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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."
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.
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.
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?
$.
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."
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.
Seriously, fuck those guys! DRM included on audio CDs, fraudulently advertising their product as able to use Linux and then disabling that feature ex post facto, fake astroturf blog ad campaigns that insult human intelligence, spending money to purchase censorship laws and immoral copyright extensions, suing tinkerers playing with products they legally own.
Fuck Sony! They are an icon of much that is wrong with the world right now.
Sony is what you get when you allow companies to grow too large in scope. I try my best (imperfectly, of course) to not give money to companies that are large. There are almost always smaller alternatives that won't fuck you 8 ways from Sunday with corruption, greed, and control like a large company like Sony can't help but do.
Please help kill companies like Sony by decentralizing your purchasing power! Next time you're thinking about buying a game licensed by Sony, check out what smaller, independent alternatives like the Humble Bundle guys are doing!
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
Insightful?! Come on, /. How does this user's gaming/buying preference and overall irrational heated opinion of a consumer electronics company add any insight whatsoever to the fact that said company is opting to use an AMD chip in their next product?
Please try your best to stop continuing to cheapen the already out-dated rating system as well as feeding blatantly obvious karma whores. Shameful.
Won't buy it. They screwed us with Linux on the PS3. Their consoles are done in this house.
You seriously believe people who wanted to use Linux on the PS3 are a significant market for Sony. And that they really care about what you have to say about that. How adorable.
As a game developer who has made a game for the 360 and PS3, I can tell you that my biggest complaints about the ps3 were the memory limitations (cpu and gpu memory is separated), the horrible software for the devkits, and the devkits themselves, which suck so much power that they require you to run air conditioning even in the winter.
The main difference that you hit when making a cross-platform title is DirectX (d3d) versus OpenGL ES. Those libraries need to understand the lowlying architecture, but they pretty much take care of everything for the developer.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
And you know what? The public have spoken: People buy less from Sony, and Sony is losing money.
> Not being a game developer I wonder what game devs would prefer,
You are asking two questions:
What do game devs prefer for software?
What do game devs prefer for hardware?
When I used to work with PS3 developers -- they almost _always_ lead their development on the XBox 360. It was _very_ rare was it to see a studio lead on the PS3 -- but those that did -- tended to have a better engine for load-balancing at the end of the day (it is easier to scale down, then scale up.)
Easier: Multi-Core --> Few-Core (PS3 --> Xbox360)
Harder: Few-Core --> Multi-Core (XBox 360 --> PS3)
Microsoft is a software company,
Sony is a hardware company.
The tools MS provided were _perceived_ as being easier and better. (I can and will not comment on the reality.)
WRT hardware, game devs appreciated the power the PS3 + SPUs even if it involved the crap load of work to get it running 100% load-balancing. Having to worry about LHS (Load-Hit-Stores) was a total PITA for PS3 developers -- memory access was pretty much ignored on the XBox 360. The bigger problem was Sony using a 64-bit OS (all pointers were 64-bits !!) when the dam console only has 512 MB address space?!?! This kind of "Sony ignorance/arrogance" being out of touch with developers was not uncommon.
PC + Xbox Developers tend to want a AMD/Intel approach to hardware for _ease of _use. Sony / Nintendo developers tend to prefer multi-core / dedicated CPUs for everything for _performance_.
One or the other isn't wrong -- just a different focus.
Maybe not, but they also gave the finger to universities using PS3 clusters. The fact that Sony participated assisted said universities with setting up these clusters speaks volumes as to how ridiculously contradictory Sony's response was when they blocked OtherOS.
These types of applications are what attracted me to the PS3, not because I necessarily wanted to do this myself, but the fact that the console was powerful and flexible enough to be used in this way was very attractive to me. Most people prefer having an option to having the option taken away out of nowhere.
It's as if Sony gets a list of options and always picks the one that will most piss off their customers. They're sabotaging themselves...
There's nothing shameful about the /. masses agreeing that Sony abuses its customer base. Perhaps what is truly insightful is how quickly the comment leapt up to +5 and stayed there, implying that far more people agree than disagree.
If you look to /. for balanced, impartial fact-based discourse... keep looking! And if you ever find such an impossible thing, do let us know.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
I'll join you on the Sony SDKs being horrible. I still think the SN debugger is the best debugger I've used for multithreaded debugging. I'd also venture that you weren't a particularly serious PS3 dev house if you were using Sony's GL implementation, we ditched that shit the second GCM became available.
The Cell architecture itself isn't difficult to program for, Sony just screwed themselves by coming out a year later then the 360. The big issue is that developing parallel software on the 360 is in a homogeneous environment. Game devs (myself included) started building engines around those constraints. After we had 360 devkits for a year or so, Sony comes by with PS3s and they are different at a fundamental level. We already have over a year of engine design and development into the 360 and we have commitments on both consoles. Now what? You can't afford the time to throw it all out and re-design from the ground up. It also didn't help that Sony's SDK was completely in flux before the launch - and for some time after. The end result is any game that wasn't first party was a horrible compromise on the PS3 at first. As time went on we changed large parts of our engine to be more PS3 friendly and it helped quite a bit. It also didn't help that the PS3's GPU is about 15%-25% slower on average and that the OS takes up a bunch more memory then the 360's does.
All in all, the PS3 was a clusterfuck for the first few years and still hasn't recovered.
PS3 Clusters were already covered here many years ago, where Sony donated PS3 consoles specifically for use as cluster nodes using OtherOS. It was cheap promotion for them, which most assuredly led to a few sales of multiple consoles to curious geeks. I don't know how many "a few sales" actually turned out to be, but I'd safely guesstimate 10,000 units at the least. Enough to spark class-action lawsuits that were clumsily thrown out of court, after which Sony updated its EULA to remove users' right to sue the company.
So yes, people wanted to use Linux on the PS3, which Sony initially embraced with open arms. Then they turned around and legally told all these users to fuck off and die. Perhaps I'm a bit too zen for the average sucker, but if the only way you (Sony) can stop people from suing you is by forcing them to digitally sign a contact with a covenant not to sue, I'd say you fail at business. It's kind of like when little kids say "I can hit you, but the rule is you can't hit me back"... those little fuckers need to be curb stomped, and so does Sony.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
While fitting the game into the local and main memory is a pain it can usually be mitigated by proper planning. Developing your memory footprint for PS3 can immediately be translated to the 360's unified memory but going the other way is a special hell. While it's true that some engines are main memory intensive that you have to resort to crazy tricks (like streaming your audio from local memory to main) in general it's not too bad as there aren't two different implementations.
But going from 3 ppu cores to 2 ppu cores and 6 spus does cause a problem if you're anywhere near utilizing the CPUs. Generally it's easier to optimize the game until as much as possible runs on 2 ppu cores and specific tasks run on the spus (as the 360 gains the benefit from the optimizations too).
It sounds like you haven't worked on the PS3 in a while. Sony has actually stepped up the game and the ps3 sdk actually surpasses the xdk in some regards. Most of the complaints I hear about the ps3 sdk are more related to windows oriented people not understanding the unix mindset. And the ps3 dev kits are now tiny and sleek and not the 2U heater units of old.
It's in my link.
In Summer 2007, Dr. Gaurav Khanna, a professor in the Physics Department of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth independently built a message-passing based cluster using 8 PS3s running Fedora Linux. This cluster was built with support from Sony Computer Entertainment and was the first such cluster that generated published scientific results. Dubbed as the "PS3 Gravity Grid", this PS3 cluster performs astrophysical simulations of large supermassive black holes capturing smaller compact objects
Disclaimer: I used to teach Cell programming classes for people who were looking to do HPC on the blades.
Cell failed. But the reasons behind the failure are more interesting.
The obvious answer is that it was hard to program. On a single chip you had the PowerPC processor and 8 SPUs. Communication was through mailboxes for small messages and DMA transfers for larger messages. To get the most out of a chip you had to juggle all 9 processor elements at the same time, try to vectorize all of your ops, and keep the memory moving while you were doing computation. That is the recipe for success for most architectures - keeping everything as utilized as possible. But it is also hard to do on most architectures, and the embedded nature of Cell made it that much more difficult.
There were better software tools in the works for people who didn't want to drop down to the SPU intrinsic level to program. There were better chips in the works too; more SPUs, stronger PowerPC cores, and better communications with main memory. Those things did not come to fruition because IBM was looking to cut expenses to keep profits high (instead of boosting revenue). The Cell project was killed when a new VP known for cost cutting came in. We finally had a good Cell blade to sell (QS22 - two chips, 32GB RAM, fully pipelined double precision, etc.) and that lasted four months before the project got whacked. And we lost a lot of good people as a result. (That VP, Bob Moffat, was part of the Galleon insider trading scandal.)
So yes, Cell failed. But not necessarily for the obvious reasons. IBM has been on a great cost cutting binge the past few years - it lets them meet their earnings per share targets. But it causes collateral damage.
The only games I have bought for PS3 since then are the console exclusives.
I sympathised with you up to that point; then I realised that this is the same weak-willed, half-baked, not-putting-one's-money-where-one's-mouth-is posts about "principles" or "boycotts" that appear endlessly on Slashdot and aren't worth the hard drive space they're stored on.
Your stern-willed resolve to stand up for your vaunted "principles" doesn't extend past foregoing the game of the month if it's only available on the PS3? Don't make me laugh.
I think it's pretty clear why Sony aren't too concerned, when of even the tiny percentage that supposedly care about this sort of thing, most of them will rant endlessly about it, but give Sony their money when push comes to shove anyway.
I don't know yet if I will bother with a PS4
Such resolve!
I'm sure you will though- it's been confirmed that "Call of Metal Gears of Modern Warfare 7" will be exclusive to the PS4 for at least 3 1/2 days after launch, and it would be unfair for you to have to forego your shiny toys for that long.
Please do come back and post another wishy-washy diatribe about "principles" after you do so though.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Actually, IMO it's been a while since they were really a high-quality brand in many ways.
Their BD players are mostly crap - slow, clunky UI and takes FOREVER to boot and load a disc.
Their digital cameras are mediocre (never could compete with Canon or Nikon) and until recently required a proprietary expensive flash card.
Their TVs use LCD panels manufactured by Samsung and Sharp, with little value added (and a lot of cost added).
Their stereos and home theater receivers are now all basically mass market crap as well - anyone who does their research would go with Denon, Yamaha, Onkyo, etc instead.
Of which none of it had to do with the Linux crowd, or the DRM whining if you had actually read the article. Weak economic times, supply disruptions and a strong yen is behind this not people protesting over Linux on the PS3.
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/
As someone who worked with a PS3 cluster, the removal other OS functionality did not impact me in the slightest. If you're using them for a cluster you aren't using them for gaming. If you're using them for a cluster you don't download the updates that have absolutely no impact on your console, which is all of them.
What they did that impacted the PS3 cluster business was they took away the other OS option in future consoles, which makes sense since it was a waste of money on their part anyway, but that means there's no way to replace broken parts of the cluster. Though as it turns out, it wouldn't be worthwhile anyway, since GPU's do the number crunching better, and for less money.
The Cell on clusters suffers the same problem it has in a console. It's not enough better than a CPU for the extra time needed to learn to use it properly. And it's not good enough to compete with a GPU for pure computing needs. It was an amusing project, and sure, once the cluster is running you want to churn through some data with it, but by the time they ditched the Other OS feature in software they were beyond viable to build new (since you couldn't get consoles that would do it).
That doesn't mean it wasn't illegal to remove the other OS feature after the fact. It probably was on principle. But don't misrepresent who it mattered to. The fraction of a percent of people who ever actually used the other OS feature *and* games did get screwed, no doubt. But if you seriously used the OtherOS functionality you didn't use them as gaming machines at the same time. Remember a lot of people 'used' the other OS feature in the same way 90 million people 'use' google plus. And yes, that small collection of power users, and that larger but still small collection of pirates got screwed on the deal. That's why these things are illegal.
You really think it has nothing to do with Sony?
Apple don't seem to have a problem with making money.
The trouble is that Sony have a hate-hate relationship with their customers. They have a long history of producing excellent hardware then utterly screwing over the customer with the software. That annyos people and they stop paying for that stuff.
Some examples off the top of my head:
They hobbled the computer version of minidiscs because of "copy protection".
Sony used to produce nice music players. Of course they used a proprietary format (ATRAC3) and the upload program was appalingly badly written and only ran on a specific version of Windows 98 because of "copy protection", giving it a rather short service life.
The Sony-BMG rootkit. A differnet branch of sony screwing their paying customers for "copy protection".
Leaking a massive bunch of credit cards then lying about it rather than trying to help their customers ASAP. No copy protection excuse there.
UMD, because of "copy protection".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
While you are probably correct that the DRM & Linux people have little to do with it you are way off base as to what is the real problem at Sony. Sony finds themselves on the wrong side of pretty much every quickly evolving high tech consumer device.
They were very slow to move away from CRT production which they were very strong in. The ramped up their LCD production just as the bottom fell out of LCD pricing. They are now attempting to catch up in the OLED space which ironically wouldn't exist in its current state without Sony R&D.
They were slow to move from tape to CD to digital music and lost the entire market.
Their once dominant position in the console market is gone. They are actually being out innovated by Microsoft. This isn't even the Microsoft of 15 years ago that was trying. They are losing to the Vista Microsoft.. it boggles the mind.
tldr; They are losing tons of money because they have become really slow in the fastest moving consumer markets.
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