX12 class GPU.

CBE just wasn't really put into a configuration where it could show you a lot of advantages.
Even for its time the memory in the PS3 was anything but optimal and definitely not build for the future.

The best decision Sony made is getting rid of the Cell. It was powerful but not convenient.

It's just too complex and unsupported to really be taken advantage of.

I call BS....no way it's true....I would like some proof....not that it wasn't a great idea....but there is no way it was more powerful than the chips we have no....especially with the latest tech jump in the last 2-3 years.

The PS3 was basically the Trojan Horse for Blu-ray and CELL. It was a great machine but even then the CELL was a moonshot and risky.

BS. If its so powerful why use an entirely new CPU architecture for PS4 when it launched? This article is just a Sony fanboy way of showing he is pro Sony. The Cell is shoddy at best, If Im not mistaken the 460 used a similar CPU which proved to be just as good as the Cell back in the day if not better. FACTS!

Ok prove it...

Intel doesn't even make the most powerful cup for consumers so not sure why he would use that as the example

"Guerrilla dev: PS3's Cell CPU is by far stronger than new Intel CPUs" - I will give you an advice, stop taking drugs they are fucking up you brain.

Mídia lixo, dando destaque PS3 cell cpu, enquanto as next gen estariam chegando com tudo, especialmente Anaconda. Sempre tapando o sol com a peneira.

This article makes me want to buy another PS3.
It just too bad that last gen the bottleneck was RAM and weak GPU while CPU clock speed are faster than what we have in PS4.
What CELL tried to do are what APU nowadays are doing just not nearly as fast as CELL so it makes sense why this thing was so ahead of its time nobody can truly harness its true power.

If it was so good then why is it gone?

Answer is simple... Too hard to get the power out and the power was in the wrong places. Games are expensive to build. You don't need them to be more expensive just because you use a custom processor.

The cell cpu is a beast. IBM is way ahead on the game when it comes to processors. I remember them showcasing the Gamecube power pc gekko chip. Blew me away back in 2001.

I still remember the tech demos and interview about the chip supposedly being able to render graphics and RAY TRACING in real-time. Mind you, this was in 2005. It was THAT fast.

That's incredible, if true. If so, I have two of that CPU in my house, one of which is in a working PS3.

Power doesn’t mean a lot if you can’t utilize it properly

The Cell was a beast, but it demand too much work. Even so, it allowed to make amazing games, like TLOU, Uncharted, Killzone that look better that many games this gen....

The Cell The Cloud I guess we can say both companies made promises they couldn’t follow

Tell me again how the multiplatform strategy was supposed to fix everything. Look at your results and compare them to Nintendo, which keeps thriving with exclusives. Your loyal fans are gone. And let’s not forget the pile of IPs you purchased only to let them rot.

The worst thing is this is down from last years numbers/expectations which was down from the previous years numbers/expectations. You think about how long “down” has been a consistent part of the communication and you realize those subscriptions are what’s holding that boat together. The price cut of gamespass is still a price raise in a string of price raises. They are trying to use players to offset the missing revenue. Now call of duty is out of gamespass, which is literally WHY they bought the company. To draw people to the subscription. They realized they missed a boatload of money and that wasn’t sustainable. Now you pay for it like you would have if they never bought the company… so why buy the company? Mind you those billions still need to be paid back. Yeah it gives you a chance to say we make the biggest FPS… but the internal conversations must be brutal at high level on topics that really matter. Like revenue. Profitability. And ROI for the shopping spree.

Is this like the 10th quarter in a row they're down 33% on hardware how is that even mathematically possible. You would think their mediocrity would Plateau