What was the justification to buy them in the first place?
Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC
tunetardis@piefed.ca 5 days ago
That’s impressive.
At my work, we had these cell processor-based blade servers for a while. Basically the same chips as in a PS3 except they could handle double-precision floats. We wanted to use them for scientific modelling, but gave up eventually. They were such a bitch to program! I can only imagine emulating them must’ve been a nightmare.
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 4 days ago
tunetardis@piefed.ca 4 days ago
I guess you could say the Cell was as an 8-core CPU (well, 9, if you include the PowerPC in the middle) at a time when such things were unheard of, at least in the consumer space. So the theoretical performance if you could max out all those cores was through the roof. I have no doubt that’s what drew Sony to them for their next gen console.
But whereas all the cores of a modern 8-core chip can access the same RAM, in the Cell, only the PowerPC could access the main memory and each core had its own dedicated internal RAM, meaning you had to load both code and data into all the cores laboriously yourself using asynchronous DMA requests before executing the code, and then sync the results back using more DMA. It was a bit like GPU programming, I suppose, though within the cores, it felt more like a CPU in terms of the instruction set and what not, so kind of a hybrid approach I guess?
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That sounds like something that might have made it easier to emulate, since on x64 the memory management could be simplified. Though that kind of cache control can lead to very high performance if the working set of data fits into that cache that x64 might have trouble keeping up with.
tunetardis@piefed.ca 4 days ago
Yeah, you know, that’s a good way of looking at it. It’s like each core could only access its own cache memory, and all the syncing to main RAM had to be done painstakingly in software. That would be a hardware function in any modern architecture. I can’t remember how big the caches were. I think they were bigger than a typical L1 at least, but not huge.
Anyway, it was not too horrible if you were just walking through an array sequentially applying some operation to it, but when you had to jump around memory, it became an absolute nightmare! Uuuugh…it’s all coming back to me now why we got nowhere with it.
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Fascinating insight.
It was a bit like GPU programming,
Don’t remember where I’ve read this but supposedly SONY wanted it to be part of their geometry engine, but ultimately had to cut down the costs and use Nvidia GPU instead.
Aralakh@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Whoa what do you do? That sounds super fascinating!
tunetardis@piefed.ca 5 days ago
It’s a small company that does mineral surveying, but we’ve done a lot of R&D in the past that ranged from designing our own survey instrumentation to writing geophysical modelling software. The Cell thing was for the latter.
IIRC the Cell processor was built around an IBM PowerPC, but that wasn’t meant to do all the heavy lifting. Rather, it was supposed to be farmed out to these other processing nodes (I forget what they were called), almost like using a GPU for general computation. Now, the IBM consultant sold us on the Cell, saying they had an OpenCL library that would make all this much easier and hide the hardware details. LOL!
First of all, it was a 32-bit library. Maybe fine for a 32-bit console like the PS3, but our blades had 16 GB of RAM and it wasn’t going to cut it. So I had to dig into the guts of the architecture to get anything usable and, long story short, a summer went by and I little to show for my efforts.
Years later, we eventually got the program running on Threadrippers and that worked out much better!
Aralakh@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Cool, thank you satisfying my curiosity. Wouldn’t have thought of mineral surveying crossed with tech, though not surprising eh, not something I come across personally I guess.
Chaf@slrpnk.net 4 days ago
Since we’re already drifting off topic - all big tech companies make a lot of money by selling hardware, compute, or some other service to the oil and gas industry, they just don’t go out bragging about it. Before the AI boom the oil and gas industry was among the biggest customers of the tech industry, just a quick search gives:
www.amd.com/en/solutions/energy.html
www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/…/oil-gas
www.nvidia.com/en-us/…/oil-gas-operations/
cloud.google.com/solutions/energy/oil-gas
www.ibm.com/industries/oil-gas
www.intel.co.uk/…/aramco-executive-brief.pdf
tunetardis@piefed.ca 5 days ago
Well I’m in Canada, and almost everything is tied in with natural resources at some level. Lol
Blackmist@feddit.uk 4 days ago
Yeah, I suspect most game developers felt the same way about it.
Most PS3 ports were rubbish compared to the Xbox 360 versions, despite the PS3 theoretically being better hardware.
Only the fancier PS3 exclusives really made the most of it.