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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."
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.
And you know what? The public have spoken: People buy less from Sony, and Sony is losing money.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.