Three developers affiliated with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory provide an in depth look for Dr. Dobb's Journal at the options for optimizing a breadth first search (written in C) on the Cell Processor.
For the non-technical the results can be summarized as "On a Pentium 4 HT running at 3.4 GHz, this algorithm is able to check 24-million edges per second. On the Cell, at the end of our optimization, we achieved a performance of 538-million edges per second. This is an impressive result, but came at the price of an explosion in code complexity. While the algorithm in Listing One fits in 60 lines of source code, our final algorithm on the Cell measures 1200 lines of code"
Definitely one for the programmers amongst us.
The name "Hewson" carries a special weight for anyone who grew up during the golden age of British computing. As the son of Andrew Hewson—the man behind legendary publisher Hewson Consultants—Rob Hewson didn't just grow up playing video games; he learned to spell his name from their title screens. However, Rob didn't just rest on his family's 8-bit laurels. From leading major LEGO franchises at TT Games to tackling the high-stakes world of technical porting at Huey Games, Rob has carved out a unique path in an ever-evolving industry. In this candid interview Rob to discussed the burden and beauty of a family legacy, the technical "scar tissue" left by the ambitious Hydrophobia, and why porting a masterpiece like Inscryption to consoles is far more than a simple copy-paste job.
Conan the Barbarian is a well-known name across pop culture and entertainment. Join Netto's Game Room as they dive into his forays into the gaming medium.
Leaked source code for Rockstar Games' GTA V appears to have revealed the protagonist of the now canceled Agent.
This reminds me of my MS paint project.
Make MS Paint in VB and C++.
Took me weeks to do it in C++.
Took only 2 days to do it in VB.
**Breaking news**
**Programming the cell is hard** hehe. Well the cell is capable of so much, but there is a lot of work that needs to be put into it. Guess the trade off is how much time an effort is worth the results.
prove the power with the games.
do you now see why there are so many cell and rsx threads.
GAMES.
The end of the article reads:
"In short, the Cell offers an impressive potential for performance. However, due to its architecture and limited support offered by the compiler, you can't expect to exploit this potential by just recompiling your current applications. Applications must be radically redesigned in terms of computation and data transfers. Computational bottlenecks must often be analyzed and addressed manually, and data transfers must be properly orchestrated in order to hide their latency completely under the computational delays."
Basically, unless something is built from the ground up for the Cell to process, don't expect drastic improvements over a system that has a different processor running at the same speed.
SONY went for the "Cutting Edge" factor when they decided on the Cell for the PS3, but with very little in the way of tools to efficiently program with the cell, they've left many developers hanging out to dry.
they did it with the ps2, toy story like renderings. And they did it with the ps3, 4d, killzone, etc. had they just said it was a little bit more powerful, and let the games speak for themselves then there wouldn't be all this rioting.