Author: TheStorm
Posted: 22 Feb 2013 12:15:39 am (GMT -5)
Actually the Cell and partially the Xenon in the Xbox were pretty terrible processors for general purpose use. While they had great potential some of the "features" such as the hyper-visor severely limited their power. There is a reason Nintendo didn't move to a Cell like design for the WiiU and stuck with a G3/7xx series Power chip just adding more cores and cache. The Cell is a great co-processor for GPUGP like and SIMD tasks and IBM even sells them as such but for general purpose work traditional Power or x86 chips are better.
The 360's Xenon avoided some of this because it didn't include the full hypervisor and other such features but it still wasn't as fast as as a traditional Power core since it shared the PPE design from the Cell.
The Wii's 750CL was underpowered but it was no where near as bad as the clock speeds seemed to imply due to the PowerPC 750CL being more efficient in other areas. And though it does lag pretty bad in raw FLOPS integer math is more important for a good chunk of the basic game logic and for single threaded performance its really not a terrible processor.
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"Always code as if the person who will maintain your code is a maniac serial killer that knows where you live" -Unknown
"If you've done something right no one will know that you've done anything at all" -Futurama
"Have a nice day, or not, the choice is yours." Tom Steiner
<Michael_V> or create a Borg collective and call it The 83+
<Michael_V> Lower your slide cases and prepare to be silent linked. Memory clears are futile.
Posted: 22 Feb 2013 12:15:39 am (GMT -5)
| KermMartian wrote: |
On the technical side, I think the departure from the Cell processor is an unfortunate one, given how impressive the chip was from a specs standpoint, but I imagine it will save game-writers a lot of headaches. Or maybe they just need to hire programmers who actually understand threading, synchronicity, and locking.  |
Actually the Cell and partially the Xenon in the Xbox were pretty terrible processors for general purpose use. While they had great potential some of the "features" such as the hyper-visor severely limited their power. There is a reason Nintendo didn't move to a Cell like design for the WiiU and stuck with a G3/7xx series Power chip just adding more cores and cache. The Cell is a great co-processor for GPUGP like and SIMD tasks and IBM even sells them as such but for general purpose work traditional Power or x86 chips are better.
The 360's Xenon avoided some of this because it didn't include the full hypervisor and other such features but it still wasn't as fast as as a traditional Power core since it shared the PPE design from the Cell.
The Wii's 750CL was underpowered but it was no where near as bad as the clock speeds seemed to imply due to the PowerPC 750CL being more efficient in other areas. And though it does lag pretty bad in raw FLOPS integer math is more important for a good chunk of the basic game logic and for single threaded performance its really not a terrible processor.
_________________
"Always code as if the person who will maintain your code is a maniac serial killer that knows where you live" -Unknown
"If you've done something right no one will know that you've done anything at all" -Futurama
"Have a nice day, or not, the choice is yours." Tom Steiner
<Michael_V> or create a Borg collective and call it The 83+
<Michael_V> Lower your slide cases and prepare to be silent linked. Memory clears are futile.