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IEEE Spectrum On The PS3 Learning Curve
An anonymous reader writes "The Insomniacs is the cover article in the December issue of IEEE Spectrum, discussing developers ramping up to the PS3 hardware. The article features Insomniac Games, who developed the PS3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man. Despite mixed reports in the press, the Insomniac folks are delighted to be working with Sony's technology, and describe the process of helping to make or break a console launch." From the article: "Despite the delays, there's something inside the PS3 that burnished Sony's reputation as a hardware company. The heart of the machine is the powerful new Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor. Developed over the last five years by Sony, IBM, and Toshiba on a reported budget of $400 million, the Cell is not just another chip: it is a giant leap beyond the current generation of computer processors into a nextgen muscle machine optimized for multimedia tasks."
Back seven years ago I remember whiteboard discussions with other engineers when we first started work on the first PS2 devkits about where we hoped Sony would take the amazing technology we now had access to with the PS2 hardware. Cell is in essence exactly what we wanted to see Sony take the PS2 design philosophy.
As game developers we spend a huge amount of our time 1) organizing data 2) feeding that data to someplace to operate on it 3) sending that data back to step one to repeat the process
Cell's design makes our lives vastly simpler. It is an absolute dream to work with.
The insanely high floating point power is what is talked about most with the Broadband Engine, but it is the memory architecture that is the best part of the architecture. The internal ring bus allows us to write code that hide memory latency.
Writing for Cell is extremely straightforward. You have each SPU setup to operate on three regions of internal memory: 1) Static data 2&3) doubled buffer of dynamic data. Data is being fed into one buffer while the SPU operates on the other. With this setup optimal Cell code has all available SPUs plowing through data with very little latency from the memory subsystem.
In many ways it is very similar to writing old style code where you got your data into the chips cache, operated on it, and then wrote that data back out to main memory or somewhere else. But with Cell you now have total control of how the data is loaded into your cache due to the SPU ability to scatter DMA into local memory, and you have the internal ring bus to pass data around to other SPUs instead of having to go out to slow main memory, and of course you have 6-8(depending on the hardware you are using) SPUs all running in parallel.
It is wonderful that every PS3 is setup to easily allow install Linux and have access to the Cell devkit. There is a wonderful world beyond the archaic x86 architecture just waiting for you.
The article doesn't even involve Sony talking up the chip. It's an IEEE article.
A lot of the Cell press has nothing to do with Sony, actually. There are a lot of EE/CompE types who get a hard-on over Cell for the same reason they do for Itanium (simple, fast hardware driven by complex compilers).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
They can, but then anyone making a game with maps large enough to cause such issues commonly split up the map into chunks with their own co-ordinate space and re-centre the global co-ordinate space's origin to the origin of each chunk as the camera moves into it.
Animating objects like characters and such have all of their calculations performed in their local co-ordinate space before the result is transformed into world space.
Most also use the scale of 1.0f = 1M, so you'll be going on for a few KM's before precision becomes much of an issue.
So overall, it's hardly an issue.