As everyone knows by now the infamous Cell CPU in the PS3 was a really hard and time consuming to code. There is a YT video by Modern Vintage Gamer who goes into detail about what was involved. The amount of code that was required to just send one command was alot more than typical core would use.
We saw just how this effected the multiplatform games that was released on PS which ran alot worse on the PS3 than the 360 for the majority of the generation.
In response to the trouble developers were having with the Cell Sony put alot of effort into the ICE teams to get the absolute best tools for taking advantage of the Cell and help development of third party games on the platform. From my understanding the ICE team was taken from the Sony first party teams such as Naughty Dog, GG and Santa Monica Studios.
By the end of the generation Sony's internal teams were putting out games that were amongst the most impressive of the generation.
Each Sony studio developed their own internal game engines, built from the ground up to take advantage of the parallel processing that the Cell offered.
As a result their current and recent projects are extremely well coded and efficient on multicore processors and their engines keep up with the best of them including Idtech and Unreal Engine.
The hard graft that these studios had to do when stuck with the Cell has given them a skill set and coding tools that are benefiting them today.
As someone who loves the tech side of things I wonder if Sony had of stuck with the Cell and improved its shortcomings like making it Out of order, streamlining the command requirements what it could have been. No doubt it would have been more powerful than the jaguar cores in the PS4.
While I understand why both Sony and MS moved to PC parts for their new consoles, I really miss the days of proprietary processors from Sony, Sega etc.
This is my first thread on GAF, so go easy on me.
AMD RDNA 2 and X86-64 instruction sets are AMD's proprietary IP. AMD wouldn't even show the internal RISC-like instruction set after the X86 decoder stage. X86 instruction set acts like an abstraction layer for AMD's micro-architecture implementation.
Sega Saturn has Hitachi's SuperH-2. SuperH-2 is a replacement for Hitachi's 68000 licenses. There are many RISC instruction sets that replaced Commodore's MOS 65xx and Motorola's 68K instruction set.
Acorn's ARM replaced Commodore's MOS 65xx since the R&D road map is inferior to the competition. Later in BBC Micro's shelf life, ARM1 was used as a co-processor. Commodore didn't evolve the 65xx CPU family like Intel X86.
HP's PA-RISC replaced Motorola's 68K since Motorola killed the 68K family as a high-performance CPU. After the 68K, Motorola's pushed its customers towards the joint PowerPC with IBM. HP Unix workstation and servers were powered by Motorola 68K CPU family. HP's PA-RISC was later replaced by Intel Itanium.
The problem with CELL is the IPC has fallen below 1 IPC and its pipeline length rivals Pentium IV's. long pipeline lenght.
Remember, RISC's main concepts are separate load, store, and simple arithmetic operations with 1 IPC (instructions per clock) throughput minimum. X86 instruction can include memory load/store and arithmetic operations, hence it acts like instruction compression for the modern X86 CPUs.
Meanwhile, GPUs went towards extreme complex instructions (CISC) methods with the fixed graphics function hardware e.g. hardware rasterization that resolves floating point data with the integer pixel grid, texture processors, ROPS blenders, hardware ROPS MSAA, hardware T&L, hardware tessellation, hardware BVH raytracing and 'etc'. GPUs adopted RISC's expanded register storage argument to the extreme with thousands of register storage.
GPU's scatter and gather instructions are complex instructions since it's a series of load and store operations from one instruction issue. GPU's scatter and gather instructions wreaked RISC's atomic instruction argument.
Advanced Computing Environment (
ACE) was defined by an industry consortium in the early 1990s to be the next generation commodity computing platform, the successor to personal computers based on Intel's 32-bit instruction set architecture. Advanced Computing Environment (
ACE) wa supported by Compaq, Microsoft, MIPS Computer Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). The CPU instruction set selection from the ACE consortium was MIPS and Alpha. Sony's PS1 and PS2 were powered by MIPS-based CPUs, but Sony didn't follow the ACE-defined hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and boot environments.
Advanced Computing Environment (ACE)'s existence was killed by Intel's CISC-RISC hybrid Pentium Pro (P6) that was supported by CISC-RISC hybrid X86 clones such as AMD K6 and Cyrix 6x86.
In the early 2000s, Intel attempted to replace 32-bit X86 with Itanium and it was later killed by second source insurance AMD's X86-64.