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PS3 Cell Processor 'Broken'?
D-Fly writes "Charlie Demerijian at the Inquirer got a look at some insider specs on the PS3, and says, Sony screwed up big time with the Cell processor; the memory read speed on the current Devkits is something like 3 orders of magnitude slower than the write speed; and is unlikely to improve much before the ship date. The slide from Sony pictured in the article is priceless: 'Local Memory Read Speed ~16Mbps, No this isn't a Typo.' Demerjian says when the PS3 comes out a full year after the XBox360, it's still going to be inferior: 'Someone screwed up so badly it looks like it will relegate the console to second place behind the 360.'" This is the Inquirer, so take with a grain of salt. Just the same, doesn't sound too good for Sony or IBM.
there is no point in judgin a dev kit. x360 kits were shitty too.
[chinese democracy starts now
I'm aware that, in the past, The Inquirer has published questionable articles. However, they've certainly got a revealing picture to back it up here...unless they're outright lying and they photoshopped something, why should we take this story with a grain of salt?
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
So what is the difference between the local memory 16MB/s and the main memory 25GB/s 'reading'?
I assume the local memory is not going to be used much for 'reading' and only main memory is going to be used.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
The subject says it all. It's getting really tedious. Why just not wait for the release and then make comments?
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The "Local Memory" is the memory attached to the RSX.
That the read performance for the Cell from this memory is dreadful is no surprise. This is exactly the same architecture that has been traditionally used in PCs. Reading graphics memory from the main processor is usually really really slow.
This memory is where you store textures and other graphics data. The main processor will usually have little need to read from this memory. If it does, then, as apparently Sony says, you just get the RSX to write to main memory instead.
This is a non-story. People have dealt with this for PC games for a long time.
I've been hearing a lot of chatter about how the PS3 is difficult to program for, developers don't like it, Sony isn't providing quality libraries, blah, blah, blah. These exact same things were said about the PS2 when it first came out six years ago and it still managed to dominate its generation of console gaming. And it certainly wasn't true that developers avoided the PS2 in favor of XBOX or GameCube. As always the winner and losers of the console wars will be decided by the buying public, in the US, Japan, and Europe.
I think being too connected to the online debates about this stuff can make you lose sight of what the more average public thinks and bases their purchase decisions on. That's why the only real argument for the PS3's failure so far is the high price, not questions about performance or developer issues.
This isn't the online IT arm of the National Enquirer, you know.
The Inq isn't always right, but what the do tend to have is a lot of news-breaking stuff that they're (well, Mike) is willing to publish regardless of the consequences when the corporate heads find out there's a leak. Thats' why Mike got eased out of The Register when it went more corporate to form the Inq in the first place.
Those who have been following it for a while will remember all the appearances of leaked memos from Compaq (ex-DEC) insiders who were willing to leak happily to someone of the old school who was interested in seeing how the whole fiasco was turning out. Compaq/HP even started internal witchhunts looking for the leakers.
Regardless, the only real problem people might have with the Inq is they can't distinguish between an opinion piece and direct reporting, or can't accept that while the information as presented might be correct, it doesn't ensure that interpretive parts also follow.
Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
Yes, but on the other hand, the PS2 games don't look anywhere near as good as Sony claimed they would. Remember the claims that in PS2 games individual hairs on a persons head would be modelled? Both the GC and Xbox games generally have better graphics than PS2 games.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
After reading the article, I realize that these are numbers for Cell and RSX local memory. Of course, our stupid submitter wanted to make us think this was the SPE's local memory, and purposefully put a DIRECT LINK to the photo in addition to the article link when he knew it would be taken out of context.
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