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Sony Ditching Cell Architecture For Next PlayStation?
RogueyWon writes "According to reports in Kotaku and Forbes, Sony is planning to ditch the Cell processor that powered the PlayStation 3 and may be planning to power the console's successor using a more conventional PC-like architecture provided by AMD. In the PS3's early years, Sony was keen to promote the benefits of its Cell processor, but the console's complicated architecture led to many studios complaining that it was difficult to develop for."
Won't buy it. They screwed us with Linux on the PS3. Their consoles are done in this house.
We all know Sony will just remove the cell processor functionality in a few updates time.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I can practically hear game programmers everywhere cheering.
If game programmers dislike the Cell, why can't they just convince their bosses to target their next project at PC and Xbox 360 instead of PS3 and Xbox 360?
Probably. But they'll probably use a POWER7 based CPU instead of an AMD x86 CPU. Given how much Cell influenced POWER7, I'd actually say that's a huge likelyhood they'd go POWER instead of x86.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
...a more conventional PC-like architecture provided by AMD.
So, then I'll just dump $300.00+ on the next generation PlayStation, and ~$60.00 on a game, when I could just play the $60.00 game on my PC, which I already have.
TOKYO, Japan -- Sony released their heavily anticipated and much hyped Playstation 4 Entertainment System today, but the games are nowhere to be found. Developers agree the hardware specs are extremely impressive, but nobody knows how to actually make games for it. Thankfully, the latest member of this venerable line of consoles is backwards compatible with the games of all previous generations.
"I think we got it perfect this time," says Sony chairman Kaz Hirai, "we expect our internal studios won't figure out how to make games for at least another few months. Third party developers should take even longer. We figure the PS4 should be hitting its stride right when the PS5 hits the market several years down the road."
How difficult will it be to develop games for that one? When asked the question, Hirai rubs his hands together, a gleeful smile spreading across his face.
"Impossible."
Game developers too stupid to deal with complex systems.
Sorry, but 'it's complex hardware' excuse pissed me off.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I programmed a Cell processor (for HPC, not gaming) a few years ago, and it was definitely a pain in the butt compared to just targeting a multi-core x86.
The problem, at least back then, was that you had to write explicit code to have the various cores communicate with each other (DMA transfers, etc.)
I imagine compilers/libraries/SDK's have improved the situation since then, but really the modest performance premium offered by the chip just wasn't worth the hassle.
Not being a game developer I wonder what game devs would prefer, a PS4 chip architecture that is similar to other consoles/PC architecture but with the cost of starting with new dev kits/libraries, or sticking with Cell-based architecture but you still have big differences with PC/Xbox Next/Wii U. Seems to me the initial pain of working with new libraries and dev kits would be a time consumer at the beginning, but the long term gain of easier portability would be worth it in the end. Devs, what would you prefer?
If they need to put the $ in excu$e: "It would cost more programmer time, which is money, to get the same performance out of a PlayStation 3 that one could get out of a PC."
The cell didn't live up to it's expectations long before the PS3's launch. They had to shoehorn in a conventional nvidia GPU at the last minute. (In a manner that causes a lot of odd development problems, and cripples the PS3's already limited memory)
The cell is just one in a long line of "Hey lets use lots of general purpose CPUs for graphics!" ideas that never panned out. Didn't work out for Intel with Larabee either.
I don't think those asymmetrical vector units strapped on to the PPC core have been particularly popular either. It seems that, in general, that offloading tasks to your "computer unit" (Formally called a GPU) has proven to be a much better solution.
I'm guessing the next playstation will have a conventional CPU+gpu design with shared high speed memory (Like the xbox).. Maybe it will be some cool unified tech from AMD. Maybe it will be a multi-core arm cpu, or maybe it will be conventional x86.
In the past half-decade PPC seems to be going nowhere in the consumer space.
I am an AMD fan and all but we don't need another way for Sony to 'Bulldozer' over previous functionality.
Silence is a state of mime.
I've shipped PS2 games and worked with numerous developers that have shipped PS3 games.
Sony's problem is the Not-Invented-Here syndrome. They have yet to learn the lesson that Apple mastered years ago in the 80's -- use off the shelf commodity parts!! Why? They will become DIRT cheap in a few years. Why waste millions of dollars investing into R&D of new hardware when in 5 years somebody else will have a no-name version of it at a fraction of the price??
e.g.
Sony is _slowly_ learning this lesson. After how many man-years of a buggy PS2 GS (Graphics Synthesizer) that couldn't even properly do z-tesing (!?!/!) the PS3 RSX is (mostly) a GTX 7800+
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX_'Reality_Synthesizer'
When the PS2 first came out everyone bitched how difficulty it was, yet it was a beautiful thing to see all of its 7 CPUs working full speed load-balancing the system. It laid the foundation that multi-core programming was the future. When the PS3 came out everyone bitched how even more difficult it would be. Developers just sucked it up and now we are even seeing A.I. running on the SPE/SPUs on second-gen and 3rd-gen PS3 games! That's pretty cool to see a modern game engine utilizing every core it can.
Using stock parts: CPU + GPU is a great way to minimize costs. You don't get the same performance benefits of true dedicated design but the commodity parts are cheap enough that the pricing curve naturally takes care of that. Kind of a no-brainer if Sony decides to use an AMD or Intel CPU for the PS4.
References:
See: PS3 games list & SPE usages
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=184843
i.e.
and
Remember the launch? IBM, Sony and Toshiba were going to put Cell processors in everything from cheap consumer electronics to number crunching supercomputers. In reality, IBM sold a few Cell blades, Sony put one in each PS3 and that's about it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Good parody. When I think about the PS3's processor, I always remember them bragging at launch that devs will still be trying to optimize for the PS3 when it's lifetime is over. I'm still astounded that they thought that was something to brag about.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
After investing A LOT of money on a new processor it makes no sense to move to a different architecture. Because:
- PS3 games and mostly PSN games are compiled for CELL. ...
- Now game developers knows the CELL architecture, people really think SONY wants to design a new processor and receive all the criticism again?
- CELL is scalable, they designed it to be able to grow its power a 100% (literally). And this scale matches with the new manufacturing possibilities, and with the new software needs.
- It can work with an AMD graphics card. I mean, both things are not exclusive. The problem with PS3 is the RAM not the processor architecture.
- PS3 is a console not a PC, and CELL was designed for games and multimedia. Something Microsoft knows perfectly, and because of that, they stole the CELL design to create IBM Xenon. There are even books about that story
- PS VITA use ARM because: 1)Battery needs, 2)Apple iOS. Otherwise it would use a simplified version of PS3 CELL for sure.
- This is a rumor.
PS4 will move to a different architecture only if SONY executives are crazy. In my opinion this is a new "rumor" strategy by SONY, trying to
1) Make people desire a console that does not exist (ala Apple).
2) Drive Microsoft crazy.
OK, XBOX is the only good team at Microsoft but remember:
- They stole the PS3 design to create XBOX, now SONY will be very careful.
- They bought Kinect to an Israel start-up, they are not very creative.
- XBOX software is mostly focused to USA, and there is a lot of business out of USA.
- Nintendo is still playing (this is amazing, but still now Nintendo is the most important game company in the world)
Do they have fresh ideas for XBOX 720? Maybe, but I won't be very optimistic.
I guess we should dust off our old Xbox hacking skills if that's the case.
I mean, if the Playstation 4 is going AMD Fusion, it'll probably be x86 with GPU, and we all know the fun that was had breaking into the original Xbox (which was originally done with AMD parts before they switched to Intel)
Of course, they could always take the lessons of the Xbox and fix it so it won't be a problem. Oh wait, it's Sony, nevermind.
Like it or not, significant performance increases aren't going to come from the standard cpu achitecture. The cell, while difficult to program, has advantages over x86. Just watch as more and more GPU's, which Cell provided, are used to increase performance in PC based systems. It's expensive at the moment but will come down in price. I fell the Cell was just ahead of it's time or ahead of the programmers time...
The trouble with the Cell processor is that there's not enough memory per processor. Each of the little processors (the "SPE" units) in the PS3 only has 256KB of RAM. That's not enough to store a frame. It's not enough to store a game level, or a significant amount of geometry. It's more like having a number of DSPs available.
This forces redesigning the program to work in batch mode. A batch job is one frame, but it's still a batch job. Data for one frame cycle is sequentially pumped through one or more SPEs. There's not much random access, because access to main memory from an SPE is in big blocks, transferred in the background.
This is both limiting and a huge pain. Especially when the competition is selling shared-memory multiprocessors. I used to do game physics engines, and when the PS3 came out, my reaction was "I'm glad I sold off that technology and got out of the business." I knew some people at Sony's SCEA R&D center, and they basically threw all their smart people at trying to figure out how to use the Cell effectively. Many of the early games really ran in the main CPU, with the SPEs managing things that didn't affect gameplay, like particles for fire, explosions, smoke, and such.
If each SPE came with a few megabytes of RAM, instead of only 256K, it wouldn't be so bad. Then you could probably have the physics engine in one CPU, the AI in another, the background object management in a third, and so on. But each of those things needs more state than whatever fraction of 256K is left over after the code is loaded.
There's a long history of Cell-like architectures in the supercomputer field. The BBN Butterfly, the NCube Hypercube, and the Connection Machine also consisted of a large number of processors, each with a small memory. None were successful. One of the lessons of multiprocessing computer architecture to date is that the two extremes - shared memory multiprocessors and networked clusters of separate computers - are useful. None of the partially-shared machines have been successful. The Cell is the only one ever to be mass-produced.
Great for audio, though. The audio guys like having their own processor, and audio processing really is a streaming process of tight loops without much state.
The PS3 has probably provided the biggest software leap in game architecture in the last 3 years. This is in comparison to typical XBox or PC platform. I argue this only because the forced paradigm shift to fully utilize the Cell architecture should be directly transferable to multi threaded programming on an 8 core AMD/Intel processor.
The PS3 teams that fully utilize Cell would probably lead the way in the next 10 years on PC platforms.
If Sony hadn't spent so much money on that complicated CELL processor, maybe they could have afforded to add an extra 64MB of RAM to the incredibly limiting memory ceiling. That's where so many of the difficulties come from.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
It took years for PS3 to get good games. It was 10x harder to work with than the X360 or Wii.
Uncharted 3 is a thing of beauty (for a console) and Naughty Dog is squeezing amazing performance out (for a console), but they're the best devs Sony has and it took 5 years. Was a new proprietary architecture that works unlike anything else on the market worth the billions of losses and the ramp-up time? No. Xbox 360 has power parity (better in some areas, worse in others, but you can do about the same games on both) even though it's 'just' a little 3 core PC in a box.
What saved them was the Blu-ray drive (and the death of HD-DVD) and that Sony has better dev teams than MS. One SCE Santa Monica Division is worth more than all the Cell processors put together.
What I would have done, would be to have had an emulation layer ontop of the cell platform that takes advantage of the cell processor, but translates from CISC or RISC processor designs.
In fact, the Xbox 360 is essentially "fusion" at the motherboard level -- The CPU can lock and share portions of the cache directly with the GPU -- there's around 27gb/s bandwitdth between the two, and all 512 MB of main memory is GDDR, controlled by the GPU die. This is, 5 years ago, closer to AMD's promised Fusion processors than what AMD's own Llano CPUs are today.
My basic predictions for the next Playstation and Xbox are something on the order of:
Which is why everyone hated Vita development, right? Clearly they have learned nothing in the six years since the ps3 launched.
We have bought This PS3 because we tought we could use it as a bluray disc player while the xbox doesn't.
Theese days (since two years in fact!!), our PS3 is sleeping in our living room, awaken only to listen Bluray-discs movies and some DNLA media movies and still!! ... Just a game comparison between my e8400/Nvidia GTS 250 PC and the PS3 : The game CodeMaters Grid racing ... ...ouahhh... so sloooowwww .
Oh my cpu cycles!! The game runs like road-runner on my PC and in-between transitions/loading of tracks. But on the PS3
Takes an eternity to load, I have even the time to plug the water boiler and prepare my cofeecup. It is very frustrating! I am NOT talking about Dirt3 - simply unplayable!@.
This machine is now sleeping between my son's Little Big Planet play-times and movies watching. ( we still don't own any bluray disc player yet!! )
Thus, We are waiting for the Wii U to come to our area one day ....
I used to program SPUs for a living for a game studio. (Worked on SOCOM Confrontation and some unannounced titles).
I disagree with all this bitching from devs: the CELL SPU is a thing of beauty.
If an engineer is worth his salt, and knows his trade well, what he can do with it is amazing.
I was blown away with how incredibly fast this SPU is, once properly used.
But only if you know how to do branchless code, and you know the difference between structures-of-arrays and arrays-of-structures.
Once the data is lined up properly, and you eliminated those nasty branches, carefully crafted code (intrinsics, not vanilla C++) will make that thing fly like nothing else. Insanely fast, think GPU-fast, but with a more generic programming model.
I regret the death of the Cell architecture.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
The PS3 was designed as a big evolutionary step in console hardware. Console hardware by tradition being a collection of proprietary circuits put together, with software optimized by going all the way down to assembly. That's how high-end development was done on every console up to the PS2. The main attitude change that occurred between the PS2 and PS3 was, of course, due to the release of the Xbox and 360. Both were designed to conceal much of the underlying hardware by abstracting it through a DirectX API that was already established on the PC. The effect this had on the industry was to bring in a lot of former PC developers, who promptly switched to the more lucrative Xbox market as the lead platform. And they brought with them the idea that software development should be abstracted away from the hardware and that they should be able to program against common APIs and drivers, and that allowed them to make Xbox and PC versions with mostly overlapping costs. (What it meant for the PC gamer was that their platform turned into a glorified Xbox, but that is another issue.)
The effect on performance of course is that the system is not designed to be fine-tuned all the way down to the metal. The devs don't want to do it and MS doesn't expect them to. So you have a solid hardware platform but it really doesn't have much potential to be taken beyond what is possible with the core API. The PS3 is different; and Sony's exclusives really do showcase just how powerful the system -can- be when the effort is made to take full advantage of the architecture. Unfortunately, from a budget perspective, PS3 development then becomes a separate expense. So the choices for the developer are either: get funding from Sony as an exclusive, or go multiplatform using one of many middleware platforms. However, all these middleware solutions typically just re-wrap DirectX code into RSX calls, turning the PS3 into a quasi-emulator for the 360/PC. The end result is that, even though the PS3 hardware has more potential, the games usually come out looking for the worse when compared side-by-side. It doesn't help that the Xbox includes hardware scaling to 1080p designed to make up for the lack of real processing power, while the PS3 version of the same game is limited to 720p because the dev did not have the budget to optimize for true 1080p on the PS3 (which has no 720->1080 scaler), although it technically would have been possible in most cases had the engine been designed to utilize it.
Basically, the PS3 came out of the old Japan-led game industry that encouraged developers to know the guts of the system and to exploit every possible byte and cycle to squeeze the most performance that they could from the system. The Xbox came out of the Western PC market where developers don't want to get anywhere near assembly anymore. The latter is able to produce games faster and cheaper, with game quality notably suffering as a result, but as long as it doesn't affect sales, it is obviously favorable to developers. So basically, this situation is another case of marketing and mass-manufacturing triumphing over technology that would have emphasized engineering and quality.
Whereas in the 90s I played virtually every AAA title that was released, these days I find it difficult to get excited about new games. Much of that is because of the stagnation and sameness, both in the technology and in the creativity that modern games offer. In the "are video games art?" debate, I would argue that a few games are legitimate artistic endeavors, but the large majority are just merchandise created for the sole purpose of selling. Even multi-platinum games these days rarely have any lasting impact beyond launch week and the collective memory of fanboys (looking at Call of Duty and its ilk). The failure of the PS3, more than anything, reflects the timing of the shift from gaming as an art/hobby to gaming as a commercialized pastime. Unfortunately, short of a market crash and quality-focused reboot of the industry a la 1983, there's no way to turn back the clock on that.
Their Handhelds also often have the option to play games from the previous generation. Something Sony DID enable for japanese customer of the Vita but not for American and European customers. That is even more evil, spend time developing a feature useful to customers, then deny it.
Sony is not so much evil as in love with itself and so it is determined to fuck itself over and over again.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It was a result of an even more epic fail in the NIH/Sony Reality Distortion field.
So anyone who has looked at it may wonder as to why it has split memory, separate video and system RAM. Such a thing is required for a PC addon card, but is not ideal in a console because of limited RAM available and the fact that it is really a single task machine. The reason is that the RSX was developed on fairly short notice, and is more or less a PC part with mods, not a complete design.
Now why would they do that? PS3 was in development for a long time, why not get a special customized part like ATi did for the 360? Well because Sony didn't have nVidia working on it from the start, it was added on later.
This then leads to the question of what were they looking at before. The answer is in fact the Cell processor. They though it was going to be so fucking amazing it was to be the GPU, not the CPU, in the system. I don't know if you can find videos anymore but Sony did some demos of a ton of Cell processors rendering stuff.
Where 90% of the comments on articles regarding sony are 7 year old girls screaming "ewwwww, sony!"
I agree with you. Sony made good products.
FTFY
It's a Sony used to be a sign of quality. Nowadays it's a stigma and a representation of our disposable electronics society.
Balanced is what Fox News advertises themselves as. They're balanced in that they give both sides the same platform with which to speak upon, irrespective of the validity or even the accuracy of the arguments put forth by either side.
Balanced is not synonymous for fair. It is not synonymous for right. Balanced is only for sore losers, whiners, and people who think they're entitled to both an opinion and an audience but have neither.
Quite frankly, Sony's behavior has been atrocious over the last two decades. They have been douchebags. GP and other comments have listed plenty of examples of why they deserve such derision. Now, if you can provide examples of why they might not, bring it. If you can't, shut up and stop whining about how the world (or Slashdot in this case) isn't fair because your opinion counts less than everybody else's. Because quite frankly, if you can't provide those examples, your opinion on the matter sure as hell does count less than the opinions of people who can provide examples, irrespective of their ultimate opinion.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
With regards to IBM's decision to kill it was how useful it was vs alternatives. The Cell wasn't as good a "general purpose" CPU as a more classic CPU architecture like x64 or POWER. It's central PPC unit was pretty weak. Ok no problem, that's not really what it is for, it is for all that vector math and that's what the SPUs are good at. ...except in that field you are now competing with GPUs. A Cell has 8 SPUs? A Tesla has hundreds of CUDA cores. The limitations on GPUs are different, and more intense in many ways (when code branches it really needs to branch the same way for 32 processes due to the parallel nature of the GPU's processing). However you still have the fact that for highly parallel floating point vector math GPUs lay down the number crunching hardcore, and of course can be fitted to any existing system with a PCIe 16x slot.
So that kind of thing factors in to the thought process as well. If your chip is not as good as your other CPUs at being general purpose, and not as good at its special purpose as GPUs, then what is the market?
nVidia and AMD are hard to compete with. They can throw down a lot of R&D dollars at making a hell of a stream processor since there's a massive market in those for video games.
For me the problem with this is the $1500 of games I've invested into the PS3 platform. I was hoping that PS4 would be an upclocked Cell cpu with more cores and faster video so it would enable PS3 games to still run, and be fast enough to emulate PS2 games. If sony drop backwards compatibility altogether I might skip PS4 and go back to PC gaming. There's not much point to buying x86 console hardware if I can buy an i7 and have someone crack the architecture of the console.
which feature[s?] are they going to saw off after they sell it to you? Count me out.
With all your experience in Cell programming, can you please answer the following question?
Do you think it would be possible to abstract away all the low level details of Cell programming into a high level programming language so as that the programmer woud only have to deal with the actual algorithm at hand, and not the low level details?
Thank you in advance for your attention.
I think that the PS4 will not be able to emulate the Cell processors efficiently enough to have backwards compatibility in software.
I also think that putting a PS3 into a PS4 will not be viable economically.
So, what does Sony plan to do with backwards compatibility? will the PS4 not run the PS3 games at all?
It makes no sense, because:
- SONY destined a LOT of money on CELL architecture, it is 100% (literally) scalable and as said with just more memory per processor it can become de programmer's heaven. ...
- Studios knows CELL architecture and they have good tools to work with it. A modified version of CELL can be made by AMD and include an AMD graphics card instead of an NVIDIA one. CELL and AMD are not opposite concepts.
- Multiply CELL power by a 10 to become a mass product is possible now and it was not easy some years ago. It perfectly fits with the software needs that production studios are requesting to the next generation. It also fits with SONY looking for less expenses on the next generation design and production, while it can compete with an hypothetic XBOX 720.
- CELL was designed for video games and multimedia in mind. The next processors won't be very different from CELL architecture, even XBOX 360 is a kind of copycat of the CELL architecture. There are books about it
- PS4 backwards compatibility is about Playstation Network and not about PS3 games. Using the same architecture PSN games will be backwards compatible, what is the most important thing right now. Do you thing PS4 won't be able to run PSN games?
- SONY new strategy is about rumors (ala Apple), and not about "hipe". They lost a lot of money talking about the PS3 power and creating technological ilusions to its users, because Microsoft copied/created XBOX 360 from that knowledge. Now SONY is going to generate rumors about PS4 but it will be totally unknown until the appropriate E3 date. This is also the Nintendo strategy with wiimote.
Well, that's my opinion.