Was the PS3 CPU Built for Gamers?

[Wayde]

It comes as no shock that most people employed by Microsoft believe the Xbox 360 is the superior console to the upcoming PS3. But Matt Lee engineer with Microsoft's Game Technology Group digs a little deeper than the average Microsoft artillery lobbed at the Sony camp. His recent expose of weaknesses in the PS3's Cell Processor for gaming are either an elaborate PR job or perhaps there is something behind it.

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Matt Lee says the Cell Processor architecture doesn't appear to be designed with gaming in mind and says: "Some aspects of the SPEs, such as the lack of branch prediction, make them particularly unsuited to running most game code, which contains a lot of branches."
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Matt believes the PS3's Cell Processor was designed more for serialized streaming math code, more common in video codecs and audio processing. He adds that significant differences between PS3's Cell and Xbox360's CPU cores handling of graphics memory means porting a game from the Xbox360 to the PS3 will be extremely difficult for developers. Xbox360 has more flexible processing power and can be allocated where needed most. All the memory can be accessed equally by all of the Xbox 360's CPU cores. Sony's Cell architecture is designed asymmetrically and that will probably lead to unbalanced allocations of processing power.
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Matt sees the PS3 Cell Processors operating with a limit of 256MB graphics textures at any given time. He says you'll never see more due to the system memory banks and split graphics. Matt believes Sony customers will endure compromised graphics quality in PS3 games due to this split in graphics memory. Xbox 360 boasts 512MB of unified memory that is valuable to both games developers and graphic artists.
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Because of the design of the PS3 Cell, Matt Lee has verified that the processor could have been designed for other uses as well as gaming. Being a market leader in almost all consumer electronics, Sony could use the Cell in other places such as audio or video signal processing chips. Matt Lee's observations about the Cell Processor are actually confirmed by Sony that says the Cell will be appropriate to be used in all types of consumer electronics.*Does this represent trouble for the PS3 knowing its Cell Processor was built to be a jack of all trades but master of none?

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[Jake]

Of course it was made for gamers. You're so anti-Sony, Wayde that your mouth smells like you sucked on a Microsoft breath mint.

But I just kid Wayde, someone has to give you guys here in the Shack the heads up on his anti-Sony - ProMicrosoft tirades he occasionally indulges.

Sony only said the Cell "could" be used in other electronics, that's just how good it is. And this Matt clown from Microsoft is just sour that they have to outsource their CPU manufacture ring to a real chip making facility. If Microsoft was nice maybe Sony could design a real CPU for the Xbox360.

It was only a matter of time before the console war devolves into name calling.